After some 30 years of blazing the Burger Highlife trail, Highlife legend and King of the genre George Darko is to headline a major concert this year, to celebrate more than three decades of the genre.
Mirror Image Productions, Darko’s label has said, adding that George would be joined in concert by other celebrated acts cutting across , in celebrating this milestone, in a major concert.
The organizers have hinted that the concert, set for the national capital, Accra, would be held in October.
“Celebration of highlife with Gerorge Darko will bring together the best of musicians from mainly the highlife industry. For us as a label, it is an opportune time to reward the dedication and love that George has shown to a genre that till date forms the bedrock of what we call a music industry in Ghana,” Gilbert Boakye Nhyira of Mirror Image said.
The date for the concert, which Mirror Image says will be announced in subsequent press announcements, will be one to be remembered,” they’ve promised.
“This is going to be a once in a lifetime event, and we are hopeful of its success”.
The concert according to Mirror Image will also mark thirty years of the Burger Highlife genre, spearheaded single-handedly by Darko.
Years after blazing the trail of what, would later go on to become an appreciable subset of highlife, Darko’s Burger Highlife still reigns, and can be seen and heard subtly in modern day Ghanaian songs.
The concert will surely rekindle and ignite the passion and drive that accompanied and embraced Burger Highlife years ago, Mirror Image has said. A whole subculture with its own fashion and way of life, Burger Highlife through the years has found a perfect home in the life of Highlife as a universal genre. Through the like of George Darko, Lee Duodu and Charles Amoah, the genre has grown over the years, with a huge cult following.
It is a distinctive form of highlife music created by Ghanaian immigrants to Germany. It is considered a German musical style. In the 1980s, Reggae music was gaining popularity worldwide and was carrying with it a growing popularity for other forms of world music that were easy to dance to. Highlife music, often fused with Reggae, gained a wider audience in Europe and North America at this time. During the late 1970s-early 1980s, there was a massive exodus of Ghanaians to foreign lands with many making the cities of Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg their second home. Burger-Highlife was born when Ghanaian musicians in Germany started collaborating with German musicians and producers. They created a crossover music style from highlife, disco and funk music. This creation of a cross-cultural fertilization between two nations and two different cultures bears all the significant hallmarks of co-operation. People from different cultural backgrounds came together, exchanged thoughts, ideas and hopes, and by doing so, they created something new and exciting that had an instant appeal and a lasting impact on Ghana and the Ghanaian and other communities worldwide. This distinctive form of music, dubbed "Burger-Highlife", has had a lasting influence of highlife music worldwide.
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