Gyakie wanted the music industry to discover her as Gyakie before finding out she was the daughter of highlife legend Nana Acheampong.
The “Forever” hitmaker has explained that she intentionally kept her father’s identity away from her early music career because she wanted to know how far she could go on her own merit.
Gyakie made the revelation while speaking on The Group Chat, hosted by Nana Aba Anamoah, where she reflected on the decision she made when she began her music journey in 2019.
According to the singer, she was conscious of the assumptions that could follow if she entered the industry with the name of an established musician attached to her.
“The thing about me is that when I started, I took my dad’s name and everything about him out of the picture. So, in 2019 and 2020, if you didn’t know me personally, you wouldn’t know my dad is Nana Acheampong until I dropped my first EP,” she said.
Her connection to Nana Acheampong eventually became public after she released her first EP. The project included “Forever” and featured artwork showing Gyakie alongside her father inside a recording studio.
That image quickly caught the attention of listeners, many of whom began questioning whether the man beside the young artiste was the legendary highlife musician.
“That project had Forever on it, and the artwork was me and him in a studio. People were like, ‘Wait, is that not him in the picture?’ That’s where the conversation started,” she recounted.
Gyakie said she deliberately took that route because she did not want her father’s reputation to become the starting point for her own career.
She believed introducing herself through Nana Acheampong could have made it difficult for audiences to separate her accomplishments from his influence.
“I knew how it would have been if I started my journey with my dad’s name. It was going to be very tricky for me, so I wanted to really play my cards well. I wanted to do it myself and see how far it would go. I wanted to see how it would be if I was personally doing it,” she stated.
Gyakie’s decision was also about building a career she could confidently call her own.
She said she did not want people to dismiss her achievements by pointing to her family background whenever she won an award, performed on a major stage or reached another milestone.
“One thing I didn’t want people to start doing is saying I worked hard for something and they’d be like, ‘It’s because of her dad. She got this award because… She went on this stage because…’ I want you to understand that it was also my hard work that took me there,” Gyakie clarified.
Watch what she said below.
@chalenewsgh GYAKIE On Building Her Own Identity #news #fyp #viral #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp #ghanatiktok🇬🇭 ♬ original sound – ChaleNewsGh🇬🇭
