F
or over 20 years, Reggie Rockstone has
been providing the beats and the inspi-
ration for many of the Ghanaian club
hits we hear today. Here, we meet a
man whose momentum is continuing; an art-
ist fully inspired and looking to the future for
what he can still accomplish. Simple ideas can
sometimes become huge phenomena. In 1994,
a decision by Reggie Rockstone to fuse hip-hop
beats with a playful sense of production and a
uniquely African cadence of lyricism and dialect
began a whole new genre of music that became
known as hip-life.
It became a modern cousin to the already es-
tablished hi-life, which was characterised by its
deference to the past, with melodic structures
rooted in traditional Akan music and updated
with Western instruments. Rockstone brought
a whole new, modern sound that over 20 years
later has become the major driving force in
Ghanaian music, and his influence can be heard
in almost all new heavy-beat in West African
music heard today.
Rockstone says that he came to music via danc-
ing, growing up in what he describes as a ‘musi-
cally inclined home’, where he was involved in
martial arts and by extension, dancing. ‘Moving
the body was none new to me, and as you know,
the African will express him or herself through
dance, so music got a reaction from me.’ Music
wasn’t his planned career path, and Rockstone
“
I was excited.
I had not been
home for a real-
ly long time, and
was happy and a
bit surprised that
hip-hop was in my
motherland.”
MUSIC LEGEND
was aware of how paths in life can open up
simply due to momentum, calling his trajectory
‘a domino one, one thing connects to the next,
hence me making music today’.
Born in England, Reggie Rockstone achieved
some success there in the early 90s as part of
rap group PLZ (Parables, Linguistics and Zlang)
along with fellow West Africans Freddie Funk-
stone and Jay, having hits with tracks ‘If it Ain’t
PLZ’ and their debut EP ‘Build a Wall Around
Your Dreams’.
Success still eluded him, and Rockstone re-
turned to Gha-
na in 1994,
a strange
choice,
perhaps,
as the
UK was
emerging
into its
Cool
Bri-
tan-
nia
phase,
and