Knii Lante
Doctor cum reggae artiste, Knii Lante recently wrote one long open letter to music award organizers specifically Charterhouse, organizers of the prestigious annual Vodafone Ghana music awards.
In the letter, he talked about reggae being bunched up with dancehall, and to him, our Ghanaian musicians are not doing dancehall but rather Azonto-hall.
He posted, “Reggae is bunched up with dancehall which is a travesty of justice. True dancehall is yet to be clearly differentiated from Azonto-hall and this leads to people playing all sorts of beats (from hip hop to azonto ) and rapping in patois over them to qualify into the Reggae/Dancehall category.”
Addressing his sentiments in an interview with Pluzz Fm, he disclosed that yes, he labelled Ghanaian dancehall as ‘Azonto-hall’ because our GH dancehall acts just take a danceable beats, speak some few patoi on it, and then labelled it as a dancehall.
When asked by the host why he made the above points, He said, “Yes, for me I’m even struggling to differentiate between what our local acts are doing down here as compared to what it’s been done in Jamaica. Ghanaian dancehall artistes are doing Azonto-hall because all they do is to take a danceable beats and do some patoi over it and then call it dancehall”.
He continued, “But in Jamaica where dancehall originates from, that’s not what they do over there, there is a vast difference between theirs and ours but we still call our dancehall”. He ended.
