Chairman of the Ghana Rights Organization (GHAMRO) Rex Owusu Marfo, who is popularly known in the music circles as Rex Omar, has expressed displeasure about how the VGMA board classifies some genre in the music industry.
According to the legendary highlife musician, most of the songs making waves in the music industry currently are highlife, but the organizers of the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMA) have always failed with their categorization – which he believes is slowly eliminating the genre from the system.
“The VGMA board are confused, they don’t know what highlife music is,” Rex Omar told Dr Cann on Happy FM‘s Showbiz Xtra.
“Adina’s song Makoma, is highlife and not Afro Pop but the new generation normally choose to call their tracks Afro pop instead of highlife. It is time for us to define highlife music well.”
Omar, who has over the years questioned the work of the VGMA board, especially with their categorization of music added that, “The likes of Shatta Wale and other musicians are doing highlife but they are not classified as such.”
“It has to be noted that the likes of Kidi, Kwame Eugene, and Dada Hafco are all doing highlife music. However, there are different styles of highlife music, because my style of highlife is different from the likes of George Darko, ET Mensah, Kakaiku and so on.”
Finally Rex Omar indicated that, when he ‘dropped’ his ‘Didadadidi’ track those days, it was tagged as contemporary highlife which according to him was unfortunate because it was not highlife.
The vociferous musician has been doing music for thirty five (35) years, and he’s is mostly known as one of the loudest advocates highlife music.
He recently released a new single ‘Nhyira’ featuring Trigmatic and produced by Osei Kwaku.
By: Eugene Baah