The name Hip-life was created my me, reveals more secrets - Zapp Mallet

Renowned sound engineer and music producer Emmanuel Mallet popularly known as Zapp Mallet has clarified and insisted that he actually came up with the name hip-life which has over the years been credited to Reggie Rockstone.

In an interview with Flex newspaper, Zapp disclosed that though he came up with the name, Reggie Rockstone was the first to release a hip-life album Maka Maka.

“When Reggie Rockstone came down from UK, he came with his partner and they both had the hip-hop culture which was sweeping all over the globes as it were at that time and some of us thought that we could go to our root, our heritage and do something Ghanaian, more African and merge hip-hop with our identity.

“An identity that will project the Ghanaian culture so Michael Cooke who was an instrumentalist then and I decided to name that class of music hip-life and it worked,” he said.

Zapp Mallet who remains one of the best recording engineers and producers in Ghana stated that his decision to finally set the record straight is not for recognition but for the sake of history.

“I have been silent on this issue for this long even though I knew it will come out one day. This was in 1994. It is a long story to be told now but a lot of us were behind generating and promoting this hip-life course and it is just fair we give them some credit, indeed Reggie Rockstone founded that genre, made it commercial but a lot of people gave a helping hand and he was not the one who introduced the name hip-life,” he added.

Zapp Mallet also added that, it was at one of their studio sessions when they argued over the name to give to that kind of music and the word hip-life came in mind and Reggie was present at that meeting.

Credit: Kasapafmonline.com/Ghana