Sarkodie’s ‘Wofa Kwame’ under review

Preamble: Music is a beautiful art form that appeals to all the three domains of human’s psychological make – up. Sarkodie over the years has produced songs that satisfy these domains and communicate well with his target audience and as creative as he is, has released another one that is a mass departure from what he is usually known for.

Music Intro: Sarkodie starts the song right at the beginning with few spoken lines about what he wants to say and asks the listener to pay attention to his message.

Instrumentation: Wofa Kwame is in a normal 4/4 time and has an outstanding strong baseline that bears a great likeness to that in Nana Quarme’s Atea Donko. The beat has idiophones like bells and few percussion instruments. It doesn’t have melodic instruments like the guitars, keyboards, and wind instruments as it is usually done on most highlife – induced beats. That gives it a refreshing feel though – and for a rap song, the ’emptiness’ of the beat doesn’t take anything away from it.

Message and style: Story telling is one thing most musicians find difficult to do but those who do it well speak to the hearts of the listener. Wofa Kwame tells two stories. In the first stanza, it has the omniscient narrator [played by the rapper Sarkodie], tell a story about a man called Wofa Kwame and the struggles he is going through in life.

According to the story, Wofa Kwame has always dreamt of traveling abroad to seek greener pastures, so that he would get money back home to build a house and fend for his family. All his friends at Akyem Agogo are already outside the country and that makes his dream to follow them linger on for years. Now, he, his wife Maa Julie and daughter Josephine have rented a house at Tema Community 4 but find it difficult to even pay their rent. The wife travels to Togo to retail items to sell but that business doesn’t yield so much.

Wofa Kwame has tried a lot of embassies so much that he has lost hope and the only resort may be that he would seek spiritual help that would hasten his wish.

Then the narrator [Sarkodie] quickly switches from playing the Omniscient into telling his own story in the first person narrator style. His story is another painful one. It is about how he [‘he’ as in Sarkodie the narrator, not Sarkodie the human being] married a beautiful woman that later showed him much hate than love. He added that his mother had warned him about the lady but he did not mind and is now bearing the pain and troubles.

The song is purely rap, he didn’t sing. The chorus, as typical of most rap songs, was rapped and not sang. Yes, choruses are lines that are usually repeated after each verse of a song. They could be sang or rapped. Interpretation of Lyrical Content: The message mirrors the many woes people go through on daily basis. These are stories a lot of people can relate to because it happens a lot – especially in the Ghanaian setting.

Rating: The song is a good one but the story line is too ordinary. He could have done better by telling a unique story. I also think that he could have continued with the Wofa Kwame story without quickly shifting to tell ‘his’ story about the wicked wife. If he had developed other verses for the Wofa Kwame story, he would have had some nice plots to build an intriguing story – then we would have had some clear cut message and some moral inclinations to the song. As for the rap, he knows how to rap but the concept was quite hazy. I will rate the whole song 59.09%.

Conclusion: Sarkodie has proven his versatility in recent times and keeps soaring in his music career as he keeps surprising people by trying new things.