Rationalizing Popular Music Discourses in Contemporary Ghana: A Media and Communication Perspective

Abstract

This paper will attempt to discuss the issues that pervade the popular music sphere in contemporary Ghana. It will also attempt to answer the questions: What is popular music in Ghana? What is the cultural form of popular music in Ghana? What is the cultural environment impacted upon by popular music discourses? How can we study popular music in Ghana as an authentic field of media and communication? What is the functionality/dysfunctionality of popular music discourses in the contemporary Ghanaian socio-musical cultural space?

It is also the thesis of this paper to look at popular music as a historical and social construct. The stance of this paper is that it is possible to analyse socio-cultural change, fathom new psycho-social perceptions by a holistic study of popular music.

The popular music space is, further, set off as the locus where the systemic world meets the life world for meaning and communication.

This paper is informed by the notion that popular music consumption is not an obscure enterprise directed entirely to an exclusively esoteric audience with padded layers of sub-cultures. Its universality in the contemporary Ghanaian socio-cultural space is emphasized.