In the lead up to the 2021 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards, we take you back to the achievements and disappointments of 2004 edition of the Awards scheme.
An edition that saw VIP and the Daughters of Glorious Jesus winning 6 and 5 awards(respectively) with Obrafour having a Night Of Doom when he won just 1 out of the 6 nominations he had.
Below is what happened at the 2004 Ghana Music Awards:
With the three topmost awards to go and the score reading- V.I.P: 3, Daughters of Glorious Jesus: 4, almost everyone at last Saturday’s Ghana Music Awards was sure whom the new rulers of Ghana Music were going to be.
Not that everyone at the Accra International Conference Centre was exactly appreciative of the results in its entirety; but at least the trend was evidence enough to make almost everyone form their opinions and to expect that the hip-life trio, Vision In Progress, were well on their way to making the world pay more attention to them.
So the V.I.P won the final (and biggest) two: Song Of The Year (Ahomka Wo Mu) and Artiste Of The Year. Earlier on, they had beaten other genre giants and all-time favourites Okomfour Kwadee and Obrafour to it by snatching all the three hip-life slots namely the Hip-life Song Of The Year (Ahomka Wo Mu), Hip-life Album Of The Year (Ahomka Wo Mu) and Hip-life Artiste Of The Year.
At a time, one would think that V.I.P were fed up climbing the stage just about every ten minutes for an award.
Their acceptance message became shorter as the honours increased; one was as short as “We know this awards show is for us and Daughters”.
And to clearly stretch the lead over Daughters, V.I.P virtually made it six by winning the Best Music Video Directing (Ahomka Wo Mu) award for the company who produced it, Feelix Dakat.
As if by design, their gospel counterparts, Daughters of Glorious Jesus, also trio, having swept all the gospel slots namely; Gospel Song Of The Year (Brebrebeyi), Gospel Album Of The Year (Aseda) and Gospel Artiste Of the Year, went on to grab the overall Album Of The Year (Aseda) and the Best Female Vocal Performance.
That makes Daughters of Glorious Jesus the Gospel music group with the HIGHEST Ghana Music Awards honours so far, closely followed by Cindy Thompson (4 in 2001).
V.I.P have also equalled the single most awarded act at a GMA, Kojo Antwi’s six (including video) in 2001.
The show began some 30-minutes later than scheduled with pockets of hitches especially with the sound and microphones.
Two brief opening acts came up before the presentation of a few awards such as the gospel and hip-life categories by a large host of celebrities and radio presenters in doubles.
13th March 2004 will for a very long time to come be the blackest night in the 9-year performing life of hip-life’s most revered act, Obrafour.
And Ghanamusic.com predicted this coming in our preview [Who Wins, Who Loses, Plus Who’d Be Shocked At GMA 2004- March 10].
In 2001 he was nominated in five different categories but managed just one substantial award; and at GMA 2004 having harboured the hopes of grabbing more honours on his six nominations, Obrafour, yet again, run home with only one, and earlier than he had expected.
He won the more than obvious Songwriter Of The Year with his lyrically-disciplined “Ntetiepa” song. Then by inexplicable reasons, his well-rehearsed and richly choreographed 20-minute performance lasted barely 3-minutes on the night when disaster stroke.
His traditional and comtemporary dancers were well ready for action after Obrafour had barely emerged from the larger-than-life pot, which hauled him to the stage.
He had performed just some bits of “Ntetiepa” when the microphone went completely dead. None of the two microphones on the stage could transmit any sound, whatsoever, to the audience.
Then Obrafour started suspecting something else- a foul play, probably. He had to leave the stage with partner-in-rhyme Tinny without performing and totally embarrased.
Later at the backstage, there was a serious war of words between his Execution Entertainment boys and the show managers.
But the organisers would be cleared later when almost all the acts that followed had to talk or perform a moment or the other with a distorting microphone sound.
Obrafour had to leave for home immediately without informing the organisers, by then he had already received his only award and if he was to believe that the major hitch earlier on had a foul play to it, then, he wasn’t expecting any more awards.
True to his expectation, none came till the end of the show, surprisingly to most of the audience, though. Speaking of bad sound, two-nominee-no-award Princess Cynthia wasn’t sure of the microphone, she made some comments (on the mic) that everyone in the audience was so sure that they were not meant for them.
Her very classy and traditional act wasn’t at all helped by the microphone. I personally think that this sound thing was a genuine problem considering that it happened more than twice with the same organizers when they put up the Shaggy Concerts early this year.
But if I were seeing South Africa music superstar Brenda Fassie (live or on multimedia products) for the very first time at GMA 2004, I wouldn’t have believed the hype about the Queen of Kwaito.
From far way South Africa, do you know how many tracks Brenda came to do in Ghana? Just two. In fact she did one of the shortest performances of the night.
As if to say she was warned about the event’s time constraints when the organisers realised that the show hadn’t travelled even halfway but they had but few minutes to end it.
And one could easily measure how much the audience had been expecting more of her frenetic dance skills. She threw a couple of dance skills that met wonderful cheers, though, but she went off the stage just about when I thought she had begun the real show.
Finally, the very appropriate theme for this year’s GMA, that’s “Ghanaian Musicians Against HIV/AIDs” was almost ridiculed.
No musician really prepared himself or herself for a hearty message to the show, which was patronised by some of the biggest celebrities and political figures of our time.
Most of the musicians even forgot to talk about the theme even though they had been informed long before about the theme and the need for them to give a short speech about it.
All in all, the Charterhouse organised Ghana Music Awards has come to stay and can comfortably be dubbed the hottest show on the entertainment calendar now.
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