Black Stars  by Deanne Sole  7 July 2008  Batman Samini 
Hiplife has been around for less than two decades, still a young
genre compared to highlife, the more entrenched style to which
it owes the second part of its name and some of its Ghanaian
flavour. Highlife rose to prominence during the early-to-mid
1900s, eventually joined by Congolese rumba and other kinds of
African music that trickle around in powerful dance patterns as
vivid as Roman mosaics.  The live horns and drums of mid-century
highlife turned into synthesisers in the 1980s, and then
disappeared altogether in this modern incarnation, replaced by
samples and electronic percussion. This innovation was borrowed
from the foreign music that gives hiplife the first part of its
name: hip-hop, obviously. As a consequence, hiplife doesn’t have
highlife’s old tolerance of instrumental solos, periods of
inspired noodling from a trumpeter or a guitarist. The only
noodling is lyric-driven rap noodling modelled on the examples
of American musicians, like t