ma,

i've begun working on my independent study which is about the influence of American hip-hop on new Ghanaian hip life, which is basically the hip hop equivalent. i read two other projects on similar themes from past SIT students and they were all mostly the same, so I decided to look for a hook to make my paper more interesting and more original. That night I went to a spot in my neighborhood where they have live bands every Sunday. It was Easter Sunday so the place was filled to the gills with people of all ages and a three or four other white folks. I sat down alone and waited for someone to invite me (very often you'll find someone eating rice or smoking a joint and their first response to your having noticed them is "you're invited"). Shortly thereafter a fat man wearing a bright polo and a gucci multi-pocketed fanny pack beckoned me to his table where he gave me a seat next to the stage where i could watch all of the musicians.

I sat for a while watching the band and eventually began looking through the crowd. I noticed that the fat man in the fanny pack was sniffing or blowing his nose in his hand and the thought crossed my mind that he might be snorting cocaine, which I quickly acknowledged was a foolish thought. Moments later he burst up from the table, snuck into a corner to blow his nose into a hanky shrieking a little each blow, and then walked on stage and started dancing with the lead singer. I looked at the spot on the table where he had been sitting and noticed a formidable character sitting in the seat next to his vacant one wth a small round tin, half open with white dust around it on the table. I was laughing so far, and continued laugh harder after I saw all this, beginning to question just what kind of Easter party I had stumbled in on.

When I first came to Madina Estates three days after arriving in the country I was so in this midst of culture shock that I had no basis of comparison for my attempts to understand something about my surroundings. I had an inkling that we were in middle class homes but didn't really know what that meant. After doing the entire program and returning to Madina, I realized just how wealthy of an area it was.

While I was at the Easter party I really started to understand what was going on. I started to feel like I'd been to a place like this before, and I realized I was living in some sort of Ghanaian Beverly Hills. Everyone there was wearing expensive jewelry and accessories, the more the better. It dawned on me that the musicians also must have been fairly wealthy because of all of the fine equipment that they were using.

I was thinking about how American hip-hop artists don't normally get respect from fans unless they've risen from the slums to success and immense wealth. The story is fundamentally one about rags to riches and the flash and bling is about showing what a success they've made. In Ghana and Nigeria, artists are extremely influenced by American hip-hop and r&b and they make music videos that mimic the American style. You'll see a Ghanaian artists with an entourage of mostly beautiful barely clad women in the back of their mansion with a swimming pool, smoking cigars, drinking champagne, with dozens of bentleys and diamonds all over their necks, wrists and fingers. The difference here is that this is wealth that the artists were born with. Ghanaian musicians are all extremely wealthy, educated men who have spent considerable time abroad, often for university. Getting a Western education is by far the most important indicator of status and wealth. Their story has nothing to do with coming up from nothing, it's about flaunting everything God has blessed you with. After talking with my advisor Dr. Collins this morning he compared this theme in hip life with the nature of the born again Christian church in Ghana which sees poverty as a curse and wealth as blessing. The idea is extremely entrenched, even in the poor who idolize and praise the rich elites. Ghanaian hip life artists have essentially taken the ideas that started hip hop and turned them completely inside out.

Coming to this idea made me much more excited about writing my paper and I'm picking up information everywhere from almost everyone I meet.



by the way,
Dylan sent this along in an email. Interesting stuff:

"It has been observable for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness. In its last stages this process is accelerated. And in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern time dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died ... Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs. It is, however, characteristic that not only a man's knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life - and this is the stuff that stories are made of - first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end - unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it - suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story." (Walter Benjamin)