Every now and then, there is someone or a group of people claiming to have originated something in our creative industry.
This is evident in debates over the origins of highlife, hiplife, azonto, Afrobeats and Afro-dancehall.
The latest is adowa rap. Rapper Strongman, in the opening of his song The Legacy, claims he was the first to rap on an adowa beat.
He may have said that for the sake of hip hop braggadocio, but as an arts and culture journalist, a writer dedicated to telling our stories, and a music analyst, I need to do my job. We cannot distort history. Our responsibility is to fact-check such claims so they are not passed on to the next generation as fact. These are some of the subtle ways through which facts are twisted. For example, you can’t do a song and say the first President of Ghana is J.J. Rawlings, and expect that everybody keeps quiet because you have artistic licence to distort facts. That becomes artistic dishonesty.
Adowa is a type of traditional music and dance common among the Akan people of Ghana. The music is mostly expressed in 6/8 or 12/8 time signatures. It employs instruments such as the atumpan, apentemma, petia, dawuro (bell), frikyiwa (castanets) and kwadum.
With the advent of hiplife in the early 1990s, Ghanaian rappers started rapping over highlife beats and other traditional Ghanaian rhythms like adowa.
Reggie Rockstone’s first album, which cemented his place as the originator of hiplife, had an adowa version of Maka a Maka, the title track of the album. That album was released on 1st September 1997.
Prior to that, Akyeame had released Brebre Obaa Hemaa earlier that same year. That song, like many others that emerged later, fused 6/8 adowa rhythms with 2/4 or 4/4 hip hop kicks and snares.
Other songs that followed this model included Adua N’abu and Eko Ma Mo by Nkasei, Okomfo Kom (AIDS) by Okomfo Kwadee, and Nana Quarme’s Eno Abena, which featured Obrafour’s rap.
Obour also released Nana Bour and Obour, songs that were done on adowa-induced beats. Many years later, Strongman, Flowking Stone, Amerado and others also joined the bandwagon.
It is therefore not factual for Strongman to assert that he originated adowa rap when, at the time Akyeame and Reggie Rockstone started rapping on adowa beats, he was only about four years old.
I have seen some of his fans and supporters argue that Obituary, his first adowa song he is using to support his claim of originating adowa rap, was done on a full and pure adowa beat. That is not true. The adowa rhythm on that song, which was not even played live, was not properly represented. If we subject it to proper ethnomusicological analysis in terms of the drums and musical components, one would realise that not all the adowa drums were used. Even the atumpan was not played correctly. The only thing they got right was the adowa ostinato in the bell pattern.
Obour and Reggie Rockstone’s adowa rap songs employed the appropriate local musical instruments. Now let’s address the argument that those who rapped on a fusion of adowa and hip hop beats do not qualify to be part of the origination conversation. That is like telling me that unless someone performs highlife like Kumasi Trio, Kwaa Mensah or Koo Nimo, then it is not highlife enough. It is also like saying a Ghanaian rapper has to rap only over palmwine highlife before their craft can be called hiplife. Because palmwine highlife is one of the early forms of the genre. That argument will be ludicrous.
There are always variants of genres and music forms, and the fusions these artistes and producers created for adowa were no different.
Strongman is a good rapper. It is evident in his delivery, an attribute that has won him the Best Rap Performance award at the TGMA on two occasions.
However, he goofed with that claim on The Legacy. We will not allow factual errors masquerading as rap vibes to fester.
