Shatta Wale is in the news following the recent activity namely, “Ghana meets Naija”. This led me for the first time, to listen to one of Shatta Wale’s songs “Dance Hall King” at YouTube. I noticed a serious deficiency about that song and so I listened to a few more of his songs to verify if the shortcoming is typical about his songs and indeed it is. The shortcoming is that he seriously lacks melody in his songs. Melody is the feature that separates beautiful music from disgusting noise. He is said to have won an award with “Dance Hall King” and I question the feature of the song that won him that award.

Kojo Antwi, Daddy Lumba and Nana Kwame Ampadu just to name a few artists, are all grand masters of melody. An example close to Shata Wale is Nii Ashitey of Wulomei who, with the less advanced musical instruments of his time was able to put out beautiful musical compositions loaded with nice melody.

Hopefully, Shatta will not argue that it is a feature of the style of music he makes. No, that won’t win the argument for him. He appears to be making reggae songs, a product of Jamaica. In the reggae domain we see men well vested in melody making who successfully applied melody in their compositions namely, Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff on one hand. On the other hand we see their fellow Jamaican artists put out the unappreciated class of songs totally void of melody that a friend of mine called “Jama, Jama Yoo; Jama, Jama Yoo”, in his attempt at mimicking the lyrics. I am not sure if Shatta is following the “Jama, Jama Yoo” line.

Although reggae is of Jamaican origin, there are non-Jamaican artists who have produced musical compositions loaded with melody for example Alpha Blonde of Ivory Coast. If Shatta thinks he is making something new he must do it well and not be like Ransom Kuti Fela of Nigeria who could not take his “Afrobeat” innovation to a successful height and resorted to unsuccessful effort of making noise to seek attention and fans. It is the quality of music that wins fans and popularity for a musician.

Shatta needs to incorporate melody in his songs to make them stand out as appreciable music as opposed to street, thug and gang noise.