- John Dankwa – “Music and the Afterworld: The Case of Akan Highlife Songs in Ghana”
Highlife is a syncretic musical style which fuses traditional Ghanaian rhythms and melodies with European instruments and harmonies. Originating in the early twentieth century along the Fanti coast of southwest Ghana, highlife music rose to prominence particularly in the 1960s. Highlife songs deal with a wide range of themes. However, most highlife song texts dwell on subjects that may be classified under the domain of misery brought about by social mobility, injustice, marriage, betrayal, poverty, hard luck, witchcraft, and death etc. The emphasis of these themes, nonetheless, finds its highest expression in the funerary traditions of the Akan, the dominant ethnic group in Ghana. The expatiation of the theme of death in highlife texts more particularly brings the artist face to face with Akan traditional beliefs. One of such is the belief in the life hereafter. The Akan believe that death is an undeniable reality and phase of life that awaits all. However, among the Akan death is not seen as an end to life. Instead, it is considered a kind of new birth into another world, where one lives on as a changed, transformed human, modified in status and power. In this paper, I explore the theme of death and life hereafter in highlife music, arguing that highlife song texts present a real picture of Akan popular beliefs about life after death through implicit and explicit invocation of the spirit of a deceased to assume certain significant roles in society.
- Amy Frishkey – “The Artist as Ancestor Spirit in Garifuna Popular Music”
The death of forty-seven-year-old Andy Palacio on January 19th, 2008, triggered waves of remorse within the minority Garifuna communities of his native country, Belize. Since he was nineteen years old, Palacio served as an ambassador for Garifuna culture in a multitude of guises: as a literacy worker in nearby Nicaragua, as the international star of a regional dance music called
punta rock, as Cultural Ambassador and Deputy Administrator within Belize’s National Institute of Culture and History, and, finally, as the frontperson of an award-winning world music supergroup called the Garifuna Collective. Considered an outward-looking outsider by his Belizean Garifuna brethren while still alive, Palacio’s call to cultural and linguistic preservation on world stages became a posthumous guiding light for younger generations and formerly begrudging peers. His final transformation from earthly to spiritual being at a young age validated his regular tendency to keep one foot upon foreign soils both literal and metaphorical. As one of his peers put it, “He is with the ancestors now,” and an outpouring of commemorative songs by former bandmates depicted his new communality with deceased elders and newfound communality with contemporaries.
My presentation excavates the meeting ground of popular music and neo-traditional Garifuna spirituality and values that Andy Palacio forged late in his career. In particular, I examine how the basis of this spirituality within the Garifuna people’s Afrodiasporic heritage dovetails with postcolonial narratives at work within the world music industry to fashion new anchors of cultural relevance for Garifuna living transnationally. I argue that outside accolades for, and celebrity status of, musicians from the Garifuna Central American home communities create a parallel between cosmopolitanism and the otherworldly realm believed to be occupied by ancestor spirits.
- Kembrew McLeod – “The Death and Life and Death of a Great American City: New York, Underground Culture, Gentrification, and the Ghost of Jane Jacobs”
Writer and activist Jane Jacobs published
The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, when New York City’s economic foundations crumbled into dirt — something that cultivated rich strains of underground culture. As a result, the inhabitants of a roughly one-square-mile area of Lower Manhattan changed the way we think about music, art, performance, and human sexuality throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These events were set in motion by a tight-knit creative community that made sparks fly as they brushed against each other. Expressing themselves without much thought about career development or sound business plans, they did it collectively in the spirit of fun and adventure when they crossed paths in bars and other venues. A half century later, this fiscal and cultural dynamic has dramatically been inverted, turning New York City into a place that is much more difficult for artists and other outsiders to thrive, much less survive. Unfortunately, Jacobs’s preservationist instincts—which saved Washington Square Park and the SoHo area from being paved over—did not account for the way that gentrification would burden artists, people of color, and the working poor. New York’s contemporary real estate boom began when the city government strongly encouraged property development in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the real estate gold rush shifted downtown, which led to the closing of CBGB, the Knitting Factory, Tonic, and other downtown venues that programmed innovative musical acts. To help visualize the relationships between these urban spaces and the people who inhabited them, Kembrew McLeod’s presentation will draw on research from his book
The Downtown Pop Underground and its content-rich website,
TheDowntownPopUnderground.com. This digital humanities project makes connections between several dozen downtown denizens and the places they inhabited, literally mapping the ways that scenes live and die within certain geographic spaces.
