Nigerian music from highlife to Afrobeats

Nigerian popular music has never been one sound, but it has been one continuous conversation. Each generation has taken an imported form, bent it around local rhythm and language, and exported the result.

Highlife arrived from the Gold Coast in the mid twentieth century and took root in eastern and western Nigeria, built on guitar bands, horns and a swinging rhythm. Bobby Benson, Victor Olaiya, Rex Lawson and later Osita Osadebe and Oliver De Coque made it the dominant popular music of the independence era. In the south east highlife never went away; it remains the default music of weddings and burials there.

In the west, juju developed on a different base — Yoruba talking drums, praise singing and guitar. I. K. Dairo brought it into the mainstream in the 1960s, and King Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey turned it into long, hypnotic, layered performances in the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside it, fuji grew out of the were music sung to wake Muslim households during Ramadan, and under Sikiru Ayinde Barrister and Kollington Ayinla it became a percussion-driven form with no guitars at all. Both are praise traditions: the singer names and honours people in the room, and money follows.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti built Afrobeat in the late 1960s and 1970s from highlife, jazz and James Brown's funk, stretched into long arrangements over relentless Tony Allen drumming, and filled with political attack in pidgin English. Zombie, Water No Get Enemy and Coffin for Head of State were confrontations with military government, and Fela paid for them with raids, beatings, imprisonment and the destruction of his Kalakuta compound. Afrobeat, singular, is his genre.

Afrobeats, with the s, is the contemporary pop of Lagos and it is a different thing — a broad label covering the dance-oriented music that emerged in the 2000s from a fusion of hip hop, dancehall, R&B, highlife and local rhythm. The line runs from Plantashun Boiz and 2Baba through D'banj and Don Jazzy's Mo' Hits, P-Square and Wande Coal, to Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy, who took it to stadiums and Grammy recognition, and to Rema, Asake, Ayra Starr and Tems, whose records now chart worldwide. Producers — Sarz, Pheelz, P.Priime, Sarz's peers in the log drum era — drive the sound as much as the singers.

Other threads run in parallel. Gospel is arguably the largest music economy in the country by audience. Northern Nigeria has its own Hausa film and music industry. Alté artists work at the experimental edge, and street-hop forms such as shaku shaku and zanku emerged from Lagos neighbourhoods with their own dances attached. What connects all of it is a preference for rhythm over harmony, for language mixing, and for music made to be danced to in public.