No Show For Nana Boroo & Castro

If the recently-released Ghana Music Award nomination is a reflection of the main awards’ night, then Ghanaian hip-lifers Nana Boroo and Castro should be getting ready for a shocker.

Even though their ‘Aha Ye De’ and ‘African Girls’ songs caused a stir on various chart shows across Ghana, the two songs have not been able to repeat that incursion on the Ghana Music Awards nomination list.

Last Friday, Charterhouse, organizers of the event, released the nominations for the award at the Golden Tulip Hotel, during a downpour. Surprisingly, singer Kwabena Kwabena beat every other artiste with 9 nominations, with 3 from collaborative works with other artistes.

Gospel songstress Cecelia Marfo came close with 7 nominations while rapper Trigmatic led the hiphop/hiplife force with a total of 7 nominations.

Meanwhile, the publicly accepted ‘Aha Yede’ by Nana Boroo and ‘African Girls’ by Castro ft Asamoah Gyan received only 3 and 5 nominations respectively.

VIP, Eazzy, D-Black and No Tribe received 5 nominations each. The nomination night attracted a number of industry players including actors and the inky fraternity, with Kofi Okyere as MC.

There were exhilarating performances by artistes as Bless, Efya, and No Tribe whose performance was adjudged the best on the night.

The group performed on stage even though it was raining heavily in the middle of the ceremony.

The 2011 Ghana Music Awards ceremony is scheduled for the Accra International Conference Centre (Dome) on April 9.

The public can vote for their favourite artists by texting the category name from A-I and the name of the artist of choice to MTN short code 1767.

Already, the usual controversies that rock the award have started. Ruff & Smooth and VIP have so far complained about the nominations.

Ruff & Smooth was not nominated at all with claims that their ‘Swagger’ song was nominated last year. However the duo said ‘Swagger’, at that time, was a single.

They released the album subsequently; hence they expected that other songs on the album would get nominations. VIP’s Paradise Entertainment was also not happy that the trio’s ‘Away’ song was not included in the Afro Pop category.

Their reason was that the organizers nominated the song for the category last year but later dropped it because it was a single then. Now that its album was out, they expected that the song would have been nominated in that category.