Three-time Grammy Awards nominee, Rocky Dawuni, has waded in the argument of role of languages in the marketability of songs.
Although he asserts that music has its own language, he admitted that there are exceptions.
He told Kwame Dadzie on Joy FM’s Twitter Spaces that for songs that have special themes meant to inform people, language of the target audience matters.
“I was touching on issues that deal with the rights of people, inspiring people and I felt that a language that could access a bigger audience in terms of the lyrics was a good way to position in order to gain a much more immediate universal comprehension to the songs so that is why I chose English,” he noted.
He said growing up he was exposed to other Ghanaian local languages and even uses some of them in his compositions but he felt that the English was a way he could really be able to connect to audiences in and outside Ghana.
“I think it really served me well to be able to push through that language [English] and also variants like Pidgin,” he added.
Speaking on the Spaces, Frank Owusu Kwabena (Franky 5), a gospel music promoter and media personality stressed that gospel musicians also pay attention to language.
Just like Rocky, Franky intimated that gospel songs are meant to evangelize and that the moment the communication is lost, the import of the gospel is defeated.
He cited Joe Mettle’s ‘Bo Nooni’ and Diana Hamilton’s ‘Adom’ as songs that had cross-over effects because the musicians did part of the compositions in English, a language that is spoken by about 1.4 billion people across the world.
Rocky Dawuni has been nominated in the Grammy Awards on three occasions. He is also the Goodwill Ambassador for Environment at the United Nations.
Some of his songs are ‘In Ghana’, ‘Beautiful People’, ‘Woara’, ‘Gonna Take it Easy’, among others.
‘Joy Entertainment Unpacked’ airs on Joy FM’s Twitter handle on Wednesdays at 8pm.
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