Lagos: Music and the Postcolonial Metropolis

Abstract Popular art remains a magnetic force that appeals to both high- and low-profile people from all walks of life and from diverse climes and creeds. This paper scrutinises the symbiotic relationship between music, a form of popular art, and Lagos, Nigeria’s urban entertainment hub. In extending the frontiers of empirical inquiry, the study also appraises the mode of give-and-take by which music and its agency vis-à-vis the Lagos metropolis negotiate the indigenous soundscape of the postcolonial metropolis. This paper unearths the cultural bonds and social interactive cohesion that served as the springboard on which Lagos was built as an African mega-metropolis and on which African music is repositioned as a global brand. Against the backdrop of the norm of reciprocity, this paper examines the kinship and mutual exchange of social consciousness between the metropolis and musical agencies. The paper asserts social, cultural, political, and economic contexts as sites for the vocalisation of space in sounds and the localisation of sounds in socio-space, with evidence of mutual exchange and interaction through musical performance and the production of geographical space.