Sounds of displeasure: a textual and sonic reading of ‘The Masses’ by Ghanaian hiplife artist Sarkodie

Abstract

Protest songs and their utilisation to articulate the sentiments and displeasure of people have most often been studied on a textual level with a focus on the lyrics only. Using ‘The Masses’, a well-known Ghanaian protest song by the hiplife artist Sarkodie as a case study, this article proposes a more comprehensive approach to analysing protest songs, which includes the reading of textual and sonic elements. ‘The Masses’ is an example of hiplife music – a Ghanaian popular music genre that fuses vernacular music, traditional dance music and popular music styles such as highlife, reggae and dancehall, with African-American hip hop elements. ‘The Masses’ is first contextualised through a literature review and an exploration of its reception. The analysis that follows draws on approaches by Killmeier and Christiansen on the determinative nature of advertisement music (2011), Krims’s categorisation of rap genres (2000), and Bradley’s theorisation on rap as a linguistic art (2009). It concludes that Sarkodie artfully utilised ‘The Masses’ as a protest song to articulate the sentiments of the Ghanaian public via an inventive use of rap’s oratory devices, intensified by imaginative sonic colouring.