Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015

This article probes how two ‘ordinary news’ events were remediated and remixed by ordinary users, journalists and professional musicians, and were circulated as popular music in Kenya. Specifically, using TV news clips and music videos uploaded on YouTube, the article reveals how the digital media allow news events to be emptied of their ‘hard news’ and to be circulated as either entirely new, or as modified artefacts of popular culture. To achieve its aims, the article borrows and modifies Bolter and Grusin’s logic of remediation to show the conflations and distinctions between news and its digital derivatives, and also their metamorphosis from hard news to popular music. In particular, the article concludes that the process of the remediation of news into remix is a factor of technology, content and context, whose interplay ambiguously interrogates the notion of erasure/invisibility (immediacy) and construction/visibility (hypermediacy).

Following the continuing popularity of Congolese rumba music in the 1950s–1970s, I explore the technological spaces in which old songs appear more than 50 years later, and study the agency of those who initiate and actively contribute to the reinsertions of the old music in and on new media formats. By redefining the ‘repurposing’ of the remediations as strategies steered by human intentionality and occurring within social spaces, I investigate the kind of knowledge that an anthropological focus on remediation, repetition and circulation through electronic and digital media can offer about Kinshasa’s society at large. I propose to analyse the various purposes that direct Kinois (the inhabitants of Kinshasa), individual persons, media professionals and international corporations, to copy and insert old (and new) Congolese dance music into a particular media format, such as TV shows, USB sticks or mobile phone ring tones.

In this article I analyse three cases of media production in Nairobi that target teenage and young adult audiences in the Sheng language. Despite large differences in terms of scale, style, financial strength and audience reach, my cases have a number of common characteristics, traits which I theorize by using elements of subcultural theory. The cases also show how the role and position of Sheng, an urban vernacular closely associated with youth and city life, is changing.

This study focuses on Congolese music videograms that are considered here as transnational and transcultural products with respect to the pathway they take through the production process, but also with respect to the interference within this process of patrons and sponsors who, in search of symbolic or economic power, show up unannounced in the content of these musical works (software) and/or the packaging of them as products (hardware). Although these works are made up of local ideas, they end up paraphrasing and re-mediatizing globalized scenarios such as an advertisement for Dior’s J’adore perfume, which appears on TV and on the Internet. In addition, certain video clips and music videos appear as advertising slots for the group of high-living bon vivant Congolese immigrants to Europe known as mikilistes, or the high fashion group known as sapeurs. The album covers and the content promote diamond merchants or cottage industries (small shops, hair salons and transport companies) that help immigrants to get by. Furthermore, these music videograms are very often produced in Europe, and yet they end up validating both a cultural melting pot and a symbolic gap by joining the rhetoric of local texts to the globalized rhetoric of the background scenery.

Hip hop is part of a global economy of music, images and signs. Since the 1990s, hip hop has become an increasingly mainstream part of the African musical landscape. In Tanzania, as hip hop has become progressively more popular, the practice of rapping has also become more widespread. In recent years, Dar es Salaam has seen a growth in andagraundi or ‘underground’ rappers. It is, in part, through the consumption of transnational styles and signs that underground rappers are able to fashion themselves. Through popular cultural practice, rappers embody the transnational persona of a rapper. These transnational ideas and symbols are, however, imbued with meanings embedded in local discourses. The distinction frequently made between the local and the global is collapsed by the rappers as they come to embody the local in the global and vice versa.

This article addresses the process of cultural globalization by examining local variations of a global music genre. It provides a case study of a South African House music scene, located in Johannesburg’s eastern outskirts and examines the role of mobility, digital media and technology as key factors for the development of this local scene. The article argues that various aspects of cultural production and performance within this scene are shaped by its transnational background and continuous remediation. It therefore focuses on the mobility of some particular agents and the digitalization of music production technology, showing their impact on the development of South African House music.