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JESSE WEAVER SHIPLEY
Haverford College
Transnational circulation and digital
fatigue in Ghana’s Azonto dance craze
A B S T R A C T
Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose
popularity is built through its global circulation. I
trace its production and flow across studios, radio
stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra
and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I
argue that, as a technologically mediated style,
Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a
mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the
potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and
copying for self-recognition. Ghanaian musicians
and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of
digital technologies, making this dance a style of
symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth
both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed
community of musical participation that valorizes
mobility itself. The dance’s sudden ubiquity,
however, creates “digital fatigue,” an uncertainty
among participants about belonging in an era of
digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of
recognition from the cultural registers that empower
them in the first place. [digital media, technology,
circulation, repetition, transnationalism, popular
culture, music, dance, African urban youth, Ghana,
African diasporas]
J
oy FM’s Open House Party, hosted by DJ Black, is Accra’s most popular Saturday night radio show, mixing Ghanaian, U.S., Nigerian,
British, and South African pop, hip-hop, and house music. One
evening in September 2011, DJ Black implored his listeners, “It’s
been a while since Ghana had a dance of its own. So please, do
the dance!” He was referring to Azonto, a dance craze spreading across the
country and among Ghanaians abroad. While the dance’s origins are contested, it was inspired by the song “U Go Kill Me,” by star rapper Sarkodie
and young producers EL and Krynkman, released less than a year earlier. The song’s sparse lyrics celebrate an azonto girl—an obscure vernacular term for a disreputable outcast or a sexually promiscuous woman. Its
danceable beat and pidgin English hook celebrating the woman’s charms—
“This girl go kill me”—lend it a catchy simplicity. The track played on
Ghanaian radio and circulated via user-to-user digital file sharing. Over
several months, the dance moves it inspired rapidly spread through clubs
and school dance competitions and online amateur videos. Other musicians began making tracks with similar beats and lyrics. In August 2011, a
Wikipedia page appeared—surely a contemporary marker of recognition—
initially defining Azonto as a “dance which mainly involves moving of all
the joints in your body in a rhythmic fashion without taking any or very
little steps.” By Christmas, Azonto had spread to Ghanaians in Europe
and the United States, mostly through Facebook, YouTube, and Ghanaian
music websites, even reaching the fringes of mainstream British popular
culture.
While the dance incorporated numerous styles, its basic steps were simplified such that, as a reporter for an online BBC documentary on Azonto’s
popularity stated, he “learned to dance Azonto in less than three minutes”
(Jakana 2012). U.S. urban fashions are preferred by aficionados—skinny
jeans, crisp branded shirts, and perhaps a baseball cap worn at a jaunty angle. The dance is controlled and subtle, brash with a bit of humor. Dancers
slouch their shoulders and cock their heads to one side, smirking in a defiant and flirtatious manner. One leg is stiff and planted while the performer
pivots and twists on the ball of the other foot; one hand is pointed straight
down, circled around the other hand held at the waist and then pointed
to the sky. From this signature move, dancers appropriate and parody an
array of dance styles and references to daily life.1
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 362–381, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. !
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12027
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
I argue that Azonto’s rapid spread and popularity are
due to its performative fashioning of a cosmopolitan persona defined by a celebration of mobility, both semiotic and
geographic. Its transformation of a stigmatized social outcast into an urbane hustler makes it a vehicle of individual
self-empowerment within a dispersed community of digital
circulation. Artists and audiences in Ghana and in Ghanaian communities abroad are connected through the recognition that mobility itself is a sign of national belonging and
personal success. Azonto, in content and form, is the embodiment of circulation, though the meanings attributed
to its mobility vary. Azonto is identified with Ghanaian indigeneity by those abroad and with cosmopolitanism by
those at home. In these inverted interpretations, speed and
ease of repeatability provide new possibilities as well as hazards: While financial and geographic mobility defines success for many Ghanaians, it also creates anxiety among certain audiences, threatening to delink references to locale
from their semiotic groundings. That is to say, technological
reiteration and circulation can create what one music producer calls “digital fatigue,” unmooring signs of belonging
from the cultural contexts that are supposed to give them
meaning in the first place. As Ghanaian affiliations are reanimated in embodied technological form, new worries arise
about the potential of music and fame to maintain the connections they seem to promise.
In the following sections, I show how Azonto’s rise
relies on relationships among Ghanaian artists in Accra
and those abroad that are facilitated by digital music production and listening technologies and how participants
manipulate and embody these technologies in dispersed,
user-generated practices. I first examine how digital music’s repetitiveness and easy replication facilitate its movement. Beat makers craft familiar rhythms that do not
require a long attention span, landing easily in their listeners’ ears wherever they are. Rappers write simple, memorable lyrical hooks designed to circulate by provoking humorous, sexual controversy. DJs and artists circulate tracks
on radio and as digital files, spreading music rapidly among
widely dispersed audiences. Azonto is a form of symbolic
action emergent in its circulation among Ghanaian musicians and fans in London, New York, and across the
globe. I demonstrate how popular songs appropriate and
are appropriated by informal musical networks, stimulating
user-generated content as aspiring artists and fans shoot
amateur dance videos to accompany their favorite tracks
and rapidly record new songs at informal studios. Azonto’s
stereotypic beat and banal hook create a sonic landscape
that facilitates its semiotic work of appropriating and intensively layering various registers. As the dance migrates
across diverse contexts, its formal structure allows youth
to incorporate disparate styles while making a specifically
Ghanaian cosmopolitanism. As Azonto moves, it draws in
new references—to dances, rhythms, social activities—that
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American Ethnologist
transform it, simultaneously expanding its referential lexicon while condensing and simplifying it. Azonto becomes a
multimodal and multireferential sign built on the inversion
and revaluation of the figure that gives it its name. Transforming the image of the outcast into that of the irreverent
urbanite and technologically savvy street hustler, the popular dance embodies a new social persona for young Ghanaians around the world to emulate. In this revaluation, the
dance lends itself to a theatricality that is at times sincere
and at others parodic. I end by examining anxieties and
uncertainties about the links between identity, sound, and
culture that emerge even as the musical dance’s transformations provide a template for aspirational Ghanaians to
imagine popular style as a vehicle for self-making.
Digital circulation and the art of repetition
This article contributes to theorizing the crucial roles that
repetition and circulation play in mobile digital media practices. It does so by showing how, as Azonto is electronically
made, circulated, and embodied, various tensions between
prosperity and aspiration, home and abroad, popular and
traditional are managed and reproduced. Azonto’s rise is
but one example of how digital media are reshaping overlapping national and global imaginaries and the changing
nature of cosmopolitanism (cf. Tsing 2005:3–10). Popular
culture seems increasingly crucial to the contours of globalized identities. For example, recently, local pop songs
have broken through their national boundaries, gaining
massive global followings and inspiring innumerable usergenerated remixes further driving their unexpected online
circulation; notably, “Ai Se Eu Te Pego,” by Brazil’s Michael
Telo, became a global trending hit in 2011, and South
Korean singer PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became the biggest
Internet trend to date, receiving over one billion YouTube
hits by late 2012. For youth around the world, popularity is a
self-fulfilling performative that inspires further circulation
and creative elaboration. There is pleasure and possibility
in mobility and difference when cast in easily consumable,
popular formats. For example, the sudden fascination with
K pop—South Korean popular music—and with other international styles among certain American hipsters is driven
by the thrill of difference tempered by the familiar senses of
pop fandom and fame. But how these global trends articulate with specific cultures of digital circulation needs further
ethnographic attention (Lee and LiPuma 2002). Whereas
much scholarship on musical globalization examines how
blended styles or “world musics” speak to eclectic international audiences and considers the role of technology in
replicating and circulating this music (Monson 1999:32), I
focus on the contextually specific relevance of a Ghanaian
digital music phenomenon for the particular contours of
Ghanaian cosmopolitanism (cf. Dent 2009). Azonto demonstrates broader features of popular technological trends but
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also defines a particular culture of circulation. Specifically,
it allows participants to feel mobile and international
while maintaining connections to home. As one youth in
Accra joked to me, “As long as you can keep moving you
always have a chance. Ghanaians are not immigrants they
never . . . imagine they are staying in one place. They all
want to move back to Ghana . . . to be mobile . . . It is
the ability to move that people want. It is not how long
you stay in US but that you can go and come.” Ghanaian
audiences become active participants in making this
musical-dance craze through easy-to-use technology and,
in the process, contribute to ongoing embodied debates
about transnational Ghanaian identity. Azonto celebrates
structured improvisation as a way-of-being in the world;
the pleasure is in the movement and circulation itself. For
Ghanaian youth who imagine themselves on the margins
of global economic and cultural movements, hustling is not
a simplistic mode of material acquisition in times of need
but a complex mode of existence, reappropriating struggle
as an often pleasurable way-of-being in the world. Azonto’s
particular ethos of mobility reflects this.
Recent analysts have shown the effects of changing
technology and media practices in reshaping national and
urban publics (Boyer 2005; Burrell 2012; Dent 2009; Miller
2011; Peterson 2010). Many studies of new media publics
in Africa explore how technologies of cultural production
transform people’s relationship both to the nation-state
and to global circulations (Goodman 2005; Klein 2007;
Larkin 2008). Much of the research on African media circulations has focused on religious movements, showing
how technology mediates the relationships among spirituality, nationhood, and modernity (Eisenlohr 2006; Engelke
2007; Hirschkind 2006; Meyer and Moors 2005). In Ghana,
Birgit Meyer (2004) and Marleen De Witte (2005) argue,
neo-Pentecostal new media have respiritualized a national
public sphere as IMF and World Bank–initiated neoliberal
reforms orient the Ghanaian state toward free market privatization. Indeed neo-Pentecostals across the continent
have permeated civil society, emphasizing doctrines of individual aspiration as states have decentralized (Engelke
2007; Gifford 2004; Meyer 2004; Shipley 2009b). However,
media privatization has also facilitated the emergence of
various informal, secular social realms with complex and
ambivalent relationships to state institutions and national
publics, which have received less scholarly attention (Larkin
2008; Perullo 2005). While the importance of the proliferation of neo-Pentecostalism and other religious fundamentalisms to African public life is undeniable, secular
popular cultural trends are crucial to life in urban Africa,
revealing a lot about changing media practices and related
notions of aspiration and creativity (Barber 2003; Fabian
1998; Newell 2012).
Following Keith Hart’s (1973) groundbreaking ethnography of informal economies in Accra, I ask, what happens
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when we look at African public life from the perspective
of the vibrant, informal, and secular networks that most
youth inhabit rather than through broader institutional
and national frames? Popular music is the primary mode
through which those in the rising generation use mobile
multimedia technology (Stokes 2007:10) and, in the process, reshape their own ideas of locality and globalization
(Ferguson 1999; Piot 2010). The emergence of hip-hop genres around the world in the last 20 years reflects larger
technological transformations that have brought popular expressive styles to the center of political, moral, and
commercial life (Basu and Lemelle 2006; Condry 2006;
Fernandes 2011; Osumare 2008). Hip-hop’s irreverence
and rebellious ethos, in particular, provide youth with a
counterpoint to neo-Pentecostalism’s sincerity as youths
make choices about their futures. The popularity of urban dance and hip-hop across Africa demonstrates how
African national publics are shaped through informal networks of cultural production and the creative reuse of
technologies (Haupt 2008; Herson et al. 2009; Ntarangwi
2009). In Ghana, hiplife music—an eclectic mix of hiphop and highlife—arose in mid-1990s Accra among elite
youth (Shipley 2009a). It spread to mass working-class audiences as artists blended familiar highlife rhythms and locallanguage lyrics with rap flows and hip-hop beat making
and swagger. Following the adoption of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, which mandated media privatization, private radio stations emerged, driving the new music’s popularity
across the urban landscape. As the initially marginal music
became socially relevant, lyrics and rhythms were appropriated in national moral debates, state political discourse,
and commercial branding campaigns (Shipley 2013).
Pop music and hip-hop—in Africa and beyond—are
distinct from other expressive subcultures in how easily
they blur lines between producers and consumers and official and unofficial, incorporating marginalized, disparate
youth into communities of active participation. Digital music is cheaper to make and circulate and requires less infrastructure than video films, sermons, fashion, or theater.
Churches depend on fellowship and institutions to circulate sermons and necessitate at least a nominal ideological commitment on the part of listeners. While rising videofilm industries in places like Nairobi, Lagos, and Accra are
built on cheap technological production and distribution,
long-form narrative video films require more resources to
produce and distribute whether as digital or hard copies
(Larkin 2008). Digital songs are particularly transportable,
can be copied from phone to phone, are easy and quick to
consume in almost any locale, and require little from the listener in terms of time commitment or previous knowledge.
African hip-hop and pop music have a do-it-yourself aesthetic that valorizes individual aspiration (cf. Barber 2003).
These musics rely on the image of a self-made black male
rapper who both speaks for and to youths and embodies
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
the spirit of entrepreneurship (Shipley 2013; Thomas 2004;
Weiss 2009). Crucially, the music’s relevance as a black genre
activates ongoing dialogues, between urban dwellers on the
continent and recent African diasporic populations in Western metropoles, that are central to the making of contemporary Africa (Ebron 2002; Pierre 2012).
Scholars of ritual and performance have long been concerned with the relationship between repetition and power
(Tambiah 1985). Repeatability is crucial for sustaining
chains of reference (Turner 1967). In their reiteration, signs
both rely on and reproduce their own conditions of possibility. That is to say, referential practices produce their own
contexts within which signs can become comprehensible
and legitimate (Kockelman 2006). The reiterative properties of language normalize unequal power relations by naturalizing social participant roles and their contextual frames
(Gal 2005). As Judith Butler (1997) shows, parody is a form of
reiteration that simultaneously embodies and undermines
dominant forms of power by making people aware of the artifice of repetition. Parodic expression exposes the power of
repetition by pushing it to the extreme, creating reiterative
overload.
African digital music makers strive to capitalize on
music’s repetitive properties to project themselves as farreaching, successful artists. However, the excessive reiterative capacity of digital music—both in repeating beats over
and over and in circulating songs widely—leads to questions about the sincerity and Africanness of the music.
Many African musicians who play traditional instruments
lament the rise of electronic beat making and looping as
uncreative copying of Western styles. For older popular genres like highlife, live performances are central locales where
music’s emotional power forges publics through shared,
repetitive experience (Cole 2001; Plageman 2012). The relationships among musicians—and between musicians and
listeners and dancers—during live shows produce and reiterate perduring social relations relevant across social
realms (Barber 2001; Cole 2001; Coplan 1994; Erlmann 1996;
Keil and Feld 1994; White 2008). Indeed, John Chernoff
(1981) has argued that reiteration has long been crucial to
structuring live African music, its improvisations, and its
embodiment. Considering music as part of a broader social soundscape central to how people experience place
and belonging (Eisenberg 2010; Feld 1996), I show how
digital production tools and Internet and mobile listening technologies change where and how music is reiterative and creative. While live music creates community
through face-to-face experience, digital music forges affective, embodied connections through multimodal, dispersed participation. That is to say, rather than focus on
the live performance, recent popular musicians invest creativity in the studio and online, finding new forms of
embodied sociality in the unpredictable travels of digital
tracks.
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Reiteration: Accra’s digital beat makers, rappers,
and DJs make Azonto
Methodologically, tracing Azonto’s rise and the rapidly
changing relationship between old electronic media (radio
and television), digital media, and popular culture means
tapping into networks of artists, media workers, and fans
in Ghana and Ghanaian communities abroad and following
digital productions as they circulate online and via mobile
devices. In mid-2011, I was in Accra after having been away
for eight months, several generations in the lifecycle of popular trends.2 New hits, new artists, and new subgenres vied
for public attention. To find out what was happening on the
music scene, I visited Rockstone’s Office, a sleek nightclub
run by the pioneer of hiplife Reggie Rockstone Ossei, whom
I have known since 1998. He has continued to rap but focuses on managing his club, currently Accra’s most popular
high-end nightspot, which has become a meeting place for
well-known and aspiring artists, successful businesspeople,
university students, and media workers. When I asked Reggie what was new, he introduced me to EL, a tall young man
in sunglasses standing near the bar. “This is the boy-wonder
. . . remember that track I played for you at the house? This
is the guy who made the beat . . . he is the next big thing!”
I exchanged mobile numbers and Facebook links with EL
and his rap partner C-Real and we planned to meet up the
next day.
Later in the evening, I headed to Joy FM to see DJ
Black (Kwadwo Ampofo), another one of Accra’s musical
trendsetters. Off a quiet street, a lone security guard sat
in Joy FM’s lobby, texting on his phone. Air conditioning
and music blasted from the station’s broadcast studio, an
oasis of energy in the calm night. As I entered, DJ Black
waved as he played a jingle recorded by Busta Rhymes when
he performed in Accra. “You’re listening to DJ Black on
the House Party . . . Joy FM!!” [blasting noises]. The program’s producer screened calls from listeners and sorted
MP3 music files while Black bantered live with listeners calling in to give shout-outs. His audience is young—mostly
under 30—but runs the gamut from elite, educated businesspeople to local, working-class kids. In the 1990s, African
hip-hop’s primary appeal for young men was the image
of the microphone-wielding rapper as celebrity who could
speak truth to power (Perullo 2005; Shipley 2013; Silverstein
2004; Weiss 2009). With the growing centrality of digital
production techniques and decreasing music sales due to
free downloading and digital distribution, DJs across Africa
have become increasingly important as mediators of popular tastes and stars in their own right (Charry 2012; Veal
2007). As many rappers are known for one or two hits, promoters, corporate sponsors, and clubs increasingly seek out
celebrity television and radio DJs like DJ Black, who remix
various artists’ hits, attracting broader audiences. (See
Figure 1.)
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Figure 1. DJ Black at Joy FM scratching on the turntable, Accra, Ghana.
Photograph by Jesse Weaver Shipley.
DJ Black is a tastemaker. What he plays on air becomes
popular. He explained that DJing adds value to tracks; spinning is visual and aural showmanship. “DJing is showing
off . . . if you’re playing a song and mixing the next song in
your ear, you have to act like it’s the hottest shit . . . because
people are watching and listening to you.” Black recalls that
his primary engagement as a teenager with “African American culture” and with “what was happening in the world
was through listening to American hip-hop and R & B.”
He got involved by making mixtapes with Prime Cuts, one
of Accra’s first hip-hop-oriented DJ collectives. He spun at
clubs and small shows, eventually landing a show on Radio Univers, the University of Ghana’s FM station, becoming
one of the first to play U.S. hip-hop and early Ghanaian rappers on Accra’s airwaves (Shipley 2013:69). When he moved
to Joy FM, Black’s musical tastes contributed to its rise as the
first and most successful station built on a commercial formula mixing primarily English-language presenters, African
American styles, and hip, urbane Ghanaian programming.3
Most successful Ghanaian DJs, program managers, and producers in the first years of Ghanaian private radio were,
like DJ Black, from educated, middle-class families and had
the fluency to codeswitch between formal English, African
American vernacular, Akan, and Accra’s latest street-pidgin
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phrasings. DJ Black’s long-term popularity stems from his
skill at synthesizing Ghanaian references with the latest
from New York, Johannesburg, and London; he makes Accra
listeners feel like they are part of a hip, cosmopolitan public
without losing their local sensibility.
Taking a break, he removed his headphones, and we
chatted while I looked through the music playlists on his
laptop. His studio serves as a center for artistic connections. Musicians often stop by for on-air interviews and to
freestyle. Black’s program reaches several hundred thousand listeners on air, and his mixes, podcasts, and interviews are available for free download, regularly accessed
by listeners in Europe, the United States, and Japan. After
promoting a contest for mobile phone giant Airtel, Black
played a hit by R & B superstar Rihanna. He cut back and
forth between her song and his scratching turntable, bending and looping sections of the song for about a minute
before fading into the next track, by Rick Ross. That night
he played U.S. hip-hop before shifting to Ghanaian and
African tracks later in his four-hour show. His MacBook Pro
is the center of his multimedia activity. Messages and listener requests from several Facebook and Twitter accounts
frequently popped up on his screen. He flipped between interacting on social media and mixing music using Serato
software, which displayed two virtual mixing decks side by
side on the screen. He brings hip-hop sensibilities to radio
DJing, looping beats and lyrics, cutting between tracks to
explore their rhythmic similarities.
As Black played Sarkodie’s “U Go Kill Me,” production staff and visitors danced Azonto in the cramped studio
around the mixing boards. I was amazed that a dance that
did not exist a few months earlier was suddenly so ubiquitous. “You don’t know Azonto? . . . Azonto is the latest thing
. . . out of nowhere, now it’s everywhere!” Black laughed at
my ignorance. “You can do the dance to many songs but it
started with this track. EL produced it . . . He raps, produces,
makes beats . . . does it all.”
The next afternoon, I visited EL (Elom Adablah) and
C-Real (Cyril-Alex Gockel) at their recording studio in Osu,
where they produced their own and other artists’ music as well as commercials. In 2009, C-Real, representing
Ghana, placed second at Emcee Africa II, the continentwide freestyle rap competition sponsored by Sprite and MNet, South Africa’s cable channel. Since then, he has tried to
turn his sudden televised fame as a reality-show contestant
into sustained musical popularity.4 Like many talented rappers, he struggles to translate his complex lyrical dexterity
into simple, audience-friendly pop songs with hooks that
compel repeat listening. He explained to me, “You never
know, as a musician, what formula is going to hit. But you
need that catchy hook to reach audiences.” EL has a talent for finding the right mix—making songs that balance
the familiar with the new. EL and C-Real were both recent
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
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she is bought and consumed like a commodity. The azonto
girl’s self-possession and style transform her disreputable
image, though activate prevalent male ambivalence toward
female sexual agency.
EL’s chorus is in pidgin English:
the way you dey be my spec, oh
this girl go dey kill me, oh
(Sarkodie: money no be problem)
Figure 2. EL in his studio making beats. Accra, Ghana. Photographs by
Saskia Köbschall.
University of Ghana graduates. On the verge of stardom,
they represent a rising generation of popular digital artists.
They are from relatively elite backgrounds: C-Real grew up
on the University of Ghana’s campus, the son of a lecturer,
and EL lived in a comfortable Accra neighborhood. Like earlier hiplife artists, their success relies on transforming local
styles into mainstream fashion. Their work demonstrates
a long-standing productive tension between poor and rich
youth styles in Accra. As elites fluent in English, they repackage working-class styles and local language idioms, giving
them a modern sheen through electronic production and
recirculating them as signs of hip cosmopolitanism for popular consumption (Shipley 2013:107).
For a rising artist like EL, producing “U Go Kill
Me” for a star rapper like Sarkodie—known as Ghana’s
fastest rapper—provided market exposure and industry
legitimacy.5 (See Figure 2.) EL produced the track—based
on Krynkman’s beat—and sang the chorus.6 Sarkodie’s Twi
and Pidgin rap lyrics describe meeting a street girl who is
there for him in times of need; in turn, he covets her attention. He celebrates her as an outsider who achieves through
her sexuality and hustle rather than established social
status.
Water from her mouth is like champagne
she is azonto, still i will maintain (her)
You’re going to be jealous.7
The metaphoric comparison of the girl to champagne
is an example of how moral ambivalence drives interest in
many Ghanaian songs. When the song parodies, objectifies, or praises the azonto is ambiguous. Music fans I interviewed among traders in a local market were split. Some
thought that “champagne is expensive so he is praising her,”
whereas others interpreted it as a sexualized insult meaning
The simple hook is easily remembered and repeated
by listeners.8 The use of Pidgin English, the language of informal urban communication, gives the track broad populist appeal. Female value is sexualized and monetized,
in the process gendering the process of upward mobility.
The transformation of the azonto from social pariah to upwardly mobile agent is premised on the power of personal
style and charismatic swagger to overcome hierarchy and
stigma.
In the studio, El, C-Real, and I discussed the struggles of crafting musical hits. Since the late 1990s, most
Ghanaian popular music has been produced on PC computers with music software like Qbase, Fruity Loops,
Logic, and Protools, using few live instruments or samples.
Producers layer numerous nonlinear computer-generated
tracks, building rich sonic environments over which rap
and vocal tracks are recorded. EL demonstrated to me
how he makes beats with Fruity Loops. C-Real quipped,
“It is a very simple program . . . Anyone can make basic beats with it. But in the hands of an advanced producer, it is a lethal weapon.” The beat of “U Go Kill Me”
is similar to numerous popular dance rhythms of the past
50 years from highlife to kpanlogo to jamma, music that
now evokes pleasant nostalgia for many Ghanaians. EL explained, “Each beat maker has his secret to making a really good jamma beat which I can’t show you, but the
basics are simple.” In about twenty seconds, EL made a
beat similar to the one for “U Go Kill Me.” With a few
mouse clicks, he distributed beats unevenly across two
4/4 time signatures and set it to loop endlessly while we
talked. For “U Go Kill Me,” sparse, syncopated piano and
high hat are offset, alternating with a bouncing side-beat.
The vocals are autotuned and low in the mix, creating an
echoing, distanced effect. The sounds are from Western
sound archives built into the software or downloaded online, but the final product sounds distinctly West African.
Indeed, African electronic artists often recombine various
sounds and time signatures in ways software and hardware designers never envisioned (Meintjes 2003; Veal 2007).
As Hammer, another well-known producer, explained to
me, since digital software does not cater to African musical
needs, part of the beat maker’s skill is improvising to get the
sounds they want (Shipley 2013:149).
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I was struck by how similar the beat of “U Go Kill
Me” is to numerous 1970s and 1980s highlife songs and
1990s hiplife. I started to think that was part of the point.
It became a hit—and unintentionally inspired a dance
craze—because of its stereotypic simplicity and easy repeatability, its repackaging of a familiar rhythm in new,
stylish clothes. Because there are so many similar tracks,
however, it is rare when one stands out through its rhythmic
innovation. This song’s clean electronic sound and eclectic, precise beats both contrast with and amplify its basic
rhythm’s familiarity. Combined with Sarkodie’s rap virtuosity and the poetic images of the Azonto this song was an instant hit.
Furthermore, Sarkodie and EL masterfully perform
hip-hop swagger associated with foreignness and mobility. While Ghana is often seen as a privatization success
story (Chalfin 2010), most youths’ daily lives are dominated by struggles to pay school fees, find work, help
their families, and gain the skills and connections to pursue their own aspirations. The artists’ skinny jeans, fresh
sneakers, sunglasses, and baseball caps present a fantastic image of Afro-cosmopolitanism. Their stylishness and
technological–musical prowess provide audiences signs of
self-made success. As one fan explained to me, “Sarkodie
is great because he made it through his own skill . . . Songs
like this give you something from the streets but it’s new,
you know? When you can’t find work or you have problems or you are hustling you can just listen to it on your
phone . . . with your friends and laugh. But they also have
a serious message of hope.”
Like many songs, “U Go Kill Me” primarily circulated
only as a digital file.9 Both industry insiders and teenage
fans disseminate MP3s on flash drives, laptops, and phones.
The song played on computer and iPod playlists in clubs,
bars, on air, and online, although Accra’s youth listen to music increasingly on mobile phones. For Africans born since
the 1980s—and because of lack of infrastructure, perhaps,
even more so than for youth from the global North—daily
life centers on mobile phones and online social networking,
with digitally circulating songs crucial to informal youth
connections and, increasingly, to how they imagine more
enduring linkages (Piot 2010).
Digital artists like DJ Black and EL are cultural mediators whose performative expertise shapes Accra’s sonic
landscape. By mastering the reiterative properties of digital
media, DJs and artists reimagine their social world, assembling lyrical and musical fragments into new stylish wholes
that, as I show below, listeners can subsequently break apart
and reassemble in a variety of contexts. They create sounds
that establish the contexts for innovative referential practices. These contexts become recognizable mobile registers that allow youth to include themselves as participants
in social conversations about morality, circulation, and as-
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piration. As the following sections demonstrate, informal
digital economies create new fantasies of cosmopolitanism
for those in Ghana and signs of home for young Ghanaians abroad, who rely on mobile popular music to imagine
Ghanaianness. Music produces and remakes collective affiliations by linking the contexts of production and listening to a set of authorizing representations (Keane 2003:410).
Songs like “U Go Kill Me” revitalize cultural recognitions,
creating new embodied ways to experience familiar sounds
and movements. Digital repetitions circulate place-based
references as immaterial, highly transportable digital tracks.
Cosmopolitanism: Azonto goes to London
Azonto’s spread to London-based Ghanaians is driven by
informal digitally mediated dialogues between youth in
Ghana and in diaspora, making a musical communality.
Producers, musicians, and audiences across various locales
coalesce into a community of participation defined through
this popular style. Digital production and circulation technologies replicate and reframe familiar sounds, detaching
them from place-based associations and tying them, instead, to Ghanaian identity as a style of mobility. While
Azonto’s initial popularity in Accra stems from how it reinvents local, familiar beats with a modern twist, for young
London-based Ghanaians, Azonto stands in as an embodied representation of Ghana as home. With this transformation, Ghanaians in Ghana further thrill as a local trend “goes
international,” amplifying Azonto into a sign of global mobility and success.
For the Azonto generation, dialogue between Accra
youth and their peers abroad creates a cosmopolitan style
that transcends local–global oppositions and maintains
its distinct Ghanaianness as a form of worldliness. James
Ferguson’s (1999) analysis of cosmopolitanism demonstrates how African lifeworlds often challenge simplistic analytic local–global dichotomies. As Ferguson shows in relation to Zambia, the local–global duality provides mythic,
fantastical narratives that both compel urban Africans to
strive for modernity and distance them from its claims of
progress. Zambians’ recognition of their displacement from
the promises of postcolonial advancements leads to a pervasive abjection. For Ferguson, cosmopolitanism is about
how Africans align themselves with worldly signs in the
midst of various localities. Inverting normal definitions, he
argues, cosmopolitanism is “less about being at home in the
world than it is about seeking worldiness at home. . . . Cosmopolitans . . . cannot or will not be bound by the claims
and proprieties of the local” (Ferguson 1999:212). This is
true for Ghanaian youth in Accra, who use international
styles to invigorate local music, and for Ghanaians living
abroad, who use Accra’s latest trends to shape their daily
lives in Europe and America (Shipley 2013:232). In making
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
and replicating digital tracks and videos, artists seek fame
and connections in a youth-initiated, globally dispersed, informal economy of music.
Online amateur videos of Azonto dancing are central to its initial spread in Ghana and then abroad. Two
YouTube clips are particularly influential. One is a montage of various Accra secondary-school Azonto dance competitions set to “U Go Kill Me.” Students wearing school
uniforms dance for large, outdoor crowds (YouTube.com
2011a). Another shows a young boy masterfully dancing
Azonto onstage at Ghana’s National Theatre as audiences
cheer (YouTube.com 2011e). Within a few months of being posted, both received several hundred thousand hits
and were repeatedly reposted and linked through Twitter and Facebook. Numerous other videos feature solo or
small groups of dancers facing the camera, submitted by
the dancers themselves for anonymous YouTube audience
assessment. Some dancers narrate to the camera how to do
the dance. Comments on videos tend to be polarized: either
praising the dancers’ skill or deriding them as inauthentic.
As homemade Azonto dance videos set to Sarkodie’s track
spread, unknown and star musicians began writing new
“Azonto tracks.”
Higher-quality videos for new songs appeared online
from Ghanaians all over the world.10 Perhaps the most influential new track was called simply “Azonto,” by 24-year-old
London-based musician Fuse ODG (Off Da Ground), featuring Accra-based female rapper Tiffany. It was inspired by
Fuse’s visit to Accra and his desire to bring the excitement
around Azonto to London. The video on YouTube got over
a million hits in its first few months, as its URL was embedded across a variety of Ghanaian news and music websites. Fuse tells me, “It’s the first Ghanaian video to [go viral] like that” (private interviews, February 17 and 21, 2012).
The YouTube clip initially provided a link for a free MP3
song download and, later, a link to buy the song on iTunes
(YouTube.com 2011j). Fuse was born in London to Ghanaian parents, lived briefly in Ghana, and returned to attend
school in the United Kingdom. In June 2011, he returned
to Ghana for the first time in 12 years. One night he performed at Rockstone’s Office in Accra. Reggie Rockstone recalls that “Fuse brought his London hard-core rap and the
crowd here was not feeling it. I advised him to listen to local
artists and our dance vibe if he wants to appeal to Ghanaian
audiences.” Fuse was impressed by the port city of Tema’s
vibrant music scene: “Tema has a new formula for mixing
hiplife, hip-hop, the UK sound.” He met rapper Tiffany and
connected with Killbeatz, a sought-after young beat maker.
He loved the energy of Azonto.
In the clubs, everyone was doing this new dance and
I wanted to learn. It was uniting people. It was so addictive . . . I went to Ghana to get a feel for the music.
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I was impressed. I love how Ghanaians are collaborating. In the studio, people were doing the dance, practicing and messing around. Everyone was teaching me
. . . how to do Azonto. In the UK, we are not united as
Ghanaians; to be honest I want to replicate that level of
community; use music to help bring people together. I
was on a journey to find my roots . . . and the hottest
music.
Fuse’s enthusiasm for what he perceived as the local
unity of the Ghanaian music scene was fueled by his desire
to express Ghanaian identity for the diffuse African community in London. “I kept asking people [in London] but
no one had heard of Azonto. I said they had to learn the
dance. I called Killbeatz and Tiffany and said . . . I wanted
. . . to [take] it international and bridge the gaps between
people. They both came to London a few weeks later and
we recorded [my track] in the studio.” “Azonto” begins as
Fuse narrates his recent trip.
See, I just came back from Ghana.
I want to share this dance
that everyone was doing over there.
The song teaches the dance as a way to tell people in
London what life is like in Ghana. Its English-language lyrics
draw on a common popular music trope, describing stepby-step how to do the dance.
They all wanna learn how to do this,
So imma take u right thru this,
Azonto dance is the movement,
So when u jump on the floor u betta use it,
First step is to step, step,
U can move to the right to the left, left,
U can do it freestyle while u step, step,
Put ur hands in the air then u rep, rep
So go, go, go, twist ur fingers and u can wave and say
hello, lo, lo
Make a fist and u can hit them with a blow, blow, blow
No violence that’s how u do the AZONTO!!!11
Metapragmatic description makes the dance into a
framework for social interaction in which participants
represent, greet, freestyle, and fake violence as forms of
self-expression and bravado. Breaking the dance into its
grammatical parts, the song posits shared steps as types
of communication. Fuse explains the song’s intent: “The
idea was to have the Azonto standardized so others could
replicate it and try to outdo each other, say ‘hey I can do
it better.’” The video posits a playful communality, transposing a Ghanaian sensibility to London life. It shows a
male and a female dancer in black hoodies, white gloves,
and white plastic “Afromasks” dancing Azonto through London’s streets. The rapper explains to me the significance of
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the video dancers in the language of marketing: “Afromask
is now the brand. The idea is that anyone could be in the
mask.” The stereotypic outfits and masks depersonalize the
dance. The dancers use a simple disco Electric Slide step
and Azonto gestures to keep time as they playfully interact with diverse people—white, black, Asian, young, old—
in Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square. The Afromask performers use dance as a mimetic bodily greeting, encouraging people to join them and copy their movements. They
pose with street performers, tourists, and random Londoners, attempting to teach them Azonto as the lyrics prescribe
its movements. Fuse and his friends shot and edited the
video. “It was all improvised. I told people on the street
that ‘it is Black history month and we are showcasing a new
dance.’ We played the music loud and got people laughing
. . . To be honest it was one of the best days I have ever had.
It made people smile on the streets of London.”
The video was an instant success. Viewers in Ghana
were thrilled to see Azonto dancers in London. For many
youthful Ghanaians around the world, the video was a sign
of Ghana’s global relevance. Fuse recalls, “The next day after
we uploaded it, people in America were uploading their version in response. I was amazed at how fast it spread . . . People loved it but then wanted to make their own versions.”
He explains that the track’s British popularity “started with
Ghanaian youth; it played at all Ghanaian parties [then]
spread. Nigerians and Jamaicans are doing it now . . . now
it is even on the fringes of mainstream. It is in many clubs,
on some mainstream radio . . . Some white kids doing it.”
As it moves beyond youth circles, Fuse seems slightly embarrassed: “Even my parents are doing it. It is a mix of older
[styles] you know? It is not restricted to a specific dance
move. It is only limited by the rhythm. Old people do it. They
look funny but it’s cool!”
For youth like Fuse who grow up abroad, being an artist
provides a way to identify with an unfamiliar homeland.
Music also links his experience of being African in London
to broader British public life. A generation ago, Africans in
England at times hid their origins, trying to blend in with
Afro-Caribbean communities. Reggie Rockstone recalls pretending he was from New York while performing in London
in the early 1990s: “No one wanted to listen to Africans rap
back then. It wasn’t cool . . . It was dangerous; Caribbean
kids would hustle you for being Nigerian or Ghanaian back
then.” Through Azonto, British-based Ghanaians search for
ways to affirm their heritage and articulate connections.
Another young Ghanaian raised in London explains what a
struggle it is “to discover our roots . . . and learn our parents’ languages.” Popular songs like “Azonto” are a form
of translation, repairing a perceived loss created by limited
firsthand knowledge of life in Ghana. As Fuse states, many
young Ghanaians raised abroad miss the sense of community that they perceive youth in Ghana share. For them, the
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search for identity is itself a form of sociality. That is to say,
as young Ghanaians grow up abroad, they struggle to be
part of an extended Ghanaian world and, in the process,
reinvent its parameters. London youths imagine Ghana as
a place of vibrant cultural production, even as youths in
Ghana struggle to connect to what they perceive to be the
excitement of Western urban life. Azonto’s transportability allows youths to connect with their counterparts in disparate locales by spreading and elaborating a shared bodily
style.
Previously unknown, Fuse was suddenly in high demand, returning to Accra to perform at the Ghana Music Awards in April 2012. He also released a “slicker, official music video” to cultivate interest among “big-market
audiences through MTV, Radio One and BBC . . . We have
a following and now want to capitalize to make it mainstream” (see YouTube.com 2012a). In mid-2012 he launched
his new Azonto track “Antenna” with an online competition
in which fans submitted videos of themselves dancing in
a variety of public locales, for example, at the Eiffel Tower
in Paris, in a McDonald’s in Manchester, England, in the
London Tube, in a garden in Kenya, and in a shopping mall
in Switzerland (see YouTube.com 2012e). Fuse then featured
the most popular dancers from the viral videos in the official
“Antenna” video remixed with vocals by Haitian superstar
Wyclef Jean (see YouTube.com 2012d). For Fuse, holding a
worldwide dance-video competition was a way of “uniting
Africans around the world, the diaspora . . . What I want
my music to do [is] to actually connect people; it’s not just
music you can dance to . . . we can meet through music”
(YouTube 2012f ).
Azonto contributes to the growing recognition of West
African pop as part of the United Kingdom music scene.
When Sarkodie visited London in late 2011, he played for
Ghanaian audiences of several thousand, but he was also
interviewed on BBC Radio 1Xtra by English hip-hop impresario and DJ Tim Westwood, teaching Westwood Azonto
during the interview. The emergence of numerous tracks
recognizable as part of an Azonto subgenre helps the emergence of Afrobeats, a term coined by DJ Abrantee, another
Brit of Ghanaian descent, to brand and package African
pop music for broader, eclectic audiences. In April 2011, DJ
Abrantee began hosting an Afrobeats program on Saturday
nights on London’s urban music station Choice FM, playing
mostly Nigerian and Ghanaian artists and, as the Guardian
newspaper stated, providing teens with “an alternative
to British urban pop music” (Hancox 2012). Famed UK
rapper Sway (also of Ghanaian descent) reflected on
Afrobeats’ sudden popularity: “When you’ve got African
swag and African traditions combined with up-to-date
western styles, and singing in English, well—you’ve got a
winning formula on your hands” (Hancox 2012). In this
sense, Azonto and Afrobeats become generic categories that
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
reimagine the links between Ghanaian music and new potential publics.
Rising artists like EL in Accra and Fuse in London strive
to transform the pleasures of sudden, informal celebrity
and the speed and transportability of digital tracks into sustainable forms of value. For this generation of digitally oriented musicians, success comes not from sales of physical
copies of their music but from cultivating online celebrity
status that leads to name recognition, performance fees,
and corporate sponsorships (Shipley 2013). Azonto is a
subgenre characterized by digital beats, lyrical references,
styles of dress, and dance moves that are shared across
a variety of locales. It provides a transportable familiarity
that turns distance into new types of intimacy. Its strippeddown, digital rhythms reflect older Ghanaian dances reconfigured for new audiences. While the music flirts with mainstream popularity, for first-generation Ghanaian youth in
London, Azonto is a way to identify with Ghana’s cultural
distinctiveness. Another London-based Ghanaian artist,
M3nsa, explained to me, “So many [mainstream] UK artists
are first generation from Ghana or Nigeria; many . . . are
only now rediscovering what is going on back at home . . .
Before, they would not acknowledge where they came from,
but it is becoming cool to do that” (private correspondence,
January 15, 2012). In contrast, young enthusiasts in Ghana
watching online see Azonto’s UK success as cosmopolitan
validation for local ways of life, imagining themselves part
of a global musical movement. As one Accra student who
is a music fan told me, “People in Ghana are really proud
that the dance has gone international.” Even as Ghanaians
at home and abroad at times have opposing interpretations
of Azonto’s significance, the style’s circulatory capacity connects them.
Recirculation: New York Azonto
Azonto’s adoption by U.S.-based young Ghanaians is an attempt to embrace a distinctly Ghanaian cosmopolitanism
in the midst of dichotomous racializing identities. Azonto
took several months longer to become popular among
Ghanaians in the United States than it did in the United
Kingdom. However, Ghanaian Americans were soon learning Azonto, following the dance through social media and
Ghanaian music websites and uploading video clips of
themselves dancing in front of mirrors, on streets, in highschool gyms, and at parties. Congregation members in New
York–area Ghanaian churches even began doing the dance
during services. Ghanaians in the United States confront
a different history of racism and inequality than expats in
the United Kingdom. In Britain, West Africans, as postcolonial subjects, strike an uneasy balance between integration into an increasingly multicultural urban British life that
ambivalently includes them and navigating overlapping
though distinct African and Afro-Caribbean communities.
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The United States’ polarized racial landscape leaves perhaps even less room for the distinction of African cultural
identities. Young Ghanaians living in cities like New York
struggle for recognition as imaginaries of African American
life dominate black public culture (Pierre 2012:186–188).
Bronx-based rapper Sam 2-Shy’s (Samuel Frimpong)
hit song “Azonto Girl” shows how this music’s digital
mediation inspires innovative, non-face-to-face artistic
collaborations and related forms of dispersed affiliation,
demonstrating the nuanced ways global connections are
integrated into daily life. Since 2006, Sam has performed
at concerts organized for Ghanaians in the United States,
opening for major Ghanaian musicians like Ofori Amponsah, VIP, and Sarkodie. “Azonto Girl” gained popularity
primarily as it spread through links on Facebook, and the
video received several hundred thousand views on YouTube
within months of its release, though it was not well known
in Ghana (see YouTube.com 2012f). Sam works at Cosco
and attends Borough of Manhattan Community College,
though he aspires to be a full-time musician. His biography
contrasts with that of Fuse, as Sam remained in Ghana
until he was a teenager, whereas Fuse grew up primarily
abroad. In Sam’s case, Azonto serves to maintain a nostalgic
relationship to Ghana—filling a gap created by loss rather
than the absence felt by Ghanaians raised abroad.
As a child in Ghana, he played music in a Presbyterian church and learned to make and play drums from
his uncles. “Music was in my family,” he explains (private
interviews, May 4 and 11, 2012). At school in the city of
Kumasi, he was entertainment prefect, becoming known as
a dancer. “There were always competitions at school . . . I
would mix break-dancing with my own thing . . . I had to always be creative to keep my reputation up as a top dancer.”
His family moved to the Bronx when he was a teen. Struggling to fit in, at first he “hung out with Ghanaians who were
already here to learn from them how to get along.” His father encouraged his music. “When I came here I started listening to more Ghanaian rap; then doing my own music.”
Being involved in music was a way for him and his friends to
feel at home. They used simple PC music production equipment to make beats and record vocals, burning CDs to distribute to other Ghanaians in the area.
The production of his hit “Azonto Girl” was a highly dispersed affair. The beat was made by Rude Boy, a Ghanaian
based in London whom Sam met online. “I know him from
MySpace times. I liked one of his beats he posted . . . and
asked if I could jump on it. He said cool and sent it to me.”
Sam writes most of his lyrics on his Blackberry. “When I get
ideas on the train or anywhere, or hear a phrase I jot them
on my phone and turn them into lyrics.” Sam recorded
the song’s vocals at JoeBaby Studios, an informal enterprise
run out of a friend’s Bronx apartment. They then sent the
digital files back to Rude Boy in London to mix and master. The simple, homemade video uses a mostly stationary
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camera and features friends and students dancing in a living room. Basic graphics and video transitions were added
before posting on YouTube. The dancers get much praise
in online comments for their Azonto style. Sam explains,
“We are trying to make our own branch of Ghanaian music
here . . . that connects to Ghana but is also a Bronx movement. People love the video and [the dancers]. They get invitations to perform at shows across the country. One of
the girls is a great dancer but she is in high school and her
church won’t let her dance anymore.”
Sam likes U.S. hip-hop and R & B but “GH music lets
me connect with Ghana. I can’t forget where I am from.”
For Sam, Azonto reflects the importance of subtlety and indirection as Ghanaian communicative modalities (Shipley
2013:13). “Azonto . . . is like a conversation with yourself. It
allows you to talk, express yourself through dance and also
talk to other people. You can move in ways that describe
things in your life that maybe you don’t want to say directly.”
Sam lives in two worlds. “I am a Ghanaian living in the US.
I have both countries on my mind . . . I could do English
hip-hop but I put more Twi language in my music because
I prefer my local language, to get a Ghanaian and African
audience.”
On the strength of his hit, Sam headlined his first show
in New York in May 2012 for a crowd of several hundred almost exclusively Ghanaian youth. For Sam, making music
involves both nostalgia and aspiration. “I did the song because I miss Ghana and the dance comes from there. My
song is on the map now. People know me. And it makes
me remember back in the day dancing at school . . . I want
my music to reach out and get attention in Ghana. If I get
enough money here I want to move back there and live
well.” Reflecting the experience of many Ghanaians living
abroad, Sam is tied to the United States in practical and financial ways but dreams of returning home. Like Fuse, he
wants to be part of what he sees as the communality and
cultural integrity of the Ghanaian music industry—even as
rappers and producers in Ghana strive to sound more international. Sam feels the struggles of maintaining Ghanaian
identity in the United States. “Being here messes up your
mind. If your Mom speaks Twi to you and you reply in English your mind gets confused. I mix Twi and English, but
I don’t forget my language. I am not trying to assimilate.”
Indeed, the title of his forthcoming album, AmeriGhana, reflects the tension of his dual sensibility.
For Ghanaian youth in the United States, mobile technology facilitates a geographic simultaneity. In the midst of
daily routines at work, school, and home, they make and listen to Ghana music, recirculating ideas and links through
social networking sites accessed on cell phones. Facebook
is Sam’s main mode of disseminating his music, linking up
with Ghanaians around the world. As he has gained recognition, “people connect on Facebook with me. I will put up
a link and people will listen to a track. They hear my music
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and then send me their beats or vocals, and we start talking.
Most of the time I am checking Facebook on my phone and
linking up with people that way.” By this means, for example, he met a Ghanaian vocalist in Toronto with whom he
recorded vocals over Skype for a collaborative track.
Informal, digitally mediated connections made
through music transform into a network of familiarity.
Azonto spreads for two opposing reasons with inverted
geographic imaginaries: For Ghanaians abroad, it gives the
feeling of participating in Ghanaian culture and Accra’s
daily life, whereas for those in Accra it provides a sense of
outward international expansion. It is simultaneously traditional and new, connecting lived, daily localities around
the globe. Aspiring youth in various places identify with
this contradictory duality in intimate if disparate ways. The
malleability of these opposite readings also fuels Azonto’s
ability to incorporate new signs. Its musical simplicity gives
it flexibility as a formal abstraction and belies its complexity
as a style of appropriation. As digital signs become markers
of authenticity, the proximity to home becomes less important than the ability to be intimately Ghanaian anywhere.
Electronic copying facilitates circulation, naturalizing
and spreading signs of familiarity and home among Ghanaians around the world while providing a structure for creative elaboration on how to be Ghanaian in a mobile, digital age. A crucial aspect of digital music’s repeatability is
its ability to, theoretically, transport a sense of place in
the same way each time a song is played or copied, in
any context, without the requirements of copresence and
the contingencies of live performances. The digital logic of
predictability gives it scalar and geographic mobility. For
example, an individual Ghanaian teenager on a bus in the
Bronx can imagine she is part of a broader audience by listening to the same track with headphones and a mobile
phone that is playing on the radio and in clubs in Accra.12
In such contexts, the digital song is both an emblem of nostalgia for home as well as the medium for experiencing a
different type of belonging. In the cheap and easy production, circulation, and replication of digital music and amateur music videos, listeners become active participants in
a rapidly evolving speech community that they themselves
are making.
Embodying technology: Azonto as style
of appropriation
So far, I have focused on the formal logic of Azonto’s circulation and on how digital technologies created the conditions for its popularity. Here I describe Azonto’s semiotic
content by considering it as a mobile, detachable sign predisposed to draw in numerous other signs and registers (cf.
Spitulnik 1996:162–164). Its multivocality relies on how it
eludes exact definitions. Nevertheless, as Azonto’s popularity grows, producers and consumers struggle to pin down its
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
meaning and origins. These “debates” are driven by a dialogic relationship between digital and embodied forms
as dancers and musicians reinterpret online videos and
respond by recirculating new elaborations. The dance’s
generic boundaries are made through celebrating newness itself. As listeners identify Azonto as something new—
rather than a variation of an old genre—they interpret
references to established styles as creative rather than
derivative. Practitioners appropriate recognizable styles
and, in the process, claim the authority to redefine what
is cool and innovative. The pattern through which Azonto
appropriates signs is similar to that of older Ghanaian musical–dance crazes like kpanlogo in the 1960s
(Shipley 2013:39). Kpanlogo, popularized by Accra dance
bands, emerged as a blend of rock, highlife, and neotraditional rhythms (Collins 1994:110). At first, more conservative audiences interpreted it as foreign and overly
sexual. With time, as it mixed with established sounds, narratives resituated the dance as a “traditional” Accra style. Its
basic rhythms and steps provided a structure for musicians
and dancers to improvise and assimilate eclectic influences.
A similar process holds true for Azonto. (See Figure 3.)
As Sarkodie explained in the radio interview with Westwood, Azonto “is a communicative dance” (YouTube.com
2011h). Its basic steps provide a rhythmic structure around
which dancers improvise, incorporating moves from disparate registers into new embodied configurations circulating among participants. As I describe above, Azonto is characterized by a slightly hunched posture, small steps, and
discolike finger pointing. The footwork is a modified, spedup highlife step, infusing moves familiar to most Ghanaians
with hip-hop swagger. Whereas older highlife dancing involves broader hip and foot movement and a relaxed posture, Azonto is mostly upper-body and arm manipulation
with minimal waist movement. Dancers turn one shoulder forward, adding a subtle, twisting motion, and stare intensely with head slightly cocked. As in many West African
dances, facial control is important. Dancers often adopt
a bored pout and solemn stare, a look at once flirtatious,
mocking, and confident. Others wear a carefree, almost
mocking smile.
Dance references are ever-changing; some are intentional while others emanate from dancers’ experiences:
they include wearing single white gloves and incorporating Michael Jackson’s signature moves; steps and posture
from kpanlogo and jamma, popular sports and recreational
dances; intricate communicative hand gestures from Asante court dances like adowa and fontomfrom; shoulderchest compressions from the Ewe recreational–war agbadza
dance (David Akramah, private correspondence, April 12,
2012). A crucial initial influence was the goal-scoring celebration dances of Ghanaian international football striker
Asamoah “Baby Jet” Gyan. With his rise to international
stardom and the success of the Ghana Black Stars at the
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American Ethnologist
Figure 3. Contestants in the Miss Malaika Ghana 2012 televised beauty
pageant dancing Azonto. Black Star Square, Accra, Ghana. Photographs by
Saskia Köbschall.
2010 World Cup, numerous YouTube clips of his postgoal dancing circulated. Gyan then recorded a hiplife hit,
“African Girl,” with rapper Castro and was prominently featured dancing in the popular video (YouTube.com 2010).
Young players and fans across Ghana delighted in scrutinizing and emulating his dance moves.
Recent African American and Caribbean dance crazes
that spread globally through online circulation of official
and unofficial videos are also important influences: sweeping arm gestures to clear space and mark time, from breakdancing traditions; sexual bending at the waist, from the
2006 Jamaican Dutty Wine and other dancehall styles; swaying and pivoting with hands on the head, from Gracious
K’s 2009 London dance hit “Migraine Skank”; gyrations and
head rubbing, from the Dougie, from California Swag District’s 2010 hit “Teach Me How To Dougie”; twisting the
waist, from the Cat Daddy by the Rej3ctz; footwork and knee
bends from the Jerk, from the New Boyz track “You’re A
Jerk.”
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While its parameters are fluid and constantly evolving,
participants quickly refine a sense of how to judge Azonto.
As dancers creatively string together gestures, they maintain a distinctive posture conveying an authoritative bodily control. Discipline and precision are embodied-moral
traits that define mastery across traditional and popular
Ghanaian expressive genres (Yankah 1995). As one enthusiast described it, the dance “is all about attitude. You can
do anything from your feet up and call it Azonto as long as
you are controlled and have the right attitude.” Azonto provides practitioners with a way to literally and figuratively
claim position. A young dancer at a bar in Accra told me,
“The dance is saying, ‘here I am.’” Another teenage dancer
saw the dance as marking generational change, explaining, “The difference between Azonto and older [Ghanaian dances] is attitude and emotion . . . by doing it you
are talking to society about what you are capable of.” The
dance’s competitive structure recalls the disco and breakdance crazes that swept Ghana in the mid-1980s. It is easy
enough that most kids can do basic moves but complex
enough to allow virtuoso performers to stand out through
their fluid references to other dances and daily life. At clubs,
school dance competitions, weddings, and funerals, less
skilled dancers gather on the outside of the dance floor
while skilled dancers—often male—face off, and show off,
in the middle. The masculine aspects of dance virtuosity
are highlighted by the parodic and inverted reflections on
female sexuality and agency expressed in the lyrics of the
music they move to. While audiences celebrate good female dancers, they also criticize them for being too sexual. Azonto dancers compete in incorporating daily activities of urban life into their repertoire, especially movements
that highlight young men’s struggles. For example, popular
moves include boxing, shaving, getting dressed, doing various household chores, driving a car, and dialing, talking,
and texting on an imaginary mobile phone while looking at
someone flirtatiously.
As Azonto’s popularity grew, so did public debates
about its origins. Enthusiasts searched and disagreed about
how to place it within established musical traditions. Some
said it emerged in Accra’s bustling Bukom and Jamestown
neighborhoods; others claimed it originated in the port city
of Tema. Online and television news reports and dance experts identified Azonto as a variation of apa (or apaa), a
neotraditional Ga dance. One Ga dance expert told me that
“‘apaa’ is a branch of kpanlogo that uses movements related to work . . . common in parts of Accra.” Apaa dancers
mimic different daily tasks like washing, ironing, and driving. In comparison, he explained, Azonto allows “more
room to improvise and add new steps than older kpanlogo
styles.” Another dance teacher from Accra disagreed, explaining that “Azonto, actually, is more limiting than kpanlogo [which] allows you to improvise from every aspect of
life. You can even do jazz steps to kpanlogo. Azonto is lim-
374
ited to movements that are related to work.” As artists and
media debate Azonto’s origins, its characteristics are further
defined and legitimized.
The use of Azonto as a popular term reflects established
patterns of how proverbial speech circulates through controversy and uncertainty of meaning (Anyidoho 1994). In
debates about the meaning of ambiguous proverbs, words,
and signs, communities of participation emerge. References to azonto in “U Go Kill Me” and later tracks follow this
common pattern. Proverbial speech in Ghana condenses
and circulates socially significant moral narratives (Yankah
1995). Ghanaian popular musicians have often revived obscure rural or urban terms as proverblike song hooks, lending them the authority of an established oral provenance
circulating in new form (Shipley 2013:161–162). For some,
azonto was a recognizable if obscure term. A 30-year-old
man in New York recalls hearing azonto in secondary school
in Accra, as an insulting, joking term: “It meant a loose
girl from the street.” For others, it was a new word. Its
sudden prevalence made many seek explanation. One 22year-old businesswoman based in Accra first encountered
the term on Twitter. “I could tell from the context that it
meant a dodgy outcast like ‘oh look at these foolish Azonto
Boys’ but I had never heard it before. I tweeted back ‘what
does it mean?’” Another Ghanaian college student living in
the Bronx joked, “These musicians can make up their own
words and new meanings . . . from only God knows where.”
While azonto was explicitly an insult to women, its obscurity allowed for it to be resignified to celebrate hustling
as a vehicle for success. This parodic inversion of azonto’s
meaning is achieved through its excessive reiteration and
ubiquity. Its scandalous sexual aspects are normalized and
made transportable through a song’s familiar rhythmic pattern. While azonto’s explicit moral message decries public female sexuality and hustling, through extreme repetition of hustling narratives across digital platforms, the older
term is remade as parody, focused on the formal capacity
to invert its initial dubious meaning, and, instead, mark ingroupness, agency, and urbane innovation.
Reflexive discussions about the dance demarcate how
participants use it as a sign of belonging. As one fan in the
Bronx explains, “half of the fun of Azonto is talking about
it. It is something Ghanaians own that has caught on so
fast. People love being in the know, ‘Oh do you know this
step? Can you do this?’” Commentaries on videos reflect
how participants debate the dance’s parameters, in the process identifying themselves through metalanguage about its
features and values. Some online clips entitled “Azonto” are
criticized for not fitting its requirements. Policing the music’s evolving generic boundaries can take the form of national disavowal. For example, a comment on a video of
two kids dancing to a Francophone beat labeled “Azonto”
states, “I’m Ghanaian and these guys are definitely not
Ghanaian . . . the dance is not azonto” (YouTube.com
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
2011d). Comments such as this reflect attempts to discern
national belonging in body movements. Many dancers receive praise, with comments like “best Azonto dancer” or
“I love your moves.” Talented female dancers often receive
both respectful supportive comments and lewd praise with
pleas to meet. For Ghanaian youth in various locales, developing a refined eye for dance is a way to recognize themselves in embodied style.
Even Azonto enthusiasts are shocked at how quickly
the dance has become ubiquitous. Bridget (a pseudonym),
a college student returning from the United States to Accra
in late 2012, describes how her ten-year-old cousin spends
hours watching dance videos, copying and practicing in
front of mirrors (private correspondence, May 2012). For
both working-class and educated urban teens and twentysomethings, the dance dominates social events, with impromptu competitions breaking out at drinking spots and
clubs. Increasingly, school-age children do the dance as
they play in the streets. Bridget explains, “Kids on the side
of roads are doing it without music. It connects to roots;
its like ampe [a children’s game], they love to do it. Now local kids . . . have become the best dancers . . . they own the
dance.” Like other young people, however, she is surprised
when “suddenly middle-aged and old people” start dancing
Azonto at more formal events. “It’s cross generational . . . at
funerals and important social events you normally have different sections for old and young people . . . Azonto bridges
that gap; people still dance adowa [Akan funeral dance] but
now Azonto as well. It’s crazy.” While kids think of the dance
as new and belonging to them, adults recognize traces of
their youth in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s in its basic rhythmic pattern. Azonto bridges generational and class hierarchies and tensions between the aspirational and successful,
the modern and traditional, giving a stylish contemporary
sheen to a nostalgic, nationally recognizable aesthetic.
In an abstract sense, the dance stands in for how
Ghanaians approach the modern world. For Bridget, the
dance reflects the idea that mobility is a central value of
Ghanaian life:
Its motions are like daily activity. Staying busy, always
active, always circulating. It is also a . . . patient dance
. . . like you can just stay in one place, but always moving, ready for the next thing. The pleasure of just doing
it; it’s like a transaction. The fun is not in saving money.
That is not in our culture. Always keep in motion. Always communicating. If you have money you have to
keep it moving not just hold it. It’s the same thing with
the dance; always ready to make a deal, connect with
someone, show-off. Controlled, cool; it’s very Ghanaian.
The dance implies something is always changing and
moving—words and bodies and styles—though participants remain disciplined and watchful; maintaining con-
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American Ethnologist
trol and being able to incorporate the unexpected defines
a good performer. Azonto celebrates eclecticism through a
style of semiotic appropriation that itself conveys Ghanaianness as the dance represents mobility in a variety of
arenas.
Digital fatigue: Repetition’s uncertainty
and moral ambivalence
The prevalence and spread of African electronic music
represents, to musically minded youth, the promise that
digital production and circulation will erase geographic
limitations and simplistic dichotomies, providing popular
access to a modernity that potentially links the urbane West
to African localities. The ease of electronic copying highlights technology’s potential to enable mobility. But the
ubiquity and exactness of digital copies raise the specter
of the absence of an original, even calling forth questions
about the moral implications of origins themselves. African
discourses on electronic music are permeated with skepticism even as they praise the possibilities of new technologies. For example, to some listeners, Azonto’s electronic
sound continues to be insincere and foreign. One Accra car
mechanic was annoyed by the music, exclaiming to me,
“These Azonto people are not serious . . . this is foreign
hip-hop. It is not Ghanaian.” Another Accra-based musician
who plays highlife and gospel refused to play Azonto because he felt it was “not real music” and it was disrespectful
in that it encouraged “loose women.”
Pioneering hiplife producer and head of Pidgin Music,
Panji Anoff has a theory about how digital music affects
the bodies of musicians and listeners. His critique resonates
with that of some traditional, highlife, and gospel musicians
and other critics of the prevalence of electronic music in
contemporary Ghana. Panji explained to me that when a
drummer plays a rhythm over and over there are always
slight variations. Repetitive, polyrhythmic instrumentation
is crucial to many African music styles, but
even the best musicians will speed up and slow down
. . . vary their rhythm over time. Traditional rhythms
have repetitions but they also have improvisations that
rely on the creativity of the drummer to respond to the
conditions around him, the dancers, the other musicians, the setting. But digital beats are always exactly
the same. You take a beat, loop it, and repeat it infinitely. This affects the way that you listen, think, feel.
Over time it creates digital fatigue; this endless repetition in your body. [private correspondence, January 12,
2005]
Panji worked in media and with Ghanaian musicians
in the United Kingdom before returning to Accra in the
early 1990s. He recalled, “It was not easy to be Ghanaian in
England; there was a lot of explicit racism . . . People were
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not proud of their heritage and there was no market for
African music.” Returning to Ghana, Panji was at the forefront of artists mixing African rhythmic traditions with hiphop. As a pan-Africanist, he wanted to bring African musical traditions to a global market. But he was also wary of
the temptations of popular trends. “Music is an important
part of our identity. When you hear music from your culture, from your childhood, your chest swells with pride. You
feel good because it speaks to you. But who do we become
when digital repetition takes over?” For Panji, rhythm provides a collective, embodied identification. However, with
digital beat making superseding live instrumentation, he
worries about the emotional and moral effects of computer
repetitions that “flatten out” African music’s uniqueness.
Here digital rhythms can be universalizing in two contradictory senses: They have the potential to create dialogue
with new, distant audiences, though, in the process, they
threaten to negate the uniqueness of place-based culture
that makes those dialogues productive. He elaborated on
the anxiety about identity that electronic beats can provoke:
“If you are on a dance floor in Europe or anywhere, everyone will move to the same beat. You will feel the collective energy of it. But over a period of time the exact repetition of digital music will start to effect your body negatively;
you will get tired . . . disoriented” (private correspondence,
December 23, 2008). For Panji, digital fatigue suggests
that live African music relies on emotional connections
among musicians and participants and that the passion and
uniqueness of presence are lost through reliance on electronic beats.
For Ghanaian youth, digital beats provide an embodied
recognition. Participants from Accra to London to New York
are synchronized through shared styles—and their recognition of being part of a stylistic movement—organized
around a metricality or rhythmic structure of digital repetition. Azonto’s digital beats represent the latest modern
version of a Ghanaian musical tradition, structuring how
artists and audiences align and reconfigure references that
reimagine their temporal and spatial relationships to past,
present, and future and to here and there. But while digital circulations create possibilities for new forms of connection, they also reveal tensions around uniqueness and
presence. If Azonto represents the ability to circulate and incorporate various places and signs into Ghanaian identity,
mobility itself becomes the nexus of a specifically Ghanaian
form of belonging; the ability to travel, to leave, itself becomes a sign of locality and a crucial aspect of being in and
of Accra.
As aspiring young musicians show, belonging to this
community of musical participation entails a desire to transcend its parameters, to move beyond specificities through
the universality that digital mobility promises of a potentially worldwide audience. Digital fatigue is a valuable way
to characterize the contradictions of Azonto emergent at
376
the nexus of various artistic aspirations, interpretations,
and desires. While Accra-based artists Sarkodie and EL want
to transform local music into a cosmopolitan sound appealing to national and international audiences, Londonbased Fuse and New York–based Sam 2-Shy attempt to
capture and be part of Accra’s urban musical community,
without fully returning to it. Digital beats stand in for a belonging that seems to elude those who pursue it from any
angle.
Digital music forges connections by projecting young
musicians’ aspirations into a specifically Ghanaian multimodal digital realm. As I describe with reference to EL’s
creative production techniques, Ghanaian artists recognize that digital technology is not designed to fit the
aesthetic sensibilities of African musical styles. Aspiring
artists reshape technologies to meet their needs. Panji
argues, “When we take recorded samples . . . or drumbeats . . . built into a synthesizer or computer we are borrowing sounds. We are second hand users of technology.
No one is designing computers for Africa.” Computergenerated sounds and time signatures can be deployed
by untrained, aspiring musicians who loop beats, shoot
clips, and send links, creating appearances of musical mastery and hopeful images of preexisting popularity; digital performativity presents the informal and aspirational
as the successful and legitimate, with the desire to make
them so.
Kweku (a pseudonym), another Ghanaian college student who moves between Accra and the United States
thinks Azonto’s popularity is built on a lie. He says its popularity in Ghana stems from the “misperception that everyone knows Azonto abroad. It is mostly wishful thinking. It is
the feeling you are part of something bigger” (private correspondence, April 2012). Artists, media, and fans in Ghana
like to talk about how the dance has “gone international”
even though it is primarily Ghanaians abroad who know it.
Kweku explained to me, “It is huge that people think white
people are doing the dance. Ghanaians are empowered by
idea that they are influencing others.” For Kweku, there is a
false, though powerful, sense that the musical movement’s
center is always elsewhere. “When you go to a Ghanaian
party in the U.S. everyone clings to the [Azonto] dance. It
makes people feel good like they are part of an international
network. But it also is about people missing home and being
anxious that they are not a part of something that everyone
else is in on.”
When Sarkodie won the award for Best International
Act: Africa (cowinner with Nigeria’s Wizkid) at the 2012 BET
Awards in Los Angeles, it further enhanced his image among
Ghanaians as an international celebrity, though he remains
almost unknown outside of Ghana.13 Indeed, the award for
Best International Act: Africa was presented backstage, and
the African artists were frustrated at how little attention they
received at the spectacular event. Sarkodie’s fame is limited
Transnational circulation and digital fatigue
to small circles, alternative celebrity realms that parallel and
emulate U.S. popular culture rather than overlap with it.
Ghanaian musicians abroad, like Fuse and Sam 2-Shy, also
aspire to fame but are caught between two worlds. They
are alternatively motivated and fatigued by their attempts
to figure out the complexity of translating their experiences
for both the Ghanaian and Western audiences that digital
circulation promises to link.
Musical networks give Ghanaians abroad the sense
they are a part of the latest trend at home, whereas those
in Ghana feel like they are participating in a global phenomenon. Both perceptions lead to a productive misrecognition that the Azonto phenomenon is more widespread
than it, in fact, is. Dzino, a South African hip-hop producer
and cofounder of Black Rage productions, explained to me
that this is a common symptom of recent online popular
trends. “If something is trending in your circles on Twitter
and Facebook you think it’s huge everywhere but people
outside of your tiny circle might never have heard of it. If everyone you know online is listening and posting comments
it leads to a feeling that these trends are everywhere when in
fact they are confined to a rather limited group with shared
networks.” He argues that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
communities often lead to a magnified sense of the reach
of something like Azonto (private correspondence, May 4,
2012). This exaggerated perception is an unexpected consequence of digital sociality that exaggerates linkages made
through social media networks that rely heavily on trending topics. For Dzino, social media circulation provides new
opportunities for African music but also leads to misunderstandings of market and consumption patterns. Social media’s obsessive power to decontextualize and magnify content gives voice to musicians who performatively produce
their image of a stylish cosmopolitan Ghanaian communality. But as someone in the music business assessing the
financial potential of Azonto, Dzino thinks that few outside of Ghanaian networks and a handful of Nigerians are
interested.
For artists like DJ Black, Sarkodie, EL, Fuse, and Sam,
new technologies and musical styles have the potential to
reinvigorate young Ghanaians’ recognition of a shared culture as well as its global significance. But as Dzino points
out, speed and ubiquity threaten to erase music’s placebased specificity and market potential. How “people consume music these days takes away the magic of seeing it
live. If you see one hundred videos of Azonto, seeing it live is
not a big deal. Social media popularity might not translate
into sales or booking live shows. Online trending can dull
the excitement of a trend and give people the feeling that
the action is always somewhere else” (private correspondence, February 18, 2012). Repetitive, ubiquitous circulation provides artists and audiences with creative potential
but also a fatigue that threatens the pleasure and emotional
connectivity and financial success it promises.
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American Ethnologist
Mobility as culture of production
I have described above how practices of digital circulation and repetition constitute a culture of mobility. Azonto’s
rise, with all of its potentials and contradictions, demonstrates how global African youths creatively use digital media as modalities of production and sociality. It bears repeating that media of any sort must be examined through
the particular practices developed by a community of users
(Burrell 2012; Miller 2011). Studying Africa from the perspective of media-savvy youths, and examining technology
and digital practices from what is often still considered the
periphery, challenges assumptions that technology is primarily Euro-America or Asian in its configuration. Africa
has not come belatedly to digital technology. While young
Africans are often, as Panji states, “second-hand users of
technology,” their creative responses to geographic distance, economic struggle, and popular trending push the
limits of electronica. New social media practices emphasize
the mobility of the technologically informed body in contrast to older discourses of identity and nationhood that focus on place-based culture as definitive of belonging. For
young Africans around the world, mobility has become a
way of living in which desires for place-based cultural affiliations are, by definition, never fully realized. In this sense,
persistent theoretical dichotomies of local and global and
home and away dissolve in the circulatory productions of
African youth.
Azonto’s circulation has a rhythm and organization of
its own; its music–dance structure is a microcosm of the
rhythm of its movement across social space. Artists’ material aspirations and desires for belonging are expressed in
potentially endless chains of digital musical repetition that
extend their presence out into the world from wherever they
are. They hope to eventually catch up to their digital emblems. Azonto’s repetitious beats and replicable tracks and
videos are proclamations of success and mobility—they are
pure attitude, forms of self-recognition that, in the process
of circulating, use multiple technologies and modalities—
production software, airwaves, Internet, mobile phones,
videos, rumor, dance—in making a diffuse community of
participation. Azonto is an embodied version of a digital
copy of an idealized mobile Ghanaian identity. The power of
digital circulation as a form of cultural production is highlighted by the speed with which Azonto emerged and developed from Ghana to London to New York and back to
Ghana. Its movement is driven by participants’ unfulfilled
desires to find place and affinity through a rhythmic tradition that encourages new creative input. Popular digital tracks provide a model of cultural nationhood in which
dispersed Ghanaian youths reinvent themselves by resignifying neotraditional rhythms that remind them of home,
in the process providing a structure for aspirational cosmopolitan expectations.
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Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013
Multiple skills and forms of appropriation are required
for a musical style to successfully migrate across social contexts. Producers craft beats and rappers write lyrical hooks
aimed at market penetration. DJs give authority to these
sounds by celebrating them. Listeners, dancers, and other
artists are inspired to transform and circulate new steps,
lyrics, and beats with a wide range of references. The symbolic inversion of the term azonto—from meaning prostitute to defining a popular swagger—relies on remaking
disreputable outsiderness into a desirable quality. Establishing azonto as a traditional, local term gives it legitimacy,
bundling and condensing the stereotypic hustler persona
such that it can be easily decontextualized and inhabited in
various contexts. At the heart of success in Ghana’s youthful
musical community is the ability to embody and abstract
movement itself as a form of cultural production. Azonto
celebrates self-actualization, continuous upward and outward mobility. It is a style of cosmopolitan self-making that
allows practitioners to align a range of specifically Ghanaian attachments while ultimately eluding attachment
itself.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the
Museum for African Art in New York, and Haverford College’s CPGC
and Provost’s Office for funding this research. For research and theoretical assistance, I thank DJ Black, David Akramah Cofie, Reggie
Rockstone Ossei, EL, C-Real, Fuse ODG, Sam 2-Shy, Ronny Boateng,
Dzino, Panji Anoff, M3nsa Ansah, Rab Bakari, Ben Angmor Abadji,
Jeff Cobbah, Deborah Ahenkorah, Naa Kwarley Quartey, Bridget
Ackeifi, Felicity Antwi, Gebby Keny, and Travis West. For research,
organization, and images, I thank Saskia Köbschall. For comments
on earlier versions of this article, I thank Hilary Dick, Nikhil Anand,
Zolani Ngwane, Alex Dent, Shane Greene, and Gabriella Coleman.
I am also grateful to the journal’s anonymous reviewers and Angelique Haugerud for their patience and insightful, transformative
comments.
1. For examples of Azonto dancing, see YouTube.com 2011b
2011f, 2011g, 2012b.
2. My involvement with Ghanaian popular music began while
I lived in Accra from 1998 through 2000 conducting research on
Ghana’s National Theatre Movement. Since 2003 I have conducted
extensive research with famous and underground musicians, producers, media workers, and fans in greater Accra, London, Johannesburg, and New York. I have also shot music videos for various
artists and extensive video footage of interviews, performances,
recording sessions, and daily life of artists and audiences.
3. Peace FM challenged this formula, coming on-air in the late
1990s with primarily Twi-language broadcasting. Its popularity led
other stations to follow suit. Joy FM and other stations that primarily broadcast in English cater to more educated, middle-class
listeners, whereas Twi and other “local” language stations target
working-class audiences not fluent in English. They have helped
shift public discourse to respect the use of African languages,
though in many contexts in Ghana the use of English remains associated with education and modern sensibilities.
4. Emcee Africa II, held in Botswana, was won by that country’s
Cibil Nyte. Many observers thought that C-Real should have won
378
but that the hometown crowd swayed the decision toward the local
rapper (see Adu-Poku 2009).
5. Emerging from the vibrant Tema hip-hop scene, Sarkodie first
came to public attention through phone-in rap battles on Adom
FM. In 2010, he won five Ghana Music Awards, including Artiste of
the Year and Best Rapper of the Year. In 2012, he again won Artiste
of the Year, and “U Go Kill Me” won Vodaphone Song of the Year.
6. According to EL, his apprentice Krynkman, also known as
Nshona, did the template for the beat and EL refined it. For
more on their production and beat making, see Lebrave 2012a,
2012b.
7. Lyrics translated from Twi by David Akramah Cofie, Deborah
Ahenkorah, and Felicity Antwi. Their rendering reflects the informal style of the song.
8. Stay Jay’s hiplife hit “Shashee Wowo” provides another example of a song hook derived from a school term—slang for a sexually
loose girl—that has entered popular culture. See Shipley 2013:163–
197 for descriptions of gender, sexuality, and hiplife.
9. The “official” music video was released in early November
2011 (see YouTube.com 2011i). The song was released on Sarkodie’s
album RapperHolic in early 2012, available for purchase as a digital
download and in limited CD copies.
10. For example, T.O., aka Mr. Ghana-Germany & Stunna Kid in
Hamburg, released “Fa Ko Fom,” showing Azonto and life from a
German Ghanaian perspective (see YouTube.com 2011c).
11. Lyrics transcribed by the artist.
12. Several New York–based Ghanaian teens discussed with me
how listening to digital Azonto tracks and other Ghanaian popular
tunes made them feel comfortable in the midst of broader isolations as well as miss Ghana more.
13. Sarkodie’s local celebrity was cemented when he was
“signed” by Konvict Records, the label of international R & B star
Akon, who is of Senegalese origin. After several years, this “signing” was dubbed a largely symbolic act, as nothing seemed to come
of it.
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