“[Shipley] has written with passionate involvement and balances his study with firsthand interviews. The globalization of hip-hop should be no surprise, and this exploration of its reach and how it can be remade provides a fascinating example of the localization and renewal of the form.”
- Bill Baars (Library Journal) “Shipley offers up a heady mix of political, business, and music history, of entrepreneurship and converging genres, intermixed with reportage and personal contacts as he explores the junction of celebrity, commerce, and politics in contemporary Ghana. . . . [S]cholars of contemporary African culture and aficionados of hiplife will find enlightenment.”
(Publishers Weekly) “The scholarly passages are hung around lengthy, eminently readable sections that will appeal to anyone who might enjoy modern African music styles, and not necessarily those with a hip-hop bias. Even if you have no particular interest or liking for hiplife, this is an absorbing and very informative book.”
- Martin Sinnock (Songlines) “[A] fascinating foray into a complex world of musical production, the deployment of shifting technologies, and articulation of conceptions of entrepreneurial success that deserves wide attention and careful consideration…. Living the Hiplife offers readers an admirable mix of ethnographic detail and analytical discussion.”
- Nate Plageman (Journal of Anthropological Research) “[T]his study not only originally and brilliantly recognizes the role of the diaspora in this cultural field, but it brightly manages to let the audience speak back to cultural producers. Indeed, Shipley repeatedly succeeds in giving voice to these participants, from a local public transport conversation to online forums…. [H]is book significantly contributes to a much neglected field that is the economy of popular music in urban Africa; and I can only welcome and salute such a study, full of original insights, as a firsthand account from an obviously enthusiastic and dedicated participant.”
- Jenny F. Mbaye (Africa) "Living the Hiplife is an important testimony to the innovative and entrepreneurial nature of hip-hop music in Ghana as well as an excellent example of a theoretically engaged ethnography that productively uses anthropological ideas of value and circulation."
- Girish Daswani (American Ethnologist)
