Ghanaian musician Mzbel has questioned the shift of the Ghanaian music industry from that of originality to imitation of other sounds and cultures.
The “16 Years” crooner, speaking on 3Music on August 22, lamented the loss of original Ģhanaian sounds like Hip-life in favor of imitated sounds.
“We don’t have anything original anymore,” she said. “We started Hip-life and we’re supposed to build on it. But all of a sudden we just left it and started copying the Nigerians.”
RELATED: Nii Okai announces ‘Moko Be’ celebration concert (see details)
“But these people travel here to listen to our beats and add their culture to it,” she continued. “But we just left our Hiplife. We stopped doing Hiplife. Now all of a sudden we said we are doing Afropop. And then all of a sudden something came called ‘Crank’.
“We just keep moving away from Hiplife. We could have changed Hiplife. We could have put more traditional drums in the Hiplife, we could have made the Hiplife something that the world would appreciate.
“Azonto went out on its own, nobody promoted Azonto. We could have done something with it but we left it. We could have done something original,” she argued.
READ ALSO: Burna Boy Releases Tracklist For 7th Album ‘I Told Them’—hello-gh.com
The comments by Mzbel come at a time when there’s a much-heated debate over the invasion of foreign (mostly Nigerian) music into the Ghanaian space. Many have called out Ghanaian artistes for not working hard enough to push Ghanaian music out in the international market like their Nigerian counterparts have done.
Nigerian acts, such as Burna Boy, Davido, Asake, Wizkid and many more, have done incredibly awesome works over the years in representing Nigeria at the bigger world stage
TRENDING VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwA12RW9Sac&pp=ygUJaGVsbG9naHR2