Highlife musician, Terry Asare Boamah, popularly known as Dada Hafco, has bemoaned that most Ghanaians have the perception that highlife musicians are villagers.
The hit maker of the song ‘yebewu nti’ made this known during an interview session on a popular television station in Accra.
He lamented that due to the improper way highlife music has been branded, it has become a challenge to break away from the perception that has already been formed.
“There must be an agenda to package the highlife music from jump. In Ghana, everybody has a certain mindset that when you do highlife you are a villager. That is out there. When I go on the radio or TV to speak, people will go like is that a highlife artist speaking English? Some of the greats that came before us have expressed these challenges over and over. It is just a myth that we have put at the back of our minds”
When asked if he had any issue with the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMA) since he constantly makes mention of the awards in his music, he answered in the negative, but noted that, there is a lot more to be done with regards to categorizations.
He stressed that the main genre that Ghana is known for is highlife music but then for some reason during awards nights, the highlife music category is not made to stand out, out of all the other music genres.
“I mean for me I don’t have a problem with them, that is the VGMAs. I always give shout-outs to them for recognizing my hard work and all that. But I think we can do better with our categorization; the way we categorize our music. Because the only genre that has been born and bred in Ghana is highlife and so why do we relegate it to the background when we are speaking about Ghanaian music”.
Dada Hafco added that most artists have flawed in keeping the heritage of Ghana because “when talking about all other genres of music, we are living in the shadows of other people”.
Explaining his assertion, he stressed that other countries have claimed their music genre in a way that the moment you sing in that music genre, you will be tagged as someone from that country but that is not the case in Ghana since most artists focus more on other music genres than the highlife.
“Countries that have claimed these genres to be theirs, when you perform or sound like any of these genres anywhere, somebody might think that is where you are coming from. If you do hip hop everybody knows you are coming from America, if you do reggae/dancehall everyone knows you are from Jamaica. Now the Nigerians are claiming Afrobeats to be theirs. So, when you do that everyone thinks you are a Nigerian. What will you do for people to know you are a Ghanaian; and that is highlife music”.
The highlife artiste then advised that if organizers of the VGMA make the highlife category the biggest award of the night, it will lure the other artists to take on the highlife music very serious and further progress the nation.
“Imagine the VGMA coming out to say that this year the biggest award of the night is the one who wins the highlife award. Subsequently, everyone will drop their guns and get into the highlife zone. When you do so, you are nationalizing it and it becomes a movement we can all push”.
