Highlife music without alcohol? Interrogating the concept of gospel highlife in Ghana and Nigeria

Abstract The term ‘gospel highlife’ has been in use in Ghana and Nigeria for a long time, without examination of its underlying ideology and ambivalences. As West Africa’s pioneer popular music and as a social construct, highlife is a socio-musical phenomenon with diverse interpretations and appropriations. Drawing on three decades of academic and professional engagements in Ghana and Nigeria, as well as the literature on gospel music by notable scholars, this article asks: What exactly is gospel highlife? How does the concept of gospel highlife fit into or challenge the idea of social stratification which characterised highlife at its inception? How does the concept of gospel highlife speak to issues of social identity and economic determinism in a postmodern and neoliberal age? Overall, this article interrogates the epistemological basis of the term ‘gospel highlife’ compared to what may be described, for want of a better term, as ‘secular highlife’, as well as narratives of its historical development. This article argues that the concept of gospel highlife goes beyond the mere idea of ‘highlife without alcohol’. Rather, the concept is nested in an interest-bound epistemological premise that reflects social, economic and gendered imperatives. We conclude that both gospel and secular highlife, just like the music minister- musician constructed binary, is a paradox of sameness and difference.