Rap reporters give hip-hop twist to news

Music artists' unconventional look at events is gaining popularity

Two Senegalese hip-hop artists are taking current affairs in a brash new direction - rapping the news.

Dakar-based musicians Xuman and Keyti deliver the week's top domestic and global stories in verse on "Journal Tele Rappe" - JTR to the cool kids - to a television and YouTube audience of thousands.

"It's the news like any other news, except that it's rapping, there is humor in it. We don't just give the news - we cover positions that are highly subjective, and the public consensus too," said Keyti, a 41-year-old whose real name is Cheikh Sene.

Xuman, a slender, dreadlocked forty-something known in more formal circles as Makhtar Fall, came up with the idea several years ago, frustrated at having to cede the mic to news anchors during TV and radio broadcasts.

"I wondered if it wouldn't be a bad thing to be able to mix rap, news and education or entertainment," he said.

The pair have years of considerable chart success between them and have been known for social and political activism spanning more than a decade.

Xuman raps in French, the official language of Senegal, while Keyti delivers his lines in Wolof, the local tongue.

They use a Senegalese producer known as No-Face Undacova for the music, with a local company called Level Studio taking care of design and production.

The show, in its second six-month season, goes out on Friday nights on the privately owned Senegalese station 2STV and is then posted on the duo's YouTube channel, which has almost 12,500 subscribers.

The pair cover topics as diverse as local politics and foreign wars, and their unconventional twist on the week's events is gaining in popularity.

A recent bulletin featuring a guest rapper called Hyde reporting from the scene on the escalating conflict in Gaza attracted 12,800 views within four days of going online.

"Salam, shalom, live from Gaza. ... The Jewish state has little to say on the errors ascribed to it. ... Netanyahu speaks to the need to restore calm. So (Israel) arms itself and the world must be silent," Hyde told his audience, sporting a helmet and flak jacket among the ruins of a destroyed house.

"Of course there will always be people who will say 'You shouldn't have said this or that', but all I did was draw on the opinions of the left and the right, without necessarily giving my own opinion," Hyde said in Dakar.

The team "has no leash", said Keyti. "There is nobody to slap us on the wrist, to say 'You cannot say that'. As long as we have this freedom, we will use it.

"We're not journalists, we are artists first. For us, (JTR) is a work of art."

Xuman prefers a halfway house, arguing that "journalist-artist" is the most appropriate way of describing the rapping news anchors.

Every week, it's a race against the clock to produce the show, said the pair, who work on a shoestring budget, although cash from the YouTube hits has paid for some studio equipment.

The fans come in many shapes and sizes, but are united in their admiration for a project they see as revitalizing a staid mass media that is a turnoff for many younger Senegalese.

"I love the concept because it combines entertainment, awakening the senses and information," said Samba Diaite, 31, from Dakar.

(China Daily 08/05/2014 page10)