Entertainment journalist Arnold Asamoah Baidoo added his voice to the hiplife conundrum on 3FM’s Showbiz 927 with Caleb Nii Boye. Arnold advocates that hiplife’s history should be the focus, but the genre is past saving per his reasons.
“Let’s be candid and frank with ourselves. We’ve moved past hiplife. I think the most important thing for us to do is how to preserve the history of hiplife, but as to whether we should hold on and sustain it, let’s talk that out of the conversation.”
One of the reasons Arnold listed as a factor for the death of hiplife is confusion among the originators. He cited that the absence of unity, even in the coining of the name, made the genre unattractive to the youngsters in the game.
Arnold seconded the unfortunate predicament of the hiplife genre to the ‘inventor-syndrom’. He opined that everyone wanted to be a trendsetter during the early days of the industry’s growth. Thus the continuum process broke.
Instancing the hullabaloo surrounding Azonto and Alkahida, Arnold noted them as some of the mad rushes to be known as originators.
“If you are an artiste and you are coming up, will you want to associate with something that, as Ghanaians, we are not even proud of? Are we not even united in pushing it? No. And so you will also move along your chosen path.”
Arnold ended by noting that Afrobeats has become a world-recognised genre due to the collective efforts of Nigerian artistes, saying that Ghanaians should focus on the history of hiplife and probably hold on to its contribution to Afrobeat history.