Koffi Olomide Research Paper

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of popular culture in one particular artist Koffi Olomide in Africa. The reason of choosing this artist is because of his talents in music career and how it has dominated the continent and how it has expanded across other continents.
Artist: Koffi Olomide
Soukous is the most Popular Music in Africa. It is a musical genre that originated in Congo (Zaire) during the 1930s and the 1940s, and has gained popularity across the continent of Africa. Soukous from the French word for “shake”, is a genre term for modern Zairean/Congolese dance music (Soukous, 2015). However, it has now been played throughout Africa, known as Lingala Music in East Africa Congo music in Anglophone West Africa. Koffi …show more content…

He has earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and a Master’s in Mathematics from the University of Paris (Soukous, 2015). Due to several political turmoil back home in Kinshasa, Koffi has made numerous trips in between Kinshasa and Paris recruiting his teams and in which sometimes French government has accused him in bringing people with him without visas and some of his fan teams never want to return home to Kinshasa. Out of all these confusions and political oppressions, Koffi has been one of the richest artist and talented musician in Africa in music career among all his colleagues or the people he has started music with or whom may have departed from him and rejoining other musicians. Koffi has released many several songs during his career in music across Africa, North America, and Asia (Soukous, …show more content…

According to Pell (2014), “but in colonial West Africa, anonymity and pseudonymity had dimensions not found in Europe”. They meant resistance to the colonial obsession with eliminating the elasticity and mobility of West African naming practices. They also made possible continuities with African oral genres (PECK, 2014). Thus Newell explores, “for example, how writers attributed praise-names to themselves and took on the role of the trickster that figures in so many West African folktales (PECK, 2014). According to Peck (2014), throughout, Newell, “emphasizes anonymous and pseudonymous writers' confidence in the absolute publicness and efficacy of their words, despite their own blurred identities”. If in British West Africa "public opinion was regarded as a new type of discourse synonymous with newspaper writing" (43), then what Newell has illuminated is a utopic, nonhierarchical (though bourgeois) space for the formation of political and national consciousness at least as fecund as the European space two hundred years earlier that inspired Habermas's work on the public sphere (PECK,

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