• Rocky Dawuni calls for unity among musicians
• The musician says apart from unity, Ghana’s music industry needs investors
• He believes with these two ‘instruments’, the industry will flourish
icon Rocky Dawuni has observed that Ghana’s progress on the world music map is at a snail’s pace because of a lack of unity and investments.
Describing the journey as “a fight in isolation”, Rocky Dawuni in an interview with Franky5 on Hitz FM’s ‘This Is Gospel’, Sunday, said although the country can boast of talents, “our institutions are not strong enough to be able to push artistes who have the potential.”
“We are there artistically and talent-wise but we are not there collectively as one voice. What I mean is that we have individual talents who are all incredible and amazing but they’re all working individually through their own efforts to create that type of attention.”
He continued: “We haven’t been able to harness that collective power together to create a face of Ghanaian music. That is, a combination of all that we have at the same time defining a certain sound that is authentic to us.”
Drawing a comparison between Ghana’s music industry and that of Nigeria, Rocky Dawuni asseverated that Nigeria has seen a lot of investments in its music industry, greasing the wheels for talents to be more successful.
According to the 52-year-old musician, the level of support Nigerians give their musicians is profound, a trait Ghana has to emulate in order to change the narrative.
He said: “With Nigeria, everywhere you go in the world, even if you’re calling only Nigerians in that city, they can fill concert halls and that’s why Nigerian artistes have had the amazing ability… They’ve been great, innovative and forceful but at the same time, any place you go where you play, there is such a contingent of people because they believe and support and there has been collective support of their music too. They have had investments in that area for a long time. All the major labels had footprints in Nigeria.”
In the case of Ghana, “It’s been a fight in isolation. We don’t have unity among our musicians.”
The Grammy Award nominee in his submission called on musicians to unite and eschew bickering. He pointed out that while he reckons the marketing and public relations agenda for musicians to engage in lyrical war, known in the music circles as ‘beef’, “when it becomes a focus, when an industry is defined by that, then we are not taking the path of progress.”
Rocky Dawuni’s sixth studio album ‘Branches of The Same Tree’ was nominated for Best Reggae Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2015. The music icon is currently promoting ‘Woara’, an indigenous highlife song.