Forget global attention with ‘adopted’ music styles –DJ Ashmen tells musicians

MICHAEL Mensah Ashley, popularly known as DJ Ashmen has shared his thoughts on the current state of Ghanaian music.

“Forget global attention with ‘adopted’ music sounds that you are doing. We have a unique music identity, Highlife and Hiplife and we must be intentional about getting it out there.

“I don’t know where the strong belief that doing foreign genre will give us global appeal is coming from. As a small country, Jamaica has been able to build a strong music identity with Reggae and Dancehall and we are happy to associate with it”, he tells musicians.

At a recent stakeholder meeting, the Executive Secretary of the Creative Arts Agency (CAA) Gyankroma Akufo-Addo, made a call for Ghana to develop a unique sound to build her musical identity to compete in the global market.

She suggested that just as some music genres were associated with certain countries, Ghana needed to toe a similar line to build a strong music presence on the global market.

DJ Ashmen’s opinion is in support of the suggestion by the Creative Arts Agency. However, the Disc Jockey who appears to have been a lone campaigner for the move in the last decade believes the suggestion has been long overdue, particularly at a time when things seemed to be getting out of hand.

“Some of us saw the danger ahead and the devastating consequence for the music industry long ago when we realised that our artistes love and cherish foreign things than ours. I always receive bashing from beatmakers when I talk about this because they feel they know better.

“But I’m throwing a challenge for us to conduct research about Ghana music from the days of palm wine, highlife music, burger highlife originated by George Darko and even Hiplife, we have our identity in all these music styles.

“So the question now is, ‘why are we trying so hard to sound American, Jamaican and even Nigerian? Is it that we don’t value what we have?’” he queried.

DJ Ashmen equally agreed that the absence of a unique music sound has been a major drawback to the industry’s global appeal, lamenting the increasing trend of Ghanaian artistes abandoning traditional sounds in the name of gaining global attention. (Related article:Ghana must develop a unique music sound to compete globally —Creative Arts Agency)

“We are here thinking our own Highlife is ‘colo’ because it’s local and old but we are happy to say we are doing Afrobeats. What is Afrobeats? Ghana has even lost the right to claim Afrobeats because we weren’t proud of our Highlife which is undoubtedly the roots of Afrobeats.

 “And we continue to shout about global appeal and attention when the solution is staring us right in our faces.  Like I’ve always said, the music industry lacks identity and it’s very bad for the future of the industry and the so-called international appeal we are all fighting for,” he stated.