ABSTRACT
In Senegal, musicians were the first artists to become businesspeople. Youssou Ndour is one of the emblematic figures of this evolution, and some of his songs express how he himself experienced this development. “Xalis” (“Money” in Wolof),1 one of his first original compositions, is a very evocative example. His verses highlight the socioeconomic dimension of artistic work. The singer has always understood his metier as an occupation that on one hand provides pleasure for his audience and on the other provides a living for the artist. This vision has guided Youssou Ndour’s approach and his trajectory as he developed a career as a musician and made himself a name as a captain of industry. He has created an enterprise based upon the ideas his own songs convey using the basic resources he was able to secure from his artistic activities’ revenues. Starting from this correlation between the repertoire of the singer and the realizations of the economic entrepreneur, I chose to make use of art discourse to examine the way in which the figure of the entrepreneur is constructed, the roles that he chooses to play, the management style he has adopted, and the obstacles he had to face in a context that is characterized by limited state intervention in the development of cultural industries.
