From Accra to New York and Back Again: the Transnational Nature of Ghanaian Hiplife Music, 1982-2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hiplife, a Ghanaian popular music genre emerging in the 1980s, is often referred to as a blend of African American hip hop and traditional highlife. This portmanteau suggests that hiplife was born out of increased globalization of American popular music in Ghana. However, defining hiplife as a genre has proven difficult due to its transnational origins. For many, hiplife originates with youth who fled Accra for New York City during political instability, lasting from Rawlings 1982 coup until democratization in 1992. Throughout this ten year exodus, Ghanaian musicians in New York engaged with African American new school hip hop, negotiating their own understandings of rap and hip hop with African American counterparts. Diasporic musicians, however, were not the only youth to lay claim to hiplife as a genre; those who remained in Ghana during this period developed alternative musical and performance practices based on shared experiences of political instability, censorship and curfews. Thus, the return home of expatriate youth was a site of negotiation between local and diasporic musicians who debated hiplifes style, aesthetic, language, and subject matter. This presentation will explore the ongoing transnational dialogues and cross-cultural negotiations concerning hiplifes controversial definition for Ghanaian youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".