John Collins explains why Ghanaian musicians are ditching ‘highlife’

Ethnomusicologist, Professor John Collins, has explained why a lot of the current crop of Ghanaian musicians no longer want to be tagged with highlife descriptions.

John Collins, who has been very instrumental in documenting Ghana’s music in books such as Highlife Time, told Joy FM on Wednesday, March 20, 2024 that it was not out of place for a younger generation of musicians to drift from an older version of art.

According to him, highlife had gone through various stages and that even though most recent Ghanaian songs may retain the highlife DNA, the youth would want to call it by different names.

“The biggest part of social change in any society is the youth. They will recycle the culture and often they will oversee that the culture they are recycling has been inherited from their ancestors but they want to put it into a different bottle. And if we went back to the 1920s, I am sure there were people complaining bitterly about why they changed the name from osibisaba (which is the old Fante name for highlife) to highlife. I am sure there was a controversy about this. But sometimes it doesn’t really matter about the name. Today we call highlife beat jama beat. The youth gave that name. It wasn’t the old name for highlife. I think it’s a natural process.

The same thing happened in Nigeria with Afrobeats. You know when the came up with Afrobeats in 2012. And by the way it was a Ghanaian. I think it was DJ Abrantie that coined it,” he told Winston Amoah.

John Collins, a music Professor at the University of Ghana also noted that during a talk at Felabration in Nigeria, there was a confusion between the youth and the older musicians about the introduction of Afrobeats which they thought was an adulteration of Fela’s Afrobeat (without an ‘s’).

Credit: myjoyonline.com

 

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