StonesThrow, May 30, 2018
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This is one of the videos that is analyzed in the excerpt from the chapter that is quoted below.
Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan_Archives for information about Sudan Archives.
Here's a quote from that page "Brittney Denise Parks, better known by her stage name Sudan Archives, is an American violinist and singer based in Los Angeles, California.[4] She is signed to Stones Throw Records.[5]...genres: Electro, R&B"....
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Edited by Azizi Powell
"This pancocojams post showcases the 2018 YouTube video "Nont for Sale" by African American singer/violist Sudan A chives. The word "nont" in this video is a little used abbreviation for the word "nothing".
This pancocojams post also presents an excerpt from a chapter "Fashion Vibes. African Fashion and Hairstyles in Music Video" in Cornelia Lund's 2019 book Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design(Publisher: Kerber Verlag).
This excerpt is given without citations and the chapter's bibliography.
The content of this post is presented for socio-cultural and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Cornelia Lund for her research and her writing. Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post and thanks for Sudan Archives for her music. Thanks also to all those who are associated with this showcased video.
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CHAPTER EXCERPT: FASHION VIBES: AFRICAN FASHION AND HAIRSTYLES IN MUSIC VIDEO
From Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design by Cornelia Lund
(pp.98–101)Publisher: Kerber Verlag
"Music videos play a prominent role as a medium for the presentation and dissemination of African fashion and hairstyles. Using the character of music videos as an open lab, creators develop fashion and hairstyles in ways that don’t necessarily conform to the established commercial beauty canons and systemic hierarchies. By doing so, the music videos engage explicitly or implicitly in current discourses and developments, such as the natural hair movement, for example. One important purpose of music videos is to propagate knowledge about African fashion and hairstyles in general or to promote chosen designers and stylists; however, music videos also challenge or playfully criticize established patterns of thought and social models through the way in which they present music, musicians, fashion and hairstyles. African fashion and hairstyles, with their futuristic and non-conformist power, thus become prominent parts of a larger movement that is trying to gure out how African societies wish to define themselves in the present and for the future.
Fashion has always been an essential ingredient in pop music, since pop music cannot be reduced to its musical elements, but should be described as a multi-media phenomenon unfolding in various different media.1 And music video – a genre characterized by the carefully choreographed mise-en-scène of the musicians, in which their outfts and hairstyles play a major role in the production and transmission of their image – is undeniably still one of the most important audiovisual forms for presenting pop music. However, if music videos are allowed to unfold their experimental laboratory character,2 they can become much more
than a promotional tool transporting the image of musicians and their music: The audiovisual combination and all its ingredients can be further used to develop propositions of aesthetic, cultural, and societal relevance.
African fashion is increasingly asserting its place in the fashion geography, and the African fashion industry, though still comparatively small, has an impressive media presence. Rapidly growing access to the Internet in African countries3 plays a signifcant role in the media strategies applied in the feld of fashion, since it fosters the development of new, globally connected platforms for presenting and discussing fashion – from blogs to online platforms and magazines – that “eschew the received categories and orders of fashion”4 and thus challenge the hegemony of the Western fashion system.
This African fashion, which Helen Jennings celebrates as “reaching its apex” thanks to its ideal position between being simultaneously “grounded in tradition” and “exposed to international tastes” and therefore being able to “satisfy local demand and ignite interest abroad,”5 does it play a role in music videos, and, if so, how? We can rapidly give a positive, though rather subjective, answer to the frst part of this question: African fashion seems to play a certain role in music videos since, in fact, it was through her research on music videos that the author of this text was introduced to the dynamic feld of contemporary African fashion some years ago.
And beyond the author’s personal experience? We can observe that African music videos are widely discussed online in a variety of media, as is the styling and choice of fashion in them. Usually, the articles deal with individual, recently released videos, but some sources also discuss more general issues, such as the support or lack of support musicians give to African designers. In an episode of the Ugandan TV show NTV Style Project (6 July 2018), the host Solomon Tazibone discusses the state of “Fashion in Ugandan Music Video” with his guests, the TV presenter Sheila Gashumba and the musician Lydia Jazmine. They praise several music videos for their styling, but also maintain that Ugandan musicians could be more sensitive to fashion in general in their videos and more aware of integrating fashion by African designers. An article published on fashionghana.com in 2018 goes even further, complaining that “African musicians have done an appalling job at supporting African fashion or brands in general,”6 and calling for a boycott of the musicians who don’t wear fashion by African designers in their videos. The argument is not so much about a protectionist attitude as about a selfconfdent appreciation of what is African, without constantly looking to Western standards or status symbols...
And again, even though the article contrasts Ghanaian and Western products, the attitude behind the wish to see more support for African fashion in music videos is not restricted to a national focus, since the platform – similar to most other platforms that discuss the topic – has a transnational approach, one that does not defne Africa as a continent of nations, but as a cultural space that includes the Afro-diasporic communities, which are in constant exchange with the continent.8 It is in this same sense that this text speaks of “African” fashion and hair, always keeping in mind, of course, that said cultural space is not a closed one and contains many different, yet intertwined cultures.
Hair is discussed much less than fashion with regard to African music videos, which, however, does not mean that hairstyling and headpieces are insignificant ingredients in the videos. Quite to the contrary, they are essential parts of the mise-en-scène, and, lately, the Afro salon and the process of doing Afro hair (and, with them, the question of “nappy” – natural and happy – hair) have even become a recurrent motif in music videos – a development that parallels the increased awareness of natural and traditional hairstyles in Afro communities all over the world. The video for Swedish-Gambian singer Seinabo Sey’s song I Owe You Nothing (2018) is set in her native Gambia and shows her in different indoor and outdoor settings. The frst setting, a tailor or fashion studio, fttingly prepares the stage for the various quite distinctive outfts worn in the video. Later on, in a cozy living room scene, the singer’s natural hair is being braided by her aunt.9 Los Angeles- based musician Sudan Archives and her companions also get their hair done in an Afro salon right at the beginning of the video for the song Not for Sale (2018) and subsequently wear different forms of braids and a ferce Afro throughout the video. In a scene later in the video, Sudan Archives dances in the midst of products for Afro hair displayed on the shelves of an Afro shop, while her companions carry her extra-long and thick braids like a train. The hairstyles, worn with visible pleasure and self-confdence, seem to underscore the message of the song, which asserts a self-determined way of life by telling the addressed “sucker”: “this is my life […] stay outta my path.” Charlotte Adigéry’s song High Light (2019) directly addresses her involvement with hair, or, more precisely, her passion for getting her hair done too often and for wearing wigs: “I know I shouldn’t do it but/ I love synthetic wigs a lot.” Accordingly, the video is set mainly in an Afro salon, where the Belgian-Caribbean sing- er and other customers undergo various beauty treatments – and the singer goes into a kind of “wig ecstasy.” The video introduces the rather intimate atmo- sphere of the space, where the women talk, smoke, eat, drink, and dance. It also shows some typical elements of this type of place: displays of wigs and extensions, for example, and posters presenting different types of female and male Afro hair- styles.
[...]
...African fashion and hairstyles can be featured in music videos in different ways. Music videos can, for example, display a certain “Africanness” through their choice of styles, without necessarily naming designers. For clothes, this is often achieved by choosing “African- print fashion,” whose reference to Africa is easily recognizable and established, whether the prints really are of African origin or a product of colonial textile politics, such as African wax prints.12 The fashion in more than one video has been hailed as “printastic,” and online platforms like All Things Ankara closely observe and comment on the use of African-print fashion in music videos. Some musicians are known for their sup- port of African designers; the Nigerian pop star Yemi Alade, for example, is praised as a “fashion icon,” “rocking”13 African fashion, from casual to haute couture. One could add that she even engages in a playful reinterpretation of traditional attire, which complements her overall African fashion attitude. In the video for her hit Johnny (2014), three styles can be observed: African prints, a sort of global business style, and allusions to traditional dresses. The latter appear, however, not at all as historical allusions, but as contemporary elements of the video’s colorful pop aesthetics, as very clearly shown by the costume displayed at the Grammy Museum14 as a representative piece from the video: the “raffa” skirt of the dress is made of contemporary plastic, as are the beads. This approach to her look is very consciously orchestrated, as Yemi Alade explains with regard to Johnny: “I’m a lover of African outfts, bold prints, and beads. But the outfts aren’t Nigerian, they are Zambian and Kenyan. So I just pick everything and create my own look. In the video, you can clearly see that this girl is ‘African’ but you can’t tell if I’m Nigerian or not. This twist is refreshing for me! Well, I think it’s an African collage and a statement.”15
[...]
As different as the musical styles and respective mises-en-scène may be, the music videos we have analyzed so far can be regarded as being representative of a larger music video production that shares a similar approach to African fashion and hair, using the open lab character of music videos to develop these themes in ways that don’t necessarily conform to the established commercial beauty canons and systemic hierarchies. These music videos engage more or less explicitly in current discourses and developments, such as the natural hair movement, for example. Music videos also play a prominent role as a medium for the presentation and dissemination of African fashion, directly and indirectly through platforms that discuss the videos – and they do not necessarily do so to please the Western gaze and fashion circuit. This attitude is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Wikipedia article on Yemi Alade’s Johnny: the song – and, with it, the video – is described as an “international smash hit”; the article goes on quite naturally to dismiss the Western world as the established center of all pop and music video activities by placing “The United Kingdom and others” at the very bottom of a long list of African countries where the song has been successful.25
So, without a doubt, one important role of music videos is to propagate knowledge about African fashion and hairstyles and thereby also to support African fashion; however, they also challenge traditional patterns of thought and social models through the way in which they present fashion and hair, showing, for example, a society that plays with gender models and embraces queer performance and fashion, as in the music videos of the South African musician Umlilo. African fashion and hair in this context, with their futuristic and non-conformist power, thus become prominent parts of a larger discourse that is trying to fgure out how African societies wish to defne themselves in the present and for the future.26"
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Here are hyperlinks for the music videos that are mentioned
in that excerpt (in the order that those videos are mentioned)
Seinabo Sey - I Owe You Nothing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUWid7BetA8&ab_channel=SeinaboSeyVEVO
Seinabo Sey,Mar 15, 2018
Statistics as of March 3, 2022 at 3:39 PM: total views -5,601,793
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Sudan Archives - Not for Sale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRlBLPSgY8&ab_channel=StonesThrow
Stones Throw, May 30, 2018
Statistics as of March 3, 2022 at 12:43 PM: total # of views - 3,176,944
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Charlotte Adigéry - High Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCkTyEsCNL4&ab_channel=CharlotteAdigeryVEVO
Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul , Jan 17, 2019
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Yemi Alade- Johnny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_XkTKoDI18
Yemi Alade, March 3, 2014
Statistics as of March 3, 2022 at 3:52 PM at 3:53 PM: 142,787,992
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