Hiplife

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since December 2006.

Hip life music is an originally Ghanaian fusion of Highlife and Hip hop. Recorded in Ghanaian languages (Ga, Twi etc...), Hiplife is rapidly gaining popularity through out West Africa and abroad, especially in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Germany. Often dubbed "Ghanaian hip hap" Hiplife is a youth driven genre that has been criticized for promoting immorality through vulgar and sexually explicit lyrics.

The history of Ghanaian hip hop goes back to the 1980s, when performers like K. K. Kabobo and Gyedu Blay Ambolley found a small audience performing Highlife variations with fast spoken, poetic lyrics. With time, Ghanaians became influenced by American hip hop, Reggae, and Highlife pioneers like the Daddy Lumba.

Hiplife first started out in the early 1990s by a rapper named Reginald “Reggie Rockstone” Osei. In Twi, Reggie would flow over reggae-like beats. Reggie Rockstone has been described as the "Godfather of Hiplife". Oddly enough, in several radio interviews in 2004, Reggie Rockstone stated that he does not perform hiplife. Other Ghanian rappers like Lord Kenya, Da Multy Crew, The Native Funk Lords, Castro Destroyer, MzBel and VIP continued the trend of hiplife music which is now one of the most popular forms of music in West Africa.

The most popular hiplife musicians include Tic Tac, the three person Vision in Progress (VIP) and Batman Samini, who won a MOBO award for his contribution to Hip-Life in 2006. Since the rise of these popular musicians, hip life has grown steadily more popular abroad.