In his final dispatch from West Africa, Boima Tucker (above) gives his role as a cultural middleman a solid cross-examination. (A co-publication with the The Cluster Mag.)
During my last weekend in the city of Monrovia, I was invited to DJ at the large, western-style club Deja Vu. This venue, owned by a young, Liberian-born Lebanese man, charges a $10 cover — most Liberians live on less than $1.50 a day. Deja Vu fills up on weekends with twenty-something NGO workers and the local elite class of the young and the hip. It boasts a host of American Hip-hop video clichés: large VIP sections, bottle service, and a small army of working girls. The amount of money the club collects has plenty in the local entertainment industry (including non-Liberians) practically watering at the mouth. I wasn’t going to get paid for my services, but I thought it would be an interesting experience and a fun way to spend my last weekend. I excitedly took the gig.
During my set, I played my usual global club-mix of music with the addition of several tunes from the collection I had amassed during my time in Liberia. Well-known American, Ghanaian and Nigerian songs got the best response, but when I decided to end my set in a flurry of local Liberian tunes, I all but cleared the dance floor. My collaborator Benjamin and I sat down and discussed what we saw.
It was a conversation that would give clarity to some of the existential questions I’d been asking myself since arriving in the country. Engaging with Liberia by way of my own cultural terrain — one over-saturated with swarms of media-creators and perpetual streams of "content" — I found myself grappling with issues of representation and power that are, today, becoming more difficult for all of us to answer.
Children singing Angolan artist Costuleta’s Tchiriri in Nimba County, Liberia (Credit: Timo Mueller)
My father’s family comes from the Sierra Leone side of the Liberia-Sierra Leone border, so my interest in visiting Liberia stemmed from a desire to strengthen my relationship with my patrimonial homeland. When I was offered the opportunity to intern in Monrovia through my Master’s degree program, I jumped at the chance. The work I wanted to do in Liberia was guided by my occupations: student of "International Development" and DJ/Producer in the “Global Bass” scene. My experience in these fields, combined with years of international travel, has taught me that my American passport, my education, and my access to money puts me in a privileged position compared to most of my music-making peers around the world. This self-consciousness was with me before I even arrived in the country. After a few hours of being in town, my motivations were clear; I headed to a neighborhood drinking spot to check out some local music.
It was important to me to have a tangible project at the end of my time in Liberia. Noting the success the Ghanaian industry has had with the help of the internet, I thought it would be a good idea to start a Liberian music blog with the idea that Liberian-based musicians could help upload content and therefore promote their work in the U.S. It turned out that shaky internet access in the country made this a nearly impossible task; the blog has now become a sort of digital relic of my research. Besides, I hoped to carry out a project that was a bit less open-ended, something conceptually complete I could point to at the end of my visit. My first thought was a DJ mix, and as I'd just visited Benjamin of Akwaaba Music in Ghana, I started lobbying him via Twitter to help me put together a compilation of Liberian artists.
With that goal in mind, I visited several studios, met a host of artists, and collected a variety of music that Benjamin and I could choose from. Once we selected the songs, we embarked on a feverish week of chasing down signatures, promotional material and information for the release. The contracts offered artists non-exclusive 50/50 deals, Akwaaba’s standard (and common for digital compilations).
Takun J photo shoot on the beach in Monrovia
Part of the challenge in licensing a compilation was facing the mistrust and suspicion foreigners are sometimes met with in Liberia. Monrovia is a city that feels overrun by the international community. The U.S. Agency for International Development runs its second-largest African program in the country, and Liberia’s economy is largely dependent on international donors. The sheer density of NGO workers and international businesspeople around Monrovia is palpable; locals are often hyper-aware of their disadvantaged position when dealing with outsiders. At the same time, many foreigners are wary of being taken advantage of by locals. Understandably, this has an immense effect on the level of interpersonal trust in the city; it's an impact as palpable in international business centres as in nightclubs.
But once word got around that a DJ from the U.S. was looking to meet musicians, people began to seek me out. Given music artists’ success in places like Ghana and Nigeria, some Liberians have begun to see major international exposure as a realistic — and seductive — aspiration. I was lucky to find myself in many “right place, right time” moments where this apparent local “need” would intersect with my skill and knowledge.
An interview with Gbema artist Ben Gibson
Still, many people would ask me how I was benefiting from being in Liberia. Even non-Liberians — like the Ghanaian and Nigerian staff at one of the radio station/recording studios — couldn’t understand why, since I was neither Liberian nor an NGO worker, I was there for any reason but financial gain.
One example of this incomprehension can be illustrated by my interaction with Benevolence, a singer with a hit song called Fatumata, to whom I was introduced by a friend at my internship. Benevolence showed up one day at our office and promised to help connect me with musicians and get me copies of local recordings, something that was fairly difficult to come by. It also turned out that, like me, he was half-Sierra Leonean, and of the same ethno-linguistic group as my family. I hoped that this would forge some kind of solidarity between us. On the contrary, Benevolence made the transfer of money essential to our relationship. Even after trying to convince Benevolence that I wasn’t going to make money off of my projects, he knew I would still benefit from my role as a middle-man. And in many ways that was true, because I could gain credit from my university and potential prestige in the global music field.
I ended up paying him a disproportionate amount of cash to put twenty songs on my flash drive. It took me two weeks to track him down and get the drive back. Later, it became evident that Benevolence hadn’t gone the legit route in procuring the songs. When I told another artist which songs I had copies of, he angrily asked who had given them to me, since many of them were unavailable for sale. You gotta respect a hustle, and I couldn’t be mad at Benevolence for trying to get a little money out of me, but I decided not to contact him again. The realities uncovered by such situations often made me stop to reflect on what I was doing in Liberia.
The process of signing contracts gave me similar feelings of self-doubt, especially in the cases where neither Benjamin nor I already had a personally relationship with an artist we wanted to include. This is what happened with the “Area Men,” Junior Freeman and African Soldier, Deboy’s Crew, and John Bricks, the latter declining to opportunity to have his work included on the compilation. Sometimes we would hear a song on the street, at a bar or on an unlabelled mp3 from someone like Benevolence, and have to go through a process to identify and contact the artist. In a rush to complete the signing, we would show up uninvited at their home or studio to convince them to sign a contract. It felt strange. Even more awkward, we couldn’t even promise they’d make any money off the release. Again, those nagging existential questions would come back up in my mind. What were we there for?
Producer and Singer Deboy signs a licensing contract for the Akwaaba Music compilation, Lonestars Hipco and Gbema
Sometimes I would wax philosophical when trying to answer these questions. There were moments when I would be with an artist and they’d come up with something brilliant, and I’d feel a pressing urge to capture it and share it with the world. Because there was nowhere to conveniently record immediately, these moments of brilliance were lost. On the other hand, I would reason that music in its essence is a social phenomenon, and at its best serves as a sort of cultural glue. The recording and subsequent commodification of music has only been around a short time. Was “losing” these musical moments necessarily a bad thing?
In that conversation at Deja Vu on my last weekend in Monrovia, Benjamin and I finally found a guiding principle for our project. Since we knew that the music was very popular amongst the poorer population of Monrovia, we assumed that what we were seeing at the club reflected something about the city’s wealthier music consumers (with a few notable exceptions we had met during our time there.)
Perhaps the latent attitude that foreign cultural products are superior to local ones has its roots in a historical delineation between classes, a perceived dichotomy between notions of “African” and “Western” identity. But, today there are other factors at play. The large expat community’s cultural influence in Monrovia, and their biased perceptions of local culture rub off on Liberians of all backgrounds.
This cultural landscape brings about a heightened sense of global competition, leaving many Liberians feeling like their own musicians aren’t as good as acts like Timaya, V.I.P, or Flavour. Like the cellphones and other Chinese imports that flood West Africa, these artists’ songs are ubiquitous, and threatening to the local industry. Globalisation and digital technologies that allow culture to move fluidly in and out of national borders without regulation have put Liberian musicians in a situation whereby they have to compete with music from countries with more equipped and better developed scenes.
Yet Benjamin and I believe that Liberian music’s uniqueness is its strongest asset. Gbema contains an exciting mix of indigenous rhythms and languages with an electronic dance production aesthetic. Hipco relays stories about the daily reality — and struggles — of life in the country. And if all goes according to plan, perhaps we will return this time next year to find local artists being played, paid and enthusiastically danced to in a club such as Deja Vu.
Takun J pleads through music to be allowed to do it his own way
Even after returning home, our roles are fraught with issues of privilege and representation. In choosing songs for the compilation, we really let our tastes decide. But by doing this, we also framed the country, the music, and the scene for a distinct sub-section of the European and American music market. Still, this framing was also consciously linked to our desire to subvert American cultural hegemony locally. We were aware that in some ways we were speaking for the scene, but being aware of our positions of privilege we were consciously able to turn our framing into an intentional socially-responsive act.
But this kind of cultural work is only one small part of a greater job. Strengthening locally-run institutions is where our intentions should ultimately lie. Benjamin and I spoke with Together Liberia, and other such institutions working with artists in the city, about who should get support from interested for-profit and non-profit agencies. We thought that small studios in people’s homes — rather than large, well-equipped ones — should be a priority, and the existing potential of these spaces should be strengthened.
The impact of the project hasn’t been fully realised as yet. Benjamin hopes to continue working with Liberian artists, while I hope to return and see where my skills can continue to support our goal of establishing Liberian (and Sierra Leonean) music internationally. As we acknowledged before we even started the project, there probably wasn’t going to be a ton of money made for the artists. But residual effects have a positive impact. The compilation is making its way through the Liberian diaspora’s networks, and whether or not the project had a direct impact, we welcome news that Liberians abroad are thinking about investing in the music industry back home. Now you can even hear Takun J, every Saturday at Noon EST, as a host on diaspora-run Web Radio.
Exposing audiences to new ideas can be part of the battle, but, beyond that, practitioners like myself must engage with people in different places and their different ideas of culture in new, progressive and forward-thinking ways, keeping strengthened institutions as the ultimate goal. We may not have all the solutions, but as long as we keep an open mind, and learn from both our success and failures, we’ll be able to continue on the path to a more just global artistic practice.
Check out the previous installments of this three-part series:
Ghana's Urban Music Evolves In The Age of Bluetooth
Can Hip-co spark a youth-led revolution in Liberia?
