YORUBA CULTURAL IDENTITY AND CREATIVITY IN 9ICE’S AFRO HIP-POP MUSIC

Abstract

Music has been said to be the most common phenomenon in day-to-day activities of the traditional people of Africa. Yoruba people of West-Africa like any other tribe in Africa, exploit the use of music to express their inner-most conscience and emotions. There are varieties of music used by the African at different stages of life events and periods. The functionality of music for different purposes forms part of the aesthetics of music of Africans. These genres include music for religious worships, traditional folk, music for social purposes and dance, neo-traditional, popular and others; but a large number of music scholars have tended to rely upon a general division of musical types into traditional, popular, and art music categories. Yet in many ways the boundaries between these categories easily become blurred when put under scrutiny, particularly in subSaharan Africa, these three categories are intimately intertwined and in conversation with each other. (Matczynski: 2011) Olusola (2018) observed that voluble praise, encomium and reminiscence are always part of the traditional musical practice among the Yoruba and Africans in general. The hegemony of popular music amidst other musical types from the late 1940s has also resulted in its being the most patronized musical type in Nigeria. Just like in any other African and world society, there exist different forms of popular music in the Yoruba society which is the most frequently used and serves major function of entertainment in all social gatherings and recreation. Hip hop originated from The Bronx in New York (Keyes 2004) while Nigeria„s initiation into the hip hop culture began in the 1980s when the Sugarhill Gang„s „Rapper„s Delight‟ prompted the emergence of local groups and MCs. The first rap album to be released in Nigeria was credited to Ronnie (Ron Ekundayo) with „The way I feel’ in 1981 while the real mainstream success of the genre began with „Sakomo‟ in 1998, the first hip hop hit song. This was followed by a series of transformations that ensured the genre„s survival despite the ailing music industry of the 1990s.