Jess Engebretson writing in Guernica:
More hereAt the heart of Liberia’s music scene today is hipco, the country’s take on American hip-hop. Hipco combines traditional rap rhythms with samples of street noise and synthy background loops. Artists record themselves in homemade studios, and producers mix tracks on fifteen-year-old software. The music they create is, from a technical standpoint, lousy—the vocals made muddy by cheap microphones, the volume swinging erratically from one phrase to the next. Yet Liberians recognize this music as theirs. Hipco is peppered with references to current events and shout-outs to specific places—Broad Street, Blue Lake, Saniquellie. Crucially, it’s rooted in Liberian English—a slangy patois that can be incomprehensible to visitors but that’s shared by Liberia’s sixteen tribes. To understand this music, you don’t need to speak standard English. You don’t need to be literate to listen. Hipco is street music, the soundtrack to the daily hustle. It’s as egalitarian as art gets.
'Rabbie' via Al Jazeera After the jump Soul Fresh
Hipco is also political, skewering corrupt police and out-of-touch politicians. Consider one of the anthems of 2011, ‘They’re Coming Again’ by the duo Soul Fresh. The song begins with a jumble of voices—a snapshot of a busy market, maybe, or of a discussion in one of the city’s hatai debating societies. But after a moment, the lead singer’s ominous croon kicks in: they’re coming again, he warns. They’re coming again. “They,” you realize, are the politicians gearing up for election season, coming with the Koran and the Bible, come here, lie / say God sent them to rule over us.
