Propuesta de Nuevos Modelos Eficientes

In this section, I argue that in hiplife live performance, the performer himself is a physical representation medium of a traditional detached text, a multiple and flexible identity, and the occasion is an interface between the pragmatic performer, carrying a traditional detached text, and pragmatic fans. For the role the physical presentation medium plays in traditional detachability, I investigate the traditional detached text in hiplife as generated by disturbing the deictic field, and as used in music. I also examine how the mental script or the traditional detached text uses the hiplife performance as a medium of expression and that through memorization in performance (Lord, 1960: 13-29; Diop, 1995: 229-251; Havelock, 1982, 61-86; Tonkin, 1992 ; Agyekum, 2011: 21) the traditional detached text acts as a huge artistic resource for hiplife performance.

179 7.2 .1 Disturbing the deictic field in hiplife

Hiplife takes advantage of disturbing the deictic field to avoid attacks from the dominant. The traditional process of detachability of the text is similar to that of deterritorialization (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983: 142; Ohmae, 1990, 1995; O’Brien, 1992; Appadurai, 1996; Elden, 2005: 8) because it destroys or suspends the pragmatic space and time of the immediate context and converts the detached text to virtuality. This is the traditional means of constructing virtuality without the aid of technology and it comes about when pragmatic structures like the deictic field, pointers to reality like pronouns, time or space are shifted or subverted. This invalidates the pragmatic structures of the pointers and changes them to virtual ones. In deictic fields and contextualization frames where the pragmatic roles or representation of pronouns are shifted for the purpose of destroying the pragmatic or the physical, the presupposed or the reference of the pronouns also become virtual. Let us use this example. The personal pronoun first person “I” indicates a speaker in a physical speaking event and the second person is the listener in the same speaking event. They are real and palpable and the validity of who they are depends on the role they play in the speaking event. Any attempt to subvert their roles like shifting them affects their validity and this equally subverts their pragmatic nature within the deictic field.

They become virtual and certain traditional practices owe their insulation against persecution to this process of subverting the roles of pronouns. The example of using this process as an insulation is the Wolof insult poetry, Xaxaar (Irvine, 1996: 131-159) in which the production team of the insult poetry starts with the sponsor who employs a composer; then the composer creates the song for a singer and co-singers, thus making it difficult to accuse a single offender. This also applies to how hiplife artistes insulate themselves against persecution for purpose of freedom of expression. There is an interface of pragmatic audience and pragmatic performer or even virtual performer all right,

180 but the pragmatic performer is not the only medium being used by the detached text because he does not possess a unitary persona. He now possesses a multiple and flexible persona. As in the case of the Xaxaar practice, the composer is a medium, the executive producer is another medium, the technical producer takes over the medium of expression and finally the performer expresses the detached text to the audience. If there is any problem with the detached text, the question is: who is to be directly responsible? Kow Kesse in “Ecomini” lampoons President Evans Atta Mills for mispronouncing the word “economics”. A Plus seriously reduces the former President J. J. Rawlings to a laughing stock, calling him names like Bongo man, which in that context means a street fighter. Nobody has ever raised a finger against them.

7.2.2 Virtual time in hiplife music

The concept of detachability as part of the process of entextualisation can also create virtuality in music. The universal time like the one produced by the clock on the wall is changed by the time produced in the musical rhythm. The musical time therefore superimposes on the universal time by suspending it. The moment we follow the music, we shift from the universal time to the virtual time of the music. We are separated from the universal time by virtue of our engagement with the virtual time and our consciousness follows the virtual time of the music, which is not natural or universal. We are thus thrown into a virtual time at that material moment we are following the rhythm of the music. This may be the reason why when a particular music is played, you are sent back into time because the virtual time sends you back into time and brings back memory of a period or an event in the past with which the music was strongly associated. Music therefore becomes a memory aid (Lord, 1960; Havelock, 1963; Tonkin, 1992). At the moment, hiplife is drawing the virtual map of our time and in future, will serve as the memory aid, bringing us back to the virtual time of this

181 physical present period. Music as memory aid enhances the hiplife cultural visibility as it passes through time.

7.2 .3 Memorization and hiplife performance

After disturbing the deictic field of the pragmatic text to have a virtual text, this intangible mercurial insubstantiality, as indicated earlier, is stored in the mind. It becomes the mental script that informs performance. According to Urban (2001:3), this abstract is the essence of culture, the “ethereal” or the “ghost-like” entity which moves from one concrete embodiment to the other in an immaterial form. Again, as indicated earlier, the detached text, using the mind as an archival facility is applied in memorization in performance (Lord, 1960; Havelock, 1982; Tonkin, 1992; Diop, 1995: 230). The mental script used in hiplife memorization, nwegutirim, is a template that is used for different events in performance (Lord, 1960; Diop, 1995). The youth are therefore interconnected with their past through the process of traditional detachability through memorization, and they are thus better placed to present the traditional side of the hiplife culture. This reinforces the validity of a Ghanaian maxim that “Tradition die hard”. Hiplife artistes like Obour from Accra, Stone and Joe Frazer from Kumasi, Black Moon and Shanti from Tamale all support Sydney that “hiplife is from the palace”. Names of hiplife artistes like the Akyeame (the linguists), Kontihene (rear guard military commander), Nananom (ancestors) and Obrafour (the executioner) are fluent testimonies of hiplife’s close association with the tradition. Practices of the African traditional culture are thus recontextualised in modern cultural expression like hiplife and this research therefore totally supports Osumare’s (2012: 34) observation that an “ancient improvisatory African aesthetic has now been disseminated through technological sampling in the twenty first century”. Again, memorization allows the presence of hiplife in multiple settings and enhances its cultural visibility across time. Let us now look at how detachability operates in modern cultural expression in hiplife.

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