Veteran Ghanaian hiplife artist Mzbel has opened up about the experiences that led her to withdraw from Ghana’s premier music awards scheme, citing what she describes as deliberate negative framing of her music and deep-rooted bias against her public image.
Speaking in an interview on Bullet TV monitored, the singer born Belinda Nana Ekua Amoah said the pattern she observed was not accidental but calculated, with narratives built around her music during award seasons to influence how the public voted.
“I’m going to make the public believe that my song is having bad influence on the youth. So you should vote against me. And people always do that,” she said.
She added that even when fan support existed, she felt the system found ways to redirect it. “Even if people vote for me, they will still find a way to make me look bad so that they can give the award to other people,” she said.
After repeated encounters with the same dynamic, Mzbel said she made a deliberate choice to stop engaging altogether. “So I immediately boycotted it. Because you won’t give me the award,” she said.
Her tensions with the Ghana Music Awards stretch back to 2008, when she publicly declared that she was forbidding Charterhouse, the event’s organiser, from nominating any of her songs or using her image or voice in any future editions of the awards. She had explained at the time that the conflict began as far back as 2006, when she complained that her 2005 hit song “16 Years” did not win an award despite being nominated, while the same panelists who put her forward would go on radio and discredit her publicly during the voting period.
In the latest interview, Mzbel said she has since reoriented her priorities, with commercial relevance and audience connection taking the place of institutional recognition. “The whole point is to make money. I’m making my money. People are still loving me,” she said.
Media and the Female Artist Standard
Mzbel also used the interview to reflect on what she characterised as a gendered expectation placed on female artists in Ghana, and how her refusal to conform to it shaped her early public image.
She said she entered the industry without awareness of an unspoken conduct standard applied to women in entertainment. “As a female artist, you’re supposed to behave a certain way. But I didn’t know that memo,” she said.
She described her initial approach to public life as unfiltered and said the reaction it provoked created friction with sections of the media. “I just entered. And I was expressing myself in my raw way,” she said, adding that the manner in which she was corrected only deepened the tension. “If you want me to behave a certain way, the approach should be soft. But then it’s aggressive. So I fight back,” she said.
Mzbel also touched on how her career initially affected her family, noting that it took time before her father and siblings came to terms with the public attention her music attracted. “My dad, no. My siblings, no. But later they understood,” she said.
