‘Female musicians are not respected’- Paulina Oduro

To the new generation she is being recognized as a movie star, but rather she is a veteran musician who took a French leave to London at the age of nine, with her diplomat father and mother.

Her interest in music began at an early age. Recognizing her talent and enthusiasm for music, her parents encouraged her, in addition to her formal education, to undertake formal tuition in music and learning to play classical piano.

Paulina Oduro therefore trained as a nurse but after three years in that profession, she felt music was her proper calling and at the age of 21, she quit nursing to become a professional singer.

She joined a reggae band called Casanova and within six months they released their first single.

Since then, Paulina has sung with a number of reggae and soca bands. Her pedigree includes performances with greats like Calypso King Mighty Sparrow, soca favorite Arrow, Lord Kitchener, Alexander O’neil and renowned Trinidadian singer David Rudder.

In a chit-chat with Flex Newspaper last week, she told your most authoritative newspaper that since 1999 she has only released one album titled ‘woman power’ from a camp. As to why she has recorded only one album since 1999 she stated that although music has been what she wanted to do all along the line, she diverted to do other business and also being a mother took much of her time.

Talking about the current state of High-Life music, she said that she sees highlife music going down and is not just like the days of Papa Yankson, CK Mann etc. She also added that in this modern system of Highlife music, female musicians are not being respected which by so doing discourage the female musicians who want to do highlife Music.

She lamented that although highlife is our root and have to be promoted because hip-life was found through highlife music, she thinks it’s time Highlife musicians have to also encourage the hip-life musicians since they are currently doing all the hard works by promoting themselves and so on. ‘it will be good for us to encourage the hip-life musicians than for us to be discouraging them since they are doing their possible best by promoting themselves which we are not doing’ she lamented.

With about 22 movies to her credit since 2007 she still prefers music to movies because music is her first love and will be launching her second album titled ‘Maraa’ (Myself) on 7th July at Citizen Kofi.