I was scrolling through my feed on instagram and I came across a
post by Reggie Rockstone that said: ‘Hip Life is 26years old’.
For a minute, I thought it was another usual post of grand Papa until I
realized he was really serious.
Wait, Reggie Rockstone, did you say Hip life, as a music genre is
26years old, for real?
To begin with let me say, happy 26th birthday to Hip life in
Ghana. We have come a long way as a music industry with that genre.
If the music genre was a human being whether a woman or man by now it
should be preparing to settle down, lol.
Any way, we need to ask ourselves as an industry some few questions if
Reggie Rockstone’s calculation of hip life is really true.
1.
So hip life is 26years and the media did not know?
How can the media be always playing a genre called Hip life and they did not
even know it was 26years.
2.
So hip life is 26years, what happen to the big
celebration, the hype, the experiences, and the concerts, the culture and media
attention.
3.
Hip life is 26 years and we cannot still count even
ten songs that are clearly classified as Hip life.
4.
Hip life is 26years and we still struggling to
define the genre till now.
5.
What happened to Musiga putting in measures that
will celebrate the Hip lifer artistes of old and now?
I know why there is no buzz about the thing; we don’t have a hip life
culture so there is nothing to celebrate.
Also some schools of thought believe that Reggie Rockstone is not the
originator of Hip life so he cannot determine when the genre started.
Finally, Hip life has no roots; it has no soul and no direction. If Hip
life did have roots, over the years we will not go through a face where people
brought in their own genre from ‘Twipop’, Crunk music, GH Hip hop, and so forth
just to kick the genre Hip life out.
It is sad that Hip life is 26years old and there was not a single
opportunity created for the new generation to know the history of the genre and
what it stands for just because we don’t have any history to share.
It’s a shame that we are all part of an industry that does not have
anything worth celebrating aside destroying ourselves.
