Professor John Collins Discusses Evolution of Ghanaian Music on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show.
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 Winston Amoah on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show 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’). He said he had to mediate the disagreement at a meeting at Victoria Island.
“The youth has the right to rename anything because language itself changes, culture is always changing and the dynamo is change is always the youth. So sometimes they will reject the old names but they inherited the old tradition so they re-bottle it in a new form. It’s a natural process that goes on. So sometimes maybe the word highlife may not be popular anymore but highlife is till with Ghanaians,” he further noted.
Highlife which was said to have been earned its name in the 1920s, is attributed to early musicians like Jacob Sam and the Kumasi Trio, among others. The genre had foreign influences from Liberia’s Kru Sailors, regimental music and basically the introduction of western musical instruments into Ghanaian traditional sounds. The variants of highlife have gone through various changes over time as different musicians have tried experimenting other rhythms through fusions.
Some Ghanaians have bemoaned the seeming extinction of the genre blaming it on its neglect by the younger generation of musicians. In the meantime, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), is considering making highlife an intangible heritage, at the behest of the Ghana Culture Forum.