Ghanaian Afrobeat singer, Kelvyn Boy, born Kelvin Brown has a new mission thus to take his motherland, Ghana to the Grammys.
He made this known in an interview with Billboard after he had gained recognition and support from some of the world’s biggest music companies.
Kelvyn Boy doubled up on that mission with his debut full-length, ‘Blackstar’, released in November on the new label he is signed unto, Blakk Arm Entertainment.
The project became massive and received attention from Apple Music’s ‘Africa Now Radio’ and this scored him the cover on Spotify’s African Heat Playlist.
He further earned support from some of the world’s well-known music companies including Deezer, Boomplay, and Audiomack.
Afrobeat singer Kelvyn Boy’s love of music started in church. His father sang in the choir and raised him through gospel, reggae greats like Lucky Dube, and country music and this, Kelvyn Boy says shares many of the same chord progressions as church music.
By 2010, when he was 19, he started performing genre-spanning covers at some local pubs in Assin Fosu and noticed how many people would approach him afterward to ask if he had his music. “That was when I realized what I could do,” he recalled.
Though Kelvyn Boy was eager to pursue a music career, his father encouraged him to finish his education first. “He was like, ‘You’re not going to get money. I did music and got nothing.’ But I knew what I had and where I was going,” he said.
In 2017, Kelvyn Boy signed a record deal with Stonebwoy’s Burniton Music Group and, after releasing a handful of singles, won the Vodafone Ghana Music Award for unsung artiste of the year in 2018. The following summer, he released his debut EP, T.I.M.E., with the agenda of introducing Ghana to his fusion of Afrobeat, Afro-pop, reggae, and dancehall.
“I was the one campaigning for Afrobeat so that EP was to give people time for the genre to grow on them,” he said.
“To give them time to understand that Ghanaians can do Afrobeat really proper. If I was from Nigeria, it wasn’t going to be hard like that.”
Kelvyn Boy doubled down on that mission with his debut full-length, Blackstar, released in November on his new label home, Blakk Arm Entertainment.
He recorded it over the last three years while touring Belgium, the United Kingdom, Australia, and some other places, always traveling with a mobile studio.
Now with all the recognition gained, he has set for himself a roadmap that will place Ghana in a better position when it comes to the music industry. He said: “I want to take Ghana to the Grammys.”
By far, in Ghana, Rocky Dawuni, Shatta wale, and Manifest are some of the artists from Ghana to have been nominated for a Grammy award.
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