Mobile Phone Ambassadors

Interview

Glo mobile, a subsidiary of Nigerian multinational telecom company Globacom Limited, is fighting for customers in the contested Ghanaian market. Singers and musicians are key in advertising the brand. Norient talked with Eugene Hoggar, the man in charge of the company’s music ambassadors and conceptualizes, coordinates and manages promotions, events and sponsored programs. From the Norient book Seismographic Sounds (see and order here).

[Thomas Burkhalter]: Ghana seems highly competitive right now: six mobile phone companies, thousands of evangelical churches, and growing music scenes are attracting buyers and followers. Why is Ghana important for your company?

[Eugene Hoggar]: As you said, Ghana is very competitive. People are striving and pushing. It’s a survival of the fittest economy. If you have a dream you must go for it, as the economy is full of potential. You have to take the bull by the horn. That’s how we are brought up: we cook with seriousness, we dance with seriousness, we sing with seriousness. Churches, businesses, they don’t play. We strive to be the best. This is Ghana. And this is Africa, too.

[TB]: How important is music for the advertisement of Glo mobile?

[EH]: In Africa you can’t do without music. We love music. That’s why we keep signing a lot of artists. We signed Reggie Rockstone, the originator of hiplife music. We have rapper Edem, we have singer Sharifa Gunu, we have a lot of them: the crème de la crème, the biggest music players in Ghana. Let’s reinforce the point: we are in a very competitive environment. To persuade a customer to sign a contract with Glo we need to be unique. So, we have the best artists of the country spearhead Glo mobile. Glo is the best and fastest growing telecommunication company in Africa. When we join forces with these artists we move at the speed of light.

[TB]: What happens when you sign your ambassadors? What is expected from them?

[EH]: We mainly use them for our commercials. We use their music as ringtones. We use their faces on our billboards. They have to carry good messages about the brand and promote the brand anywhere they go. Basically, their blood should be as green as our logo. Everything that they do has an effect on the brand – positively or negatively. If they shine, the brand shines as well. If they release a new track, we do everything to push this track to the next level. We also have ambassadors in Nigeria – for example, superstar P Square. We can invite him to Ghana to collaborate with one of our ambassadors and push his or her career. Music has contributed immensely to our success.

«Good Things Don’t Come Easy»

[TB]: Are these ambassadors difficult to get? A potential candidate might first go to Vodafone, then Glo, then Tigo, and ask each company how much they will pay.

[EH]: Good things don’t come easy, my friend. Yes, we’ve paid an arm and a leg to get them. One of our competitors had one ambassador, now they have two. But Glo has fifteen. We are pioneers for working with musicians. Managing these stars is not child’s play. If you need them for a commercial, they might be in America, England or Switzerland for a concert. Tracking their activities and making sure that they live a good life is difficult, too. They need to give a positive image of the brand.

[TB]: What kind of message do you want to spread?

[EH]: What we try to convey with our TV commercials, radio shows and through our ambassadors is quality, innovation, and the fact that our offer stands out on the market. We use our ambassadors to sermon that message to people. They are at the frontline. All we’re trying to do is to let them rule their world. We want them confidently ruling the world through Glo Mobile Ghana.

[TB]: How important are the lyrics sung on their albums and in concerts?

[EH]: It’s key. If we have a potential future ambassador we analyze his or her lyrics. If we realize that the lyrics bring a negative light on the brand we’ll stay away. We don’t want our brand to be too explicit or vulgar. So, yes, we are careful.

[TB]: So the duo FOKN Bois might not be a future candidate?

[EH]: The FOKN Bois are genius. See, we have a checklist: we want people who have a vision and we want people who positively appeal to the market. We believe in Africanism, and they represent that. So, yes, we are watching them closely. Who knows about tomorrow? We may approach them, or we may not approach them.

The interview was conducted on 26.4.2013 in Accra, Ghana. The text was published first in the second Norient book Seismographic Sounds.

Biography

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern (Switzerland). He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (NF), co-directed AV-performances and documentary films (e.g. «Contradict», Berner Filmpreis 2020 + Al-Jazeera Witness), and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., «Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut», Routledge, «The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East», Wesleyan University Press). He teaches regularly at universities, and runs workshops for arts institutions. Since 2022 he produces the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, he is working on his new music duo «Melodies In My Head», and on the podcast series «Long Take: Life as an Artist». Follow him on Instagram, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Bandcamp, Spotify, or Meta.

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Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World

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The second Norient book «Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World» introduces you to a contemporary world of distinct music and music videos. Written by 250 scholars, journalists, bloggers and musicians from 50 countries.

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Published on March 16, 2018

Last updated on July 10, 2020

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Playing with the Dustbin of History

Review

by Thomas Burkhalter

The Lebanese-Swiss duo Praed experiments with sounds that cultural elites call trash or kitsch. Through Praed’s style, they attack cultural canons within the Arab World, and they present a fresh mix towards Europe. Here is a different take on Exotica. From the Norient book Seismographic Sounds (see and order here).

Praed, the duo of Lebanese Raed Yassin and Swiss Paed Conca, perform popular media sounds from the Arab world with techniques from experimental music. On their first CD The Muesli Man (2009), we hear lots of samples: gunshots, someone screaming, music from Egyptian films, a speech by iconic president Gamal Abdel Nasser, Arabic pop music from the 1980s, electric bass, virtuoso clarinet playing, electronica sounds – all held together through a wide range of editing and manipulation techniques. On their second release Made in Japan (2011), Yassin sings over a sample of Egyptian pop-star Mahmoud El Husseini while a bathroom-pipe is bursting. Japanese voices, screaming, and dub-grooves are interlaced. All of that is put into a grinder and mixed with prepared double- and E-bass, varying playing techniques on the clarinet and scratches from record players and tape recorders. The approach is discussed openly by the duo’s label Annihaya, which specializes in the «displacement, deconstruction and ‹recycling› of popular or folkloric musical cultures», as described in the «about» section. Annihaya «seeks to distort boundaries of popular music», with the aim to present «new ways of listening to original works».

Micro-Korg Sounds and Maqsum Rhythm

The Praed track «8 Giga» (on Made in Japan) serves well to illustrate this approach. Yassin plays a melody on his micro-Korg synthesizer. It keeps repeating itself (on C, B flat and E flat) throughout the track without variation, cuts or changes in dynamics. Ethnomusicologist Shayna Silverstein links the micro-Korg sound to the mijwiz reedpipe, a typical instrument of the rural Levantine dabké music and dance. In contemporary dabké the shrill mijwiz sound is replaced through synthesizers – played with the Korg PA-800 in the case of Rizan Said’s Annihaya album King of Keyboard (2015).

The 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + (accentuated on 1 and 3, unaccentuated on 1.5, 2.5 and 4) of the maqsum rhythm – throughout the Praed track – further links «8 Giga» to possibly the most popular rhythm in the Arab world. One finds it everywhere from rural dance music to the electronic mahragan music of Cairo. The latter, sometimes called electro sha’abi, is produced on the virtual instruments of software sequencer FL studio by upcoming musicians of lower class backgrounds. Today, cheaply produced mahragan is as popular as the expensive productions of pan-Arabic pop.

1980s Arabic Pop and 1950s Belly Dance

In addition, Yassin starts repeatedly shouting «Allah» after 8'48'' of "8 Giga". It’s a reference to classical Sufi music. As Conca puts it: «The ecstasy of Sufi music without the religion». The «Allah» shouts sound distorted and thus do not reference the high quality standards of ethnomusicological records of Sufi chants in pre-war Aleppo, the lighter and well-produced versions sold in the Euro-American world music market, or the over-produced renderings of the many TV preachers on Arabic satellite channels. The focus on imperfection and low production quality is important, as Charles Hirschkind, anthropologist and author of The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics reminds us. He argues that when it comes to cassette sermons, the low-budget and home-recorded cassettes and mp3 files (full of background noise and blasting voices) are higher in demand than flashy productions on TV. «There is an aesthetic of modesty that is appreciated by many people», Hirschkind explains on request: «people have more trust in low quality».

The same seems to be the case for pop music. Yassin and an increasing number of subcultural musicians fall for the sha’bi street pop of Hakim, the crazy renderings of Sha‘ban ‘Abd al-Rahim, or the virtuosic keyboard versions by Islam Chipsy. They tend to ignore the clean pan-Arabic pop sound that is perfectly produced, financed and promoted by Saudi-Arabian satellite TV empires. They prefer Arabic pop of the 1980s that was «produced quickly and comparatively inexpensively through studio overdubbing and extensive cutting-and-pasting,» as Michael Frishkopf writes in his edited volume Music and Media in the Arab World (2010). The pop sound of that period integrates both the instruments, rhythms and sounds of 1970s psychedelic rock; and the oriental sound of belly dance music of the 1950s and 1960s. «The nightclub sound was a musical hybrid generated by the creative invention and innovation of second-generation and post-World War immigrants who were inspired by modernization and Orientalism», writes scholar Anne Rasmussen in her article «An Evening in the Orient – The Middle Eastern Nightclub in America» (1992). According to her, this music of the nightclub violated «every boundary of authenticity».

Violating Authenticity

It is this violation of «every boundary of authenticity», the obviousness and easiness, and the amazing sounds that Yassin and an ever bigger circle of local musicians enjoy – Yassin calls them copy-cats or hipsters. More importantly, these styles and sounds have the potential to anger cultural elites within the Arab World and fans of world music abroad. In a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, BBC world music pioneer Charlie Gillett – shortly before his untimely death in 2010 – expressed indignation at Omar Souleyman’s London concert. He said that Souleyman was the worst wedding singer he had ever heard. One can plainly state that the old, pure, and gentle world music has been attacked and replaced by new, less pleasant sounds.

The micro-Korg sound of Praed expresses this bias directly and indirectly. Music writer Simon Reynolds calls this focus the anarchive. These are sounds and styles that have been outside the canon of official music history in the region for a long time. It’s the dustbin of history. These styles and sounds are seen by many as culturally inferior, as trash, cheap or kitsch. Praed often renders this material with irony and parody. As Conca explains:

«We manipulate sound aesthetics of various Lebanese political parties and put them into new contexts. On stage, Yassin likes to wear the typical mirror-sunglasses of the party leaders of the radical Christian right, while playing the music of Shiites and Sunnites on his synthesizer.»

Praed: Raed Yassin (left) and Paed Conca (right) (Lebanon/Switzerland) (photo: artist)

Positioning in the Arab World and in the West

Raed Yassin positions himself on various levels. With his choice of references he criticizes the elitist cultural canon in Lebanon and he breaks taboos – in his solo piece «CW Tapes» – working with sounds from the Lebanese Civil War. He also presents Europe and the US with a different, not too clichéd image of the Arab world. Praed, however, also positions itself within a European and American context. Paed Conca plays multiphonics on his clarinet at the beginning of «8 Giga». Multiphonics — the art of playing several sounds together using specific blow and fingering techniques — are known from the history of jazz, new music, free improvised music and other music styles. Through these references, Praed creates experimental music that is not just high culture but plays and manipulates material from our increasingly mediatized popular culture.

Experimental music working with pop sounds is still a minor development – it happened in Bastard Pop in the 1990s and in few other instances. One can find similar artistic ideas and strategies in Post Digital Pop, in contemporary jazz where some musicians improvise over pop songs instead of the Great American Songbook, or even in the New Conceptualism in New Music. Conca left Switzerland and lives in Beirut: «It’s more free here», he says. «The way Yassin experiments with local pop culture is rare and fresh. It is difficult to find such unobstructed handling of popular culture amongst European musicians and listeners of experimental music». For Conca, Praed is a «commentary about the randomness, oppositeness, and purposelessness of the acoustic materials that are surrounding us». He explains that the music is «a plea for an infinite, crazy, and open world». Yassin says that he aims to work towards a local and an international audience:

«My work functions differently in places where people understand the language and the music. Here I use nostalgia as a key to get into their feelings. In the West, in order to reach their emotions and manipulate them, I use exoticism – not in a cheesy way, but in a way that triggers questions of why I manipulate music.»

The text was published first in the second Norient book Seismographic Sounds.

Biography

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern (Switzerland). He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (NF), co-directed AV-performances and documentary films (e.g. «Contradict», Berner Filmpreis 2020 + Al-Jazeera Witness), and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., «Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut», Routledge, «The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East», Wesleyan University Press). He teaches regularly at universities, and runs workshops for arts institutions. Since 2022 he produces the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, he is working on his new music duo «Melodies In My Head», and on the podcast series «Long Take: Life as an Artist». Follow him on Instagram, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Bandcamp, Spotify, or Meta.

Published on March 17, 2018

Last updated on September 17, 2020

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Filmstill: Stahlberger (Musik), Jovica Radisavljevic (Video): «Du verwachsch wieder nume i dinere Wonig» (Schweiz 2014)

Wahnsinn oder Wirklichkeit?

Short Essay

by Jovica Radisavljevic

Im Video zum Stahlberger-Song «Du verwachsch wieder nume i dinere Wonig» verwischt Regisseur Jovica Radisavljevic die Grenzen von Realität und Wahn. Hier erzählt er, wie es dazu kam und was es heisst, mit Minimal-Budget maximal kreativ zu sein. Aus dem Norient Buch Seismographic Sounds (hier bestellbar).

Die Anfrage von Stahlberger, ein Musikvideo zu «Du verwachsch wieder nume i dinere Wonig» zu drehen, hat mich während einer zweimonatigen Asienreise erreicht. Ich habe sofort zugesagt und bin mit dem Song im Gepäck weitergereist. Immer wieder habe ich den Song angehört und mich gefragt, wie diese Geschichte einer Flucht aus Alltag und Realität in ein Musikvideo umgesetzt werden könnte: Mir war von Anfang an klar, dass das Video furztrocken sein musste. Das passt zu Stahlberger und ihrem einzigartigen Humor. Ich hatte das Bild eines «geistig angeschlagenen» Protagonisten im Kopf, alleine in einem kargen Raum. In welchen Kontext setzen wir diese Person? In ein Gefängnis? Zu übertrieben! In ein Treffen der Anonymen Alkoholiker? Schauspielerisch zu anspruchsvoll! Die Flucht eines Schizophrenen im Auto? Zu teuer!

Zurück in der Schweiz habe ich die Ideen mit dem Kameramann Aron Marty diskutiert, der mit mir dann auch die Crew bildete. Gemeinsam sind wir auf die Idee mit dem Psychologen gekommen. Denn wo verarbeitet man eine Situation, wenn man mit der Gesellschaft oder dem Alltag nicht mehr klar kommt? Ein Setting, das ideal zum Song passt. Dass Manuel Stahlberger als Kopf der Band den Patienten spielen musste, lag auf der Hand. Die Rolle des Therapeuten haben wir dem Bassisten Marcel Gschwend alias Bit-Tuner zugeteilt, der auch innerhalb der Band immer mal wieder den Band-Papa gibt. Und die übrigen Bandmitglieder? Einerseits haben wir sie in den Warteraum der Praxis gesetzt und andererseits mit ihnen diese abgespacten Refrain-Teile inszeniert, die die trockenen Strophen der Realität mit einem schrillen Traum kontrastieren. Das ist ein Grundthema von Video und Song. Man ist sich nie sicher: Ist das jetzt schon Wahnsinn oder immer noch Wirklichkeit? Die Grenzen verwischen, etwa wenn sich ein Käfer aus der Tapete löst und quer über die Wand krabbelt.

Material und Requisiten haben wir an unserem Drehort – eine leerstehende Fabrikhalle –, in umliegenden Brockenstuben und Einrichtungshäusern zusammengesucht, drei Räume bildeten die Szenerie: ein Wartezimmer, ein Behandlungsraum und ein Greenscreen. Der Drehtag hat schliesslich fast 15 Stunden gedauert, und trotzdem war die Stimmung stets heiter. Immer wieder sind Leute vor die Linse gesprungen und man musste die Einstellung wiederholen. Oder wir haben unter dem Vorwand, dass der Take noch immer nicht gut sei, Marcel so lange genötigt, Magnesium zu schnupfen, bis er nicht mehr konnte.

Wir haben viel diskutiert: Warum machst du das jetzt so und nicht anders? Wie sollte der Gesichtsausdruck sein? Was schreibst du in dein Notizbuch? Vieles entstand spontan und ohne Drehbuch. Die Band hat vor dem Dreh von uns nur eine grobe Kurzbeschreibung des Videos bekommen, verbunden mit der Aufforderung, einen Koffer mit allen möglichen Kostümen und Kleidern mitzunehmen. Damit haben wir dann experimentiert. Anderes, wie etwa die Tanzeinlagen des Refrains, entstanden aus der Müdigkeit. Selbst in der Postproduktion habe ich vieles spontan entschieden: Bei der Ästhetik der Refrain-Teile habe ich mich etwa vom wunderbaren Musikvideo «My People» von The Presets inspirieren lassen. Verdienen lässt sich an so einem Projekt übrigens kaum etwas. Uns ist es auch nie ums Geld gegangen. Vielmehr darum, etwas zu tun, was man komplett, von A bis Z, selbst auf die Beine stellt. Die Band hat uns da völlig freien Spielraum gelassen.

Aufgezeichnet von Hannes Liechti via Skype am 20.3.2015. Dieser Text wurde erstmals publiziert im zweiten Norient Buch «Seismographic Sounds».

Biography

Jovica Radisavljevic arbeitet als Cutter und Regisseur in Zürich. Follow him on his Website.

Published on March 13, 2018

Last updated on May 01, 2024

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Playing with the Dustbin of History

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