The scholarly study of hip hop's spread to countries outside of the United States has largely been stuck in a state of paralysis no matter the region or country under review. Scholars tend to get trapped into telling romanticized stories of hip hop's political power. This is especially the case for Senegal where Y'en a Marre, a group of rappers, mobilized the youth vote to prevent incumbent President Abdoulaye Wade from winning a third term in 2012. Although focusing on that same country, Catherine Appert offers an important corrective to scholarship's singular focus on deconstructing rap lyrics by looking closely at the musical meaning of hip hop as a speech genre. For Appert, although a rap song's message is a factor, it is not the only one. She argues that memory, time, age, and consciousness are foundational to the making of the Senegalese hip hop ‘identities’ on which her study focuses. Known as Rap Galsen, ‘a slang inversion of Sene-gal’ (5), Senegalese hip hop's emergence, longevity, and shifts over time lead Appert to argue that the contradictions of modernity in postcolonial Dakar opened a set of opportunities and constraints for artists seeking to imagine meaningful lives on their own terms.
Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2012 and nine years of intermittent engagement in Dakar, Senegal's largest city, the author combines participant observation and oral interviews to analyze concepts such as memory, belonging, age, gender, modernity, and tradition as mediated through Rap Galsen. She puts herself in conversation with artists from various Dakar neighborhoods with the intention of tracing the changes in how hip hop is remembered, conceptualized, and performed.
Chapter One provides important contextualization and proposes a theoretical framework and research approach that facilitates a creative exploration of the interplay between the act of remembering, music production, and diaspora identity creation. In Chapters Two and Three, artists converse with Appert about the origins of hip hop in Senegal, as well as their early encounters with hip hop from the United States. Here, she is interested in the diaspora notion of collective memory-making to show how Rap Galsen's formation and its foundational principles and values revolve around two origin myths. One myth concerns hip hop's founding in the South Bronx in New York City by disenfranchised African American youth during the early 1970s. The other myth asserts hip hop's direct lineage to Senegal's indigenous oral cultures.
In Chapter Four, Appert sets out to explain how artists’ investment in these two myths represents a ‘practice of hip hop genre.’ Senegalese artists make claims to diaspora identity and lineage by mythologizing hip hop's origins in the United States (i.e. the Bronx myth), on the one hand, as well as by distancing themselves from indigenous performance genres such as taasu, praise singing, and mbalax (i.e. the Orality myth), on the other. She finds that the perceived appeal and utility of hip hop lies in its ability to articulate experientially an urban lived experience of marginalization that speaks to the needs and desires of a disenfranchised ‘youth’ generation due to the conscious ‘social action’ impulse embedded in the culture. Appert complicates this narrative by pointing out how state intervention and the social pressure to respect adult authority place constraints on what she calls their ‘hip hop voice’.
One of Appert's most compelling and insightful chapters is Chapter Five, in which she focuses on the experiences and perspectives of women hip hoppers. She reveals their precarious status in Rap Galsen and how they are forced both to confront and negotiate a multilayered labyrinth of patriarchal attitudes and behaviors within and outside the movement. Appert problematizes male rappers’ ‘distinct masculinity’ (136), which reduces women's role in Rap Galsen to the margins, while highlighting the agency women exercise in challenging sexism and exclusion to carve out a space of belonging and visibility. In the final chapter, she returns to her core conceptual framework to underscore the ways in which hip hop production constitutes a discursive diaspora experience and response to contemporary urban marginalization in Dakar. In seeking to understand not only how but why Senegalese practice hip hop, she makes a very appealing argument about hip hop as an alternative temporality that suspends the transition from youth to adulthood, as well as allows for the articulation and re-articulation of transatlantic diasporic connections.
Appert's thorough and self-reflective ethnography convincingly supplants dominant narratives of hip hop in Africa by honing in on the intellectual groundwork that sets the politicization of rap in motion. Although her study lacks sufficient critical engagement with the nature and meaning of how Senegalese consume US hip hop, as well as on how the exogenous impacts consciousness, aesthetics, and politics, In Hip Hop Time is a must read for anyone not only interested in music, but also in understanding the relationship between memory, agency, and cultural production in contemporary urban Senegal and beyond. Her theoretical insights into diaspora cultural identity making breaks new ground in what is possible when studying the globalization of hip hop music and culture in Africa.
