Assistant Professor of Music looks at hip-hop in Senegal as part of a continuum, navigating social and gendered spaces, and its own mythologies.
In the opening paragraphs of her new book, 鈥溾 (Oxford University Press), Appert describes a performance and its linguistic mix of Wolof, French and English that is unique to rap artists in Dakar.
鈥淚 watch and listen as their words, cadence, gestures, and music project through the streets of Dakar, layering aural memories of hip hop鈥檚 diasporic movements between Senegal, the United States, and France,鈥 she writes.
The performance underlines the country鈥檚 colonial history and the music鈥檚 journey, expanding from urban America to Africa across time and borders. Hip-hop is a globalized, not just global, phenomenon, the author suggests.
Appert did ethnographic research with rappers in Senegal during a series of trips between 2007 and 2015. She also conducted a case study of Senegalese rappers living in Los Angeles for her 2012 doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Appert wanted to write about hip-hop in 21st-century Senegal 鈥 known as 鈥淩ap Galsen" 鈥 as much more than its usual representation in global hip-hop studies, which typically casts it as a music of resistance mobilized against government corruption.
鈥淎 lot of writing about hip-hop is not about the diversity of actual experience, and that鈥檚 what鈥檚 interesting to me 鈥 it鈥檚 about people鈥檚 lives,鈥 Appert said. 鈥淲hat are the ways it matters to people? It comes down to the stories people tell about themselves challenging the stories scholars tell about them.鈥
The book takes on different facets of hip-hop mythology and how its origin myths are layered in the process of forming music and memory. A music 鈥渂orn in the Bronx鈥 is still being referenced around the world today, but Appert says it is far from the whole story of a still-evolving art form.
She distills black music鈥檚 evolution from the colonial era to the late 20th century in both Africa and America, in a timeline leading to the birth of hip-hop and up to the present day.
At the beginning, with turntables as musical instruments, emcees and the sound systems introduced by West Indian immigrants, 鈥渉ip-hop emerges, as the saying goes, by making something out of nothing,鈥 Appert writes.
鈥淒isillusioned minority youth in the burned-out neighborhoods of the postindustrial South Bronx of the 1970s take these musics and fixate on 鈥榯he break鈥 鈥 a percussive, low-end groove to be endlessly looped and manipulated.鈥
In later chapters, Appert cites the influence of gender dynamics, and describes how hip-hop intersects with contemporary indigenous forms of speech coopted in commercial music.
She also addresses ethnographic practice as a form of musical analysis, and reveals the challenges of fieldwork in urban and popular music and the dynamic between oral history and memory among interview subjects.
鈥淗ip-hop is diversifying in ways that were unimaginable 15 years ago,鈥 she said. 鈥淭hese are historical processes, just recent ones.鈥
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