Rhyme, Reason, Rogue

Abstract

Popular culture is often othered in conservative theses as inferior and [or because it is] foreign. Scholarship and views on popular music in Nigeria have been sometimes inattentive to the extent that the popular musical forms have gone to entrench themselves as recognizable local forms. This article compares older popular forms that are now canonized—such as jùjú and highlife—with Nigerian Yoruba hip hop to show the peculiar historical factors that justify the latter’s cultural heterodoxy. The dominant hip hop morality that emerged is defiantly divergent from the earlier stress on formal education and legitimate industry. Importantly, hip hop performance in Yoruba has evolved a protocol of social criticism that first presents itself as acquiescent and/or reprobate. Also, existing conceptualization of hip hop acts as hidden [or even public] transcripts is complicated by the novel strategy of mimicry now found in the Yoruba form.