Ghana Music export dilemma; The Projection of Friends over Real Talents – Enock Agyepong

Ghana has been blessed with so many talents and key among them are in sports like football, boxing and music on the other hand but lack of self confidence have been our greatest enemy..

Let’s stay with music since that’s where we belong.

After our biggest export in The Osibisa band we haven’t had any major export again except for individuals like Rocky Dawuni and currently Wiyaala.

Most of our artist are very loud locally but their works do not travel beyond our bounders which is quite worrying.

One major problem is also our so called king makers who unfortunately have been bought physically and mentally so they have been programmed to make our artist second to Nigerian artist.

After the exploits of VIP, Tictac and Co in Nigeria no artist from Ghana have been able to make any sensible penetration yet and our cheap gatekeepers have always managed to impose these Naija acts on us to the extent that some of our artiste now believe they can never be better than these Naija artist.

Currently one of our so called major Export is Kwame Eugene since he is now getting features and making some advances into these areas but his inferiority complex is too obvious to avoid. One important ingredient of an artist is that feeling that tells you that you are better than any other artist in the world and that is what our “major” export Kwame lacks.

He has on countless occasions said his icons are Davido and wizkid and there is no way he can be better than them.

The amazing part is when Okyeame Kwame tried boosting his moral aka Vhim by saying he sings better than them he came out to say it’s not true and hey!! that is not the characteristics of an artist that can really send us beyond our boarders and go past the Nigerian boarders and then to the world. He has been accused of taking songs from other African artist which clearly should tell you that he has an issue of not fully believing in himself and if you ask me I will choose Kidi over him in that category. Unfortunately he is the one our gatekeepers have chosen and are projecting and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him probably win the Artist of the year this year.

Personally I feel he is not ready and also needs some real talk from Richy to help him get his head out of that mtn hit maker zone.

All hope is not lost and the only way we can really get a major world artist again is by forgetting about these bought gatekeepers and do it the Rouky and Wiyaala way, why am I saying this, for years they never nominated Roucky Dawuni in their Reggae category until he hit the Grammy and also Wiyaala had told them never to include her in their awards because it doesn’t make artistry sense and that’s the reason why Wiyaala is now beyond our boarders.

Kiyo Dee took me on a tour of where the real talents and future exports will be coming from and one of those places we visited was an engineer called NOVA to record one of his songs PRO and when we got there I saw young guys with different hairstyles and tattoos playing video games.

At our next section we met different guys also doing the same thing I mean playing video games so I asked him if they had nothing doing that’s why the are always playing video games? He smiled and he opened their IG pages and showed me one by one their profiles and I saw 1000s of Hits from them. He also showed me some of their concerts and I was shocked to see their following and one of them was Darko Vibes, then he said our generation believes in getting 100% out of every job we do.

I was therefore not surprised at all when I saw Kwesi Arthur at the BET Awards because I was aware of their self confident attitude.

Now my only fear is that our gatekeepers will get in there and saturate these pure breeds in the name of making money and I know they will get some but majority will not give a damn about them because nobody gave them a dog chance when they needed that helping hand and indeed they are growing beyond reach.

I was worried when I heard Kwesi Arthur do Worae and now a similar one cause you can clearly see that it is a derailment from his original roots which took him to the BETs and the recent one that blew my mind was when I saw him on an ice cream bicycle and its dangerous how hard they are trying to conform him to the norms and I hope he resets his settings and get back on track because his hard brand has got nothing to do with ice creams.

I have personally followed these young cats and have been to a couple of their listening sections and one guy i recently chanced on was Brain the Mensah and I believe that some of these new guys I’m talking about are our only hope of really going global.

Kiyo has a new single out titled “Too Wrong” please take sometime off to listen to the composition and lyrical dexterity and compare it to what is making noise out there and you might get the drift.

These guys produce their own works and are constantly creating and my joy is that their target is no where near what our gatekeepers are imagining.

Listen to STAYWOKE by Darko Vibes and you will realize that Stonebwoy had to change his style to fit in the new generation which he did so well.

Now it Looks like all you have to do locally is to study the system and link up with these so called gatekeepers and then play along the lines and a typical example is how Wendy has been able to replace Ebony with ease kudos to bullet if you know you know.

Let us be truthful to ourselves and start pushing the real talents and stop gratifying mediocrity.

More enemies popping up at the end of this article but we will keep talking till things change for the better and hope in the end they will understand and become Friends.

#VhimMoveMent

(Story: Enock Agyepong – Speech Productions)