Producing Diaspora

This chapter shows how palimpsestic practices of hip hop genre produce diasporic connections. It describes how hip hop practices of layering and sampling delink indigenous musical elements from traditional communicative norms to rework them in hip hop, where they signify rootedness and locality in ways consistent with hip hop practice in the United States. It demonstrates that this process relies on applications of hip hop time (musical meter) as being fundamentally different from indigenous music, whose local appeal is contrasted with hip hop’s global intelligibility. It outlines how hip hop concepts of flow free verbal performance from lyrical referentiality to render it a musical element. It argues that these practices of hip hop genre, in their delinking of sound and speech, reshape understandings of the relationship between commercialism and referentiality, and suggests that voice therefore should be understood to encompass artists’ agency in pursuing material gain in the face of socioeconomic struggle.

Remembering the Griot

This chapter locates Senegalese hip hop at the intersection of local musical history, transatlantic Afrocentric dialogue, and the accelerated globalization of the 1980s. It traces the historical invention of the griot through colonialism, religious conversion, and postcolonial nationalist projects, while showing how griot instrumental and vocal performance practices provided a foundation for Senegal’s preeminent popular music, mbalax. It details how early international rappers, including Positive Black Soul (PBS) and Daara J, in line with a history of Afrocentric and pan-African projects in which they were well versed, traced an alternative history that routed the griot through diaspora and “back” to Africa, bypassing contemporary griot performance and mbalax in the process. It argues that this was not a literal claim to hip hop origins, but a strategic project of remembering that claimed diaspora as an alternative local history.

Voicing Galsen

This chapter turns to the vast majority of Senegalese rappers who locate themselves in the underground, to show how they construct hip hop meaning in dialogue with other performance genres. Demonstrating how Wolof-centric processes of urbanization create a sense of distance from tradition, it positions mbalax as a modern musical tradition whose ties to indigenous communicative norms and speech genres render it antithetical to hip hoppers’ claims to a liberal, agential voice. It argues that hip hop undergoes a similar traditionalizing process, so that origin stories don’t just reflect local realities, but also comment on and voice them. It shows that, although hip hoppers contest lived experiences of underdevelopment through themes of education and consciousness raising, local hierarchies ultimately continue to limit the possibilities of hip hop voice.

Sampling Myth

This chapter traces how the stories people tell through and about hip hop produce diasporic connections. It introduces two fundamental and interlinked origin myths that are central to how music means in Senegalese hip hop (Rap Galsen). One connects hip hop to griots and indigenous oralities; the other centers on the South Bronx and urban marginalization. It argues that analyzing hip hop within specific local musical histories complicates frameworks of resistance in global hip hop studies. Rather than objectifying the sounds of hip hop or reducing them to a medium of resistance, it approaches hip hop meaning through an ethnographic analysis of musical genre that examines the social significances of sound and musical gesture. It shows how hip hop’s aural palimpsests relate to strategic practices of memory.

Remix

Resampling earlier chapters’ stories about urbanization, tradition, voice, gender, and genre, this epilogue looks back at changes in the Senegalese hip hop scene in the wake of the 2011–2012 Y’en a Marre movement. Showing how global narratives about hip hop resistance can have unexpected consequences, it reflects on scholars’ material and representational responsibilities to the communities we work with. It connects these to the complicated question of state involvement in Senegalese hip hop, linking the cultural diplomacy of the US Department of State to a growing anti-Islam sentiment, while also acknowledging how these programs have contributed to improved material conditions for some Senegalese hip hoppers.

Gendering Voice

Through a discussion of Gotal, a women’s collective, this chapter shows how gendered analysis problematizes constructions of hip hop as a youth music. While young urban men experience a newfound mobility that allows the construction of widespread hip hop networks, familial and social concerns over female sexuality limit young women’s movements through public (hip hop) space. In focusing on expression in the public sphere, and in rejecting traditional music as easy and feminine, hip hop constructions of voice underestimate and effectively silence indigenous modes of female self-expression. Female rappers still seek to mobilize hip hop voice, however, and counter these narratives through discourses of family and work. Flipping the script on hip hop tropes of the underground, they position their own marginalization as a badge of hip hop authenticity.

Globalizing the Underground

This chapter outlines the early history of Rap Galsen (Senegalese hip hop), showing the emergence of two originating schools: internationally circulating groups like Positive Black Soul (PBS), Daara J, and Pee Froiss, and hardcore groups like Rap’Adio, Waa BMG 44, and Yatfu. It problematizes the ghetto, the street, and the underground as globally circulating hip hop myths, and argues for local specificity when linking hip hop to urban marginalization. In Dakar, the street and the ghetto represent a particular experience of urbanity tied up in colonization and underdevelopment, and the hip hop underground defines itself not only through lyrical and linguistic content, but through musical aesthetics. Ultimately, this chapter highlights the extent to which Rap Galsen’s own origin story has been produced and finessed over decades to better align with globally circulating hip hop myths.