Fast-rising afro-fusion artiste, David Ayuba, popularly known as Pzeefire, has urged industry stakeholders to rebrand highlife music to suit the system in the country.
According to him, Ghanaian highlife music is a beautiful genre which when rebranded will gain world recognition to promote the industry, adding, Ghanaians should encourage and promote our creative industry, which holds the key to the development of the country’s creative economy.
He was of the view that when Ghanaian highlife music is marketed well, it would help in the promotion of Ghana’s rich creative industry to the outside world.
“Ghanaian highlife musicians should wake up and find new ways of promoting their music like the new path dancehall and afro-pop artistes are taking, where their music is spread across,” he said.
The artiste noted that highlife musicians could gain the much needed premium if they made a conscious effort to produce good content to meet local and international standards.
“Highlife musicians should be more creative and innovative with highlife music and infuse their songs with elements that appeal to both young and old,” Pzeefire explained.
The Speech Production signee claims that though the Nigerian music industry has a lot of genres, they promote their afrobeat music which has generated the country a lot of revenue and recognition.
He mentioned that the insurgence of other genres of music possesses a great risk to the existence of the Ghanaian highlife music, adding, today its azonto, tomorrow its dancehall whiles the highlife is pushed to the background.
“It would be very important to rebrand highlife, and also there is the need to flood the industry with more songs to support the growth of the music,” he added.
Pzeefire, however, explained that even though highlife is originally a Ghanaian music genre, other countries are trying to lay claim to it while Ghanaians look on unperturbed.
He mentioned that most of the Nigerian artistes in the past visited Ghana to learn more about highlife music to add to what we have back home and are now claiming the originality of the highlife music genre while industry stakeholders look unperturbed.
He lauded the efforts of King Promise, KiDi, Mr. Eazi, and the other young ones for making efforts to give highlife a new face and urged the old ones to be vibrant in the music industry.
Pzeefire, who hoped to see an institution set up to teach highlife music, which includes all forms of Ghana’s traditional music, blamed the media, music stakeholders and the entire nation for not paying attention to Ghana’s music heritage – highlife.
Pzeefire is due to release his second EP titled In A Beautiful Place this March, which hopefully will have at least one highlife song on it.
By George Clifford Owusu