A Senior Lecturer at the Department of Music of the University of Ghana, Professor Edmund John Collins, says the generation of Ghanaian musicians who brought what was later referred to as ‘hiplife’ wanted to have nothing to do with the know Ghanaian genre of highlife.
Professor Collins said the ‘hiplife’ generation was originally doing pure hiphop adopted from the West but later had to fuse in highlife when they realised they cannot do away with the traditional genre.
The ‘hiplifers’ were doing hiphop only that it was in the local language, he said.
The professor of music said what the ‘hiplifers’ referred to as rap was already a feature of Ghanaian music with the likes of Gyedu Blay Ambulley doing that.
Professor Collins, who was born and bred in Ghana, made these known on TV3’s 20 by Twenty over the weekend.
He said there was a huge gulf between the older musicians and the new ones due to the scrapping of music as a course of study from the education curricula by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) administration.
“The youth had no role models because music was taken from education,” he told host Winston Amoah.
He accused the ‘hiplife’ generation of wanting to break the status quo by trying to speak very fast.
“They want[ed] to be artificial,” he stressed.
But he commended the Kufuor administration for heeding to calls to re-introduce music in the school curricula, thus sustaining what Ghana has been widely known for, highlife.
Watch full interview below:
By Emmanuel Kwame Amoh|3news.com|Ghana