The Black Arts: CELEBRATING GHANAIAN WOMEN IN MUSIC

Being a woman in any field requires you to be something more than you are, requires you to have to strive harder, ask harder, demand harder, act harder for the same things your male counterparts may have served to them on a platinum platter.

In spite of the battles women have had to fight and win in the past to create this fairly 'Utopian world' for the women of 2014, our Utopia can be a Utopian hell instead.

I dedicated this month of July on a music TV show I host, 30Minitz, to the celebration of Ghanaian women in music. The aim for this is to raise a month-long discourse about the Ghanaian music industry and it's relations with women. We commemorate Ghanaian female musicians who have had to break through numerous barriers raised against them simply for being female; Religious barriers (It's 'dishonorable' for a woman to get into the cheap, 'sexualized' business of music), Image barriers (women being forced into boxes that define female musicians as sexual objects), Relevance barriers (women have to fight harder for their art to be taken seriously and to remain relevant). Women generally have to have that extra oomph to be successful in the industry.

In the video below, I present to you Ghanaian dancehall artiste MzVee and Afrobeats artiste Eazzy (also of Big Brother Fame). We discuss what it means to be female in the industry, the importance of fighting for an image that's true to you, the biological clock and whether it has to influence your timeline for success and much more!

MzVee, a rising star who is already garnering a solid following, was discovered on Vodafone Icons and started out with her group D3, hoping to be the Ghanaian Destiny's Child. The group however, had to split before they made any history and MzVee launched herself in Dancehall, a genre she loves.There being next to no females in Ghanaian Dancehall presently, Kaakie trailblazed a way for female dancehall musicians of our time like MzVee to have her voice heard too . In this video, she talks about how male-dominating but embracing the Ghanaian Dancehall world has been, and how the females are hoping to overturn that dominance. She also speaks about being a 'Natural Girl', a movement she is passionate about that encourages women to be true to themselves.

"When I entered the industry, I noticed that females didn't have a stand in music," says Eazzy.
Eazzy has earned maestro status in Ghanaian Afrobeats music. Her rap, her energy-filled style, are fairly avant-garde for Ghanaian female musicians in her time. She is unapologetic about her sexiness and has made a name for Ghana and Ghanaian Afrobeat music across Africa. Two years ago, Eazzy represented Ghana in the Big Brother House, and realizing the mad love Africa had for her music was something to be proud of. In this video, Eazzy shares candidly her battle with the derogatory and 'over-sexualized' Ghanaian perception of women in music (Google 'Eazzy news Ghana' and the first headlines that pop up are about her relationship with her ex Keitta, and whether or not they had sex on live TV, not her musical prowess), being a female in the rap business, and she calls for the addition of a Female Artiste of the Year category to the Ghana Music Awards categories.