This thesis focuses on the contributions of the Yorùbá culture to the development of
modern Nigerian popular music. It traces the origin, conception and growth of popular
music styles in Nigeria and highlights the underlying Yorùbá cultural cum linguistic
influence that nurtured their growth within the urban space of Lagos city. It examines
how contemporary Nigerian popular music practitioners appropriate the Yorùbá culture
in negotiating their musical and national identities and counteract popular music
homogenization through the creation of hybrid musical styles and cultures. The work
adopts a multi-dimensional research approach that involves cultural, musicological,
historical, anthropological and socio-linguistical tools. Adopting the participantobserver
method with Lagos as the primary fieldwork site, additional data were sourced
along with interviews of key informants through bibliographic and discographic
methods.
The study reveals the importance of Lagos as a major factor that contributed to the
development of Nigeria‘s popular music practice as exemplified in genres like jùjú, fújì
and afrobeat, and discovers that the Yorùbá language has gradually become the
dominant medium through which artists express their musical identity as typified by
current mainstream hip hop music. Extending earlier work by scholars such as Barber,
Waterman and Euba and recent works in hip hop linguistics by Alim and Omoniyi, the
thesis contributes to the growing body of research within popular music through the
discipline of ethnomusicology, especially in the emerging area of academic inquiry into
indigenous African hip hop culture.