Nana Yaw 18
THE FOUNDER of Oneplay Africa and Ottobi Entertainment, Nana Yaw 18, has expressed disappointment over Ghana’s inability to preserve hiplife, a genre he believes could have catapulted the country to global recognition in music.
Speaking on The Chat on Channel One TV, Nana Yaw 18 attributed Ghana’s failure to internal neglect and lack of unity, noting that while countries like Nigeria have successfully promoted Afrobeats worldwide, Ghana lost the opportunity to do the same with hiplife.
“When you look at the Grammys, you’ll see categories like heavy metal, funk, and electronic music, and you might wonder if people still engage with those genres,” he said, and added, “But they’re there because they’ve been sustained. That’s what Ghana failed to do with hiplife.”
Nana Yaw 18 believes hiplife was Ghana’s unique musical identity, but it faded due to a perception that it was outdated, with many young artistes abandoning it for trendier genres like Afrobeats.
“Anytime our Nigerian counterparts want to poke fun at us, they remind us that we had hiplife, but we failed to sustain it,” he added. Nana Yaw 18 also attributed the situation to Ghana’s tendency to downplay the contributions of pioneers like Reggie Rockstone and Zapp Mallet. “We killed our own genre because some people felt Reggie Rockstone didn’t deserve to own hiplife or Zapp Mallet didn’t have a stake in it. That mindset hurt us,” he said.
He called for a change in how the music industry treats its legacy genres, and urged Ghanaians to support and evolve what is theirs rather than constantly chasing what’s trending elsewhere.