Youssoupha Féhé Sarr

A young student researcher and hip hop artist, I grew up in the Plateau district of Dakar in the 1990s and 2000s. I was drawn to hip hop very early on, initially through breakdancing and then through rap music in my teenage years. I also grew up in an environment where other music genres were more prevalent. I am the youngest of several creative siblings who express themselves in more eclectic styles that are often crossroads where traditional music from the Malian empire will come into collision with Afrobeat, jazz and other black musical styles, along with literary forms from the four corners of the world. In my years as a student at Gaston Berger University in Saint Louis between 2010 and 2015, I founded a live band as lead vocalist. This was an opportunity for me to share songs I had composed that I considered “not hip hop enough” to be accepted by the Senegalese rap scene, but not “not hip hop enough” to belong to any other category. This allowed me to channel my diverse influences and develop my own style, both academic and artistic. I therefore enrolled on a Master’s in African Literature and Civilization at Gaston Berger University in Saint Louis and wrote a final year dissertation on the relationship between verbal arts and the rebuilding of Senegalese cultural identity, focusing on Senegalese Rap and Slam. Currently performing as “Rhapsod”, I am putting the final touches to my first release, an EP called Juroom (‘five’ in Wolof). In parallel I have recently enrolled in a Doctoral thesis co-supervised by the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations and the Institute of African Arts; it focuses on rap in the field of orality and the likelihood that it could serve as a channel of transmission for both endogenous and exogenous knowledge.