Music has been known to provide
comfort to people in distress, as well as
providing some form of entertainment.
Over the centuries, music has moved from
one stage to another so that it can
conform to the current trend.
The Nigerian music is so dynamic that it is
known worldwide. The world music isn't
complete without mentioning Nigerian
music and that is why we now see
different foreign artiste coming to sing or
perform in Nigeria. The Nigerian music
covers so many folk songs which have
their origins from the various ethnic
groups in the country and popular songs
with roots from other foreign cultures
especially from the West. However, each
kind of song is so distinctive with each
having its own techniques, instruments,
and language.
Nigeria is a blessed country with diverse
cultural heritages but more focus is
usually placed on the three major tribes,
namely Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. This is
because of their size in terms of
population and land space. This is not to
say the minor tribes are ignored but are
most times categorised under the major
tribes depending on their locations.
The northern part of the country is a
unique entity for its kind of music. The
people of the North are known for
complex percussion instrument music,
the one-stringed goje, and a strong praise
song vocal tradition. This part of the
country, by the virtue of being a Muslim
dominated area and their strict adherence
to culture, have been able to blend their
music with Arabic. The Hausa play
percussion instruments such as the
tambura drum; the talking drum and the
Kakaki which is the elongated state
trumpet. Traditional stars included the
Hausa Dan Maraya, who was so well
known that he was brought to the
battlefield during the 1967 Nigerian Civil
War to lift the morale of the federal
troops.
The Igbos play a wide variety of folk
instruments and are known for their
ready adoption of foreign styles, and
were an important part of the
development of the Nigerian highlife
music. Just like every other cultural
setting, they had peculiar kind of singing
which was and is in the Igbo language,
Ibo and they made use of the 13-stringed
zither, called an obo. The Igbo also play
slit drums, xylophones, flutes, lyres, udus
and lutes, and more recently, imported
European brass instruments.
Without any form of bias, the Yoruba
music is most considered as the most
important component of modern Nigerian
popular music, as a result of its early
influence from European, Islamic and
Brazilian forms. Singing in one's language
was difficult especially if it's intended for
the international audience. In actual fact,
there was no international appeal when
singing in one's dialect until the Yoruba
broke through. Modern styles such as
Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Barrister's fuji, Salawa
Abeni's waka and Yusuf Olatunji's sakara
are derived primarily from Yoruba
traditional music. Yoruba music has now
come of age and the new generation of
Nigerian music now sings in their native
language. 9ice is one of many that broke
into the industry with Gongo Aso and
many more artists followed.
Taking a cursory look at the various kinds
of genres of music in Nigeria shows how
much development has come into the
Nigerian music industry over the years. In
every era, there are kinds of music played
and are developed on by succeeding
artistes the following era.
Highlife
Among the Igbo people, Ghanaian
highlife became popular in the early
1950s, and other guitar-band styles from
Cameroun and Zaire soon followed. In
the mid-70s, other highlife performers
were reaching their peak. These included
Prince Nico Mbarga and his band Rocafil
Jazz, who's "Sweet Mother" was a pan-
African hit that sold more than 13 million
copies, more than any other African
single of any kind. Mbarga used English
lyrics in a style that he dubbed panko,
which incorporated "sophisticated rumba
guitar-phrasing into the highlife idiom".
After the civil war in the 1970s, Igbo
musicians were forced out of Lagos and
returned to their homeland. The result
was that highlife ceased to be a major
part of mainstream Nigerian music, and
was thought of as being something purely
associated with the Igbos. Highlife's
popularity slowly dwindled among the
Igbos, supplanted by jùjú and fuji.
However, a few performers kept the style
alive, such as Yoruba singer and
trumpeter Victor Olaiya (the only Nigerian
to ever earn a platinum record), Stephen
Osita Osadebe, Oliver De Coque, Celestine
Ukwu, Oriental Brothers, Sonny Okosun,
Victor Uwaifo, and Orlando "Dr. Ganja"
Owoh, whose distinctive toye style fused
jùjú and highlife.
Juju
Juju music practically started with the
coming on stage of two maestros in the
person of Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey.
These two were so enigmatic to the point
that they ushered in the international
audience and gave the Nigerian music
more exposure. Both were rivals and as
such did everything humanly possible to
sell their music and it yielded so many
dividends for them and it's still yielding
till date.
Obey's lyrics addressed issues that
appealed to urban listeners, and
incorporated Yoruba traditions and his
conservative Christian faith and Ade
added strong elements of Jamaican dub
music, and introduced the practice of
having the guitar play the rhythm and the
drums play the melody. Ironically, both
displaced the iconic IK Dairo from the
pinnacle with their emergence who was
perhaps the biggest star of African music
by the '60s, recording numerous hit songs
that spread his fame to as far away as
Japan.
Afrobeat
This kind of music is synonymous with the
legendary Fela Anikulapo Kuti who
recorded a series of hits, earning the ire
of the government as he tackled such
diverse issues as poverty, traffic and skin-
bleaching. Although Kuti is often credited
as the only pioneer of Afrobeat, other
musicians such as Orlando Julius
Ekemode were also prominent in the early
Afrobeat scene, where they combined
highlife, jazz and funk. In the 1980s,
Afrobeat became affiliated with the
burgeoning genre of world music. In
Europe and North America, so-called
"world music" acts came from all over the
world and played in a multitude of styles.
Fela Kuti and his Afrobeat followers were
among the most famous of the musicians
considered world music acts. Afrobeat led
to the birth of another genre of music,
jazz and rock and roll. The ever-masked
and enigmatic Lágbájá became one of the
standard-bearers of the new wave of
Afrobeat. However, successive artists have
refined this spectacular genre and kept
the flame burning. Femi and Seun Kuti,
two of Fela's sons are among. Dbanj has
been able to fuse afrobeat into his kind of
music. Certainly afrobeat isn't going to
die; rather it's the fulcrum of most music
thanks to the legacy put in place by Fela.
Reggae and hip hop
When talking about reggae music in
Nigerian, this brand of music was started
by a musician simply called "Terakota". By
the 80s, Nigerian reggae stars included
The Mandators, Ras Kimono and Majek
Fashek. Like many later Nigerian reggae
stars, Fashek was a part of the long-
running band The Mandators, who toured
and recorded incessantly during the mid
to late 1980s and early '90s. Later
prominent reggae musicians included Jerri
Jheto and Daddy Showkey. The general
rapid growth of the entertainment scene
with support from the media helped
popularise Hiphop music in Nigeria.
Television programmes like the MTN
Y'ello show, Music Africa, Nigezie, and
Soundcity, amongst others played a major
role to bring hip pop music to its very
present heights. Every tribe in Nigeria has
a hip hop artiste either trying to blossom
or already blossomed. 2face, an
international artiste is from Benue State.
Eedris Abdulkarem is from Kano State.
This shows that Hip hop is the most
encompassing, creating avenues for
different people irrespective of tribe or
religion to freely express their talents and
the fans craving for more.
Kudos must be given to the present day
artistes who have not let the efforts of the
founding fathers be in vain. They have
blended the Nigerian culture with the
foreign culture to create an international
appeal without losing the Nigerian touch
in their songs. The sky is just the
beginning as their best is yet to come.
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