Wei Ye Oteng,
Acclaimed music producer Wei Ye Oteng has decried the state of music today.
“Check our songs [these days] – It’s two minutes and thirty seconds,” he noted to Nana Romeo on Entertainment Capital, Saturday, July 22, 2023, on Accra 100.5 FM.
He said it all comes down to today’s unbridled reliance on samples and loops for music programming.
“How many samples do you have and how long can you creatively stretch it in an arrangement for a song?” he quizzed.
He said, this is why “all our songs are now two minutes, thirty seconds or two minutes, forty-five seconds and they claim this is standard practice for music nowadays.”
Oteng said due to this, music veterans like Adane Best would struggle in the studio.
He challenged the notion that people have a short attention span for music consumption these days.
“Go and listen to the Gospel songs they take their time and programme,” he challenged. “Don’t we listen to them?”
There are plenty beautiful music creations that “when you listen to, knocks you off [your feet],” he noted, citing that “Samini and the likes, up till today, are doing music that when you listen, you feel the vibe – it touches your soul.”
However, “unfortunately,” he lamented, “the masses are doing fried rice songs.”
In Ghana, fried rice, alias check-check, is cheap fast food on the streets made for pockets which cannot afford the more expensive Chinese Restaurant option.
In Oteng’s view, the songs he considers fried rice music have made music promotion tiresome and tricky. Thus, a lot of pomp and pageantry and controversy is needed to sustain public interest in a song these days.
Employing a bit of hyperbole, he said sometimes, artiste managers “have to slap the artiste [to cause a stir] to bring their song back into public attention else, it will die in just two months”.
Here, he congratulated and sent “shout outs to George Britton – see the way he was able to keep Camidoh’s song [Sugarcane] on and on”.
“If you don’t use strategy, your song will die,” Justice 'Wei Ye' Oteng stressed.
