The Music, Genres and Social Relations of African Popular Art
Because Africa is such a vast continent with so many nations, and so many different cultural groups, it would be inappropriate to talk about African pop culture as a definitive entity with specific characteristics. There are some generalizations that can be made about African pop culture however, such as the fact that it has been influenced by many foreign cultural traditions including Islam and Christianity, both of which have colonized various parts of Africa and imposed Eastern and Western cultural practices upon African people. Another fairly steady influence on African pop culture is apartheid. The effects of segregation and racial discord linger among many Africans. Some Africans want to return to more indigenous forms of pop culture in terms of music, art and other genres, and others see the influences of the past as representative of the history of Africa, and, therefore, authentic. More recently, urbanization has also influenced African pop culture. That culture contrasts with the rural cultures, again demonstrating the inaccuracy of trying to pin one type of pop culture to the entire continent. One final characteristic shared by many Africans is that of a desire to be authentic and not be seen as a product of colonization. Being original is an important consideration that many Africans see as most representative of African culture and want included in their popular culture. This authenticity will help to legitimize their art, even if its outside influences are detectable, and it will help Africans to reclaim a place of power and relevance on the world stage.
When one discusses popular culture, music is almost always mentioned, and the forces that influence it are often discussed. Some African music, usually that which is made with indigenous instruments and has been for perhaps thousands of years, is considered primitive. For some Africans, that music is not at all what they would consider popular culture, but to others, tribal music is the only musical culture, or at least the only one they consider relevant. The same goes for some contemporary musical styles. Despite their clearly outside influences, many Africans consider those styles to be much closer to what some consider pop music. One example is hip-hop. After apartheid ended in South Africa, hip-hop became quite popular. This may be because some hip hop music includes references to racial relationships in other countries. Heike Becker of Research in African Literatures says hip-hop served as a way to think about black and white social negotiations in South Africa. People still searched for more authenticate ways to communicate their experience with the racist past and the new integrated society, but hip hop applied to the situation (Becker 29). Globalization was also occurring around the same time, and that had an effect on African popular music too. The HIV epidemic is another uniquely African influence on popular music found on the continent.
With the influences from Islam and Christianity also mixed in, African popular music takes many different forms. Austin Emielu of the journal, Popular Music, says, “The European legacy in Africa gave birth to Western-influenced popular music such as the West African Highlife, Congo Jazz, Kwela and Mbaganga of South Africa, Mapouka of Cote d'Ivoire, Kriolu music for the mixed population (the Mesticos) in Cape Verde, and many others” (Emielu 374). Emielu mentioned several other forms, but this quote represents a sampling of the many different genres of pop music in Africa. He also mentions that urban popular music in Africa seems to be influenced most by Western European, American and Islamic music, which is often incorporated with traditional African music (Emielu 384). By mixing these genres and influences, a new form of music is created, and it is authentically African despite the influences that are easily detected in it. Becker says, “The notion of authenticity is regularly accompanied by processes of authentication in which people have at their disposal resources and techniques that they use to realize an authentically felt grounding to the social and cultural constructions that make up their lives” (Becker 32). All art contains some level of imitation of other art, and yet critics of African pop music identify the imitation as if the new music created is not authentic because the influence is detectable.
Various processes are involved in creating popular music. Emielu says one of those processes, indigenization, is reworking or adapting foreign musical forms to represent fundamentally African cultural and aesthetic characteristics (Emielu 385). For instance, jazz was created in the United States, but has been exported to Europe where it has developed its own style. Africans also enjoy jazz a great deal and have added their own culture and aesthetic flairs to the genre. No one accuses Europeans of being inauthentic because of what they have done with another countries musical form, but Africans are often accused of cultural appropriation. And, the jazz they create in Africa, represents their culture also. “Syncretisation, on the other hand, refers to the creative admixture of foreign and traditional African musical resources to create new forms of 'syncretic music' - a phenomenon . . . an intersection of local and global socio-musical perspective” (Emielu 385). Synchronization takes place constantly in music and other forms of art. Artists like to try new styles and challenge themselves, and society likes to hear, see, and experience new things even if they are familiar. Jean Ngoya Kidula of Africa Today points out, “Research and scholarship about Africa's interaction in contemporary society are presented in such terms as imitation, while a similar happening in Europe or America is discussed as a new trend or development, even when borrowed from or imitating the less politically or economically powerful cultures” (Kidula 101). This is typical of the way Africans are treated by the rest of the world, which is often reflected in their various art forms also.
Just like on other continents, one style of music or one artist becomes popular in an African nation, only to give way to another style or another artist a short time later. That is the nature of public opinion and popularity, ever changing. When a new socio-political issue arises, that can influence the creation of popular music. As one style or influence grows or wanes, bridges from one generation of Africans to the next are built.
“African popular music, like the African man, never dies but passes through 'cycles of life' which guarantee its sustenance through a negotiated relationship between continuity and change” (Emielu 386).
Genres
In various art forms, there are evidence of imitation and repetition of familiar motifs. A painter may also be a poet or a musician and their attempts at art in the various genres may reflect their work in another genre. The artist of any genre may refer to another artist, contemporary or from the past. Lizelle Bisschoff and Ann Overbergh of Research in African Literature explain that the same can be expected from cultural expressions from various origins, that may even create new genres or change existing ones (Bisschoff and Overbergh 113). Technology also affects the expression of culture. Visual arts is an excellent example: they have gone from portraits to black and white photography, to color, to cell phone photography. Each change in technology brings about a change in the genre also. With photography, the purpose of having pictures has changed from commemoration to communication.
One innovation in visual arts is cinema, moving pictures. Many excellent films have been made by African film makers, although some of them may be diasporic. Bisschoff and Overbergh say that African cinema has helped post-colonial African consciousness to demonstrate its existence to the rest of the world. While cinema is a Western created genre, the work of African film makers has been seen as authentic and genuine (Bisschoff and Overbergh 113). The films that African film makers have created are not just entertaining, they are also political, informative, and revealing of life in Africa, something of which most of the rest of the world is ignorant about. Becker says, “[To] young, upwardly mobile people in Cape Town and Windhoek, the movies apparently were important because they showed ‘Africa’ as a form of a different way of being in the world, without ceasing the historical and mundane connections with Westernized consumption and the associated cultural styles from elsewhere” (Becker 30). African films address the concerns that African people have—HIV, apartheid, race relations, urbanization, climate change, poverty, and many others. This makes African films appealing to Africans because they are relevant to their lives whereas a film made for Western audiences may be an interesting and even enjoyable artifact for Africans, it does not have the same type of importance to African people. Beside cultural relevance there are practical considerations such as price and access to films. Because popular culture is, by definition, important to the masses, it should be accessible and affordable. For many Africans who cannot afford to luxuries, movies that the can afford occasionally should represent their lived reality, and many African films deliver on that.
One way that movies are affordable to the people of Africa is through video. Movies made for video cost less to produce, market and distribute (Bisschoff and Overbergh 116). Bisschoff and Overbergh talk about Nigerian video that targets diasporic audiences and the increased interest in digital filmmaking in Tanzania as a way of creating new methods of distributing popular art (Bisschoff and Overbergh 124). Daniela Merolla writing for The Global South talks about the necessity of video documentation and research into new methods of creating and distributing popular art to the African masses. While Merolla’s focus is oral storytelling, she sees the benefit of these other genres to oral art forms. She believes that films and new media technologies including digital video recording, websites, mobile phones, and blogs have “revolutionized the production of oral literature in Africa” (Merolla 155). Considering that oral art is widespread in African, film making could be the most ubiquitous method of distributing popular art, but there are other art forms included in African popular art too.
Popular art includes many art forms, and, as discussed above, they are influenced by many things. Folktales, myths, poems, and other oral genres represent a wealth of culture. “Oral literatures are a fundamental part of the intangible heritage of African cultures” (Merolla 155). Documenting oral art in written and video form is a “new” form of pop culture that may not be unique to Africa, but is unique to the time in the rest of the world. It is somewhat like a revival of art form that has been done elsewhere in the past, but by recording the oral history and culture of Africa, African artists are creating their own new genre, and it is a genre that fits in with the concept of popular art for Africans.
This type of art is more interesting to them because it has not been done previously and Africans may feel that they have yet to be represented accurately and authentically, so that which is new fits the image they have of themselves. Indigenous art forms are included in the experimental and new forms because others have not yet experienced them even though many Africans are familiar with them. “Although underground, experimental, and nonmainstream art is often considered and interpreted as ‘Western,’ . . . these types of art forms also deserve a place in a discussion on contemporary and popular African art, as Africa is part and parcel of the modern, urban world” (Bisschoff and Overbergh 123). African artists engage in non-traditional art forms too including street art and graffiti and video installations, which necessarily involve technology. Because of communications technology which has brought innovation to Africa, the barriers to creating art such as lack of financial resources, are no longer an issue.
The ability to distribute the new art forms and genres to the mass audience of African people creates new relationships among themselves and outwardly to the rest of the world. The oral art forms, for example, include lots of mythical information that Africans have known for centuries and can now share among themselves and with the world. Jeanne van Eeden of Design Issues talks about the myth as a naturalizing force. To those who are unfamiliar with the myths included in the African oral popular art forms will understand them as contemporary myth and see them not as a challenge to Western or Eastern mores, but as new social constructions that are not only authentic but legitimate and worthy of consideration by those who are hearing them for the first time. van Eeden points out that myth reduces things such as stereotypes to the simplest essence and allows them to be frozen as stereotypes rather than truths. She suggests that “white mythology” or “colonial discourse” is a legitimizing myth or justification (van Eeden 20). African artists can use that strategy to create their own legitimizing myths and share them with the world.
One aspect of popular art is the way it redefines and manipulates space. Graffiti, for example, can change a drab concrete overpass into a work of visual interest that expresses the artists political, social and cultural experiences. van Eeden says spatial experience includes issues such as power, status, ideology, myth, representation, identity, capitalism, the representation of the past, leisure, and entertainment. “Not only is the manipulation of space an integral part of postmodern entertainment landscapes, it also was a component of colonialism that inflected landscapes in accordance with colonial narratives, since imperialism required other countries to almost become readable, like a book” (van Eeden 23). African artists can appropriate the aspects of space that return to them the power, ideology, status, representation and identity that was marginalized during colonialism. Popular art has the ability to include all Africans in the reclamation. One area where this is particularly important are those areas that were segregated by apartheid. By reclaiming the space with popular art, Africans can reclaim their power and their cultural and national identities.
Popular art has the capability to reclaim culture, power, and identity for those who deem it popular and worthy of time and resources. Africans are discovering that the art and art forms they have used for centuries can help them today to reclaim what they have lost through centuries of oppression, colonization and marginalization. Their popular art can work among their fellow citizens, fellow Africans and fellow humans to represent and demonstrate their culture, but also to provide an image for the rest of the world of authenticity and legitimacy.
Works Cited
Becker, Heike. "Anthropology and the Study of Popular Culture: A Perspective from the Southern Tip of." Research in African Literatures 43.4 (2012): 17-37. JSTOR. 27 November 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/1... >.
Bisschoff, L. and A. Overbergh. "Digital as the new popular in African cinema? Case studies from the continent." Research in African Literature 43.4 (2012): 112-127. EBSCOhost. 27 November 2019. < http://content.ebscohost.com/C... >.
Emielu, Austin. "Some theoretical perspectives on African popular music." Popular Music 30.3 (2011): 371-388. JSTOR. 27 November 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/2... >.
Kidula, Jean Ngoya. "Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music: Positions, Tensions, and Resoutions in the African Academy." Africa Today 52.3 (2006): 99-113. JSTOR. 27 November 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/4... >.
Merolla, Daniela. "Reflections on the Project African Oral Literatures, New Media, and Technologies: Challenges for Reseach and Documentation." The Global South 5.2 (2011): 154-162. JSTOR. 27 November 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/1... >.
van Eeden, Jeanne. "The Colonial Gaze: Imperialism, Myths, and South African Popular Culture." Design Issues 20.2 (2004): 18-33. EBSCOhost. 27 November 2019. < http://content.ebscohost.com/C... >.
