Ghanaian rapper M.anifest has said that Hiplife is dead in a news documentary by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) titled Hiplife Rewind.
Speaking in the documentary the rap star posited that Hiplife is dead. According to the Ghanaian rapper, Hiplife is dead because the young people are no longer interested in it.
“Hiplife is dead because the driving force of the music is the younger people and the younger people do not identify with Hiplife,” he asserted, shifting in his seat and sitting up.
According to him, Hiplife tastemakers also contributed to Hiplife’s death because they were too conservative to recognise and participate in the evolution of music in West Africa at the time.
“The originators of Hiplife were a bit too precious about what it should be so as new versions sonically were happening, you could hear people saying, ‘Oh, this Jama, this Azonto, is watered down, it’s not real’,” he noted, adding that insisting on the “idea of real,” these industry powers failed to identify that: “You have to evolve or perish [and that] is what any music form has to understand.”
“Those who were gatekeeping Hiplife were refusing to acknowledge the evolution and the thing must evolve. The thing must evolve,” he stressed. “For it to survive, the thing must evolve.”
The documentary features creatives who made significant contributions to the genre’s inception, and how they aimed to make the sound appealing to the western audience.
The genre Hiplife birthed Ghanaian megastars like VVIP (formerly VIP), Tic (formerly Tic Tac), Lord Kenya, BukBak, 4×4, Kontihene, Bak Tye, Tinny, Scizo,Omanhene Pozo, Obrafour, Okyeame Kwame, M.anifest, M3nsa, Sarkodie, etc.
M.anifest who has been in the rap music game since made his debut in the Ghana music industry in 2005. He has been linked to and compared to his compatriot Sarkodie, Nigerian MI Abaga, and South African Nasty C.
In the meantime, Legendary Rockstone pioneered the Hiplife genre in 1994 by fusing hip-hop beats with a playful sense of production and a uniquely African cadence of lyricism and dialect.
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