Meet Abena the Rockstar

Born Bediako Bernice, Abena did a cool thing by adding Rockstar to make her name to make it standout.

“I am an artist, musician and I focus more on rap as a genre because I feel I gravitate more towards Hip Hop/Hip Life.”

As a Level 300 student at Data Link University studying Banking and Finance hoping to catch some attention with her first self-titled single Abena, the femcee has been writing fiercely lately to create pieces worth the hype and air around her now.

“I have wring and rapping for a long time but I decided to take it to another level in 2012 by recording and performing seriously whenever and wherever I could find a mic and stage.

“I used to learn other artists’ lyrics and rap to it but I had this fear I being in front of the crowd. I knew my family also was not going to make it easy for me to just take up music as a career because of preconceived ideas they had about the industry; especially when I will be doing secular songs. “But I was so much in love with music I knew somehow someday I was going to write some hits for other artists. So I had to let them know I was going to do this music and the school thing side by side and make both work for me.”

She is yet to release an official single but have been around performing alongside D Black, Sarkodie, Yaa Pono and several heavy weights in the industry.

“I am more for the studying of the landscape now and knowing what will work and what wont. I’m not in a rush to bring out an album; because I want to grow gradually with my audience. So I will be dropping singles to know what my listeners will want better, so I do more and more of that. I’m being very strategic because I don’t want to come up today and fall off the next day. I want to come in and stay forever.”

Dealing with a field reserve for wordsmiths of proven delivery, Abena Rockstar doesn’t seem to see any artists as threats because she reveals not;

“Seeing any competition as at now because the plan is basically to do me because not even a single artist in this industry can do what I can do as an artist and I obviously can’t be like them. I want to be myself and stand out and shine with the Abena Rockstar kind of music. The plan is to be myself as much as I can. I am talking about being original. The music industry is a man’s world but I am coming to pick on issues people haven’t talked about, or topics that got lost in translation in those who tried to address them with their music.”

Being a lady with fine features and lots of spark, she concedes there is some doubt about the competition she bringing in because she believes;

“When you are a lady, there is a preconceived idea of how you should be and behave and what should do and not do and what to be and not be. It’s a psychological box society has placed on us females but I as a female will try as much as I can to thread out that imaginary box and be relevant for a long time to come.

“The reason why most Ghanaian females don’t last is because they refuse to step out of the imaginary box society put in place at the beginning of the career. They stay in it and in the middle of their career when they feel they have all the audience now and want to rebel a bit, people start rolling their eyes and disengage from the brand because that femcee is not looking sexy again or not dressing sexy again.

“When a lady is rapping, most people don’t pay attention to the content of the song; once you are sexy all eyes will be glued on you. So you tempted to think if you stop being sexy, people stop listening.”

But she warns “I am a lady and whether I like it or not, I should be sexy.” “I composed my records with all these stereotypes in mind and I will try as much as I can to veer off being this sexy rapper and be known for my rap and weights of my work.

“I have a song Mayaase talking about adolescent sex, Sobolo, Toole, and Never Give Up. I try to teach with every word I put on the beat. I have done one with Cabum, Breyna and working with Kofi Kinaata now. I am releasing my own project produced by Magnom and its titled Abena.

To know how hungry Abena Rockstar is aiming for the rap crown she reveals sacrifices she had to make to be this good included “deferring from school for one year because it was conflicting with my school schedule and more.”