Founder of Oneplay Africa and Ottobi Entertainment, Nana Yaw 18, has bemoaned Ghana’s failure to preserve hiplife, a genre he believes could have propelled the country to greater global recognition in music.

Speaking on The Chat on Channel One TV on Saturday, July 12, 2025, Nana Yaw 18, stressed that while countries like Nigeria have succeeded in pushing Afrobeats to the world, Ghana lost the opportunity to do the same with hiplife because of internal neglect and lack of unity.

“When you go to the Grammys, you’ll see categories like heavy metal, funk, and electronic music, and you’ll wonder if people still even do those genres,” he said. “But they’re there because they’ve been sustained. That’s what Ghana failed to do with hiplife.”

According to him, hiplife was Ghana’s unique identity in music, but the genre faded due to a perception that it was outdated, with many young artists abandoning it in favour of more trendy genres like Afrobeats.

“Anytime our Nigerian brothers want to laugh at us, they remind us that we had hiplife, but we failed to sustain it,” he added.

Nana Yaw 18 also blamed the situation partly on Ghana’s tendency to downplay the contributions of pioneers like Reggie Rockstone and Zapp Mallet.

“We killed our own genre because some people felt Reggie Rockstone didn’t deserve to own hiplife or Zapp Mallet didn’t have a stake in it. That mindset hurt us,” he said.

He called for a change in how the music industry treats its legacy genres and urged Ghanaians to support and evolve what is theirs rather than always chasing what’s trending elsewhere.

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