Ghana’s Highlife to die soon – Zapp Mallet

Ace Ghanaian sound engineer and music producer, Zapp Mallet, has lamented – why? He believes very soon music of Ghanaian origin popularly known as, High-life, will die if serious efforts are not applied in promoting the genre.

According to him, High-life music is fading off and needs the attention of the present generation of Ghanaians, especially people interested in the industry to revive it; else the genre will be no more.

Speaking at African University College of Communications on the theme,'The Lost Works of Quakes', the inability of some great artworks to stand the test of time, he stated that Ghanaians are unpredictable with regards to sounds so it is difficult to tell from the production stage what a hit song is until it becomes a hit after its release.

He continued that Salsa music has been the same since his childhood days, but he can’t say same for Ghanaian music.

“I don’t know why we don’t appreciate ours or whatever is wrong with us. Why do we take foreign things and jump into it, we need to appreciate our own”, he said.

Zapp, known in real life as Emmanuel Mallet stated that it feels sad to see our arts and Ghanaian creativity dying.

“C.K. Mann is gone, Paapa Yankson is gone including some who departed earlier, and very soon Ghanaian highlife will be totally dead because we are not breeding any more High-life musicians.”

“For life to be continuous, you have to breed, and we are not breeding. I can count the number of people who can play highlife guitar in my hands, so what are we doing? We are killing our arts, we are not breeding and not reproducing” he bemoaned.