The role of neo-traditional Yoruba music
Waterman:
The role of neo-traditional music in enacting and disseminating a
hegemonic Yoruba identity is grounded in the iconic representation of
social relationships as sonic relationships.
Following Geertz, I would suggest that patterns of Yoruba popular performance are not merely "reflections of a pre-existing sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility"
The two dominant styles of contemporary Yoruba popular music are juju, best known through the recordings of King Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebeneezer Obey, and fuji,a secularized outgrowth of ajisaari music, traditionally performed at 3 a.m. during the Ramadan fast by amateur Muslim musicians.
Both of these genres combine the traditional functions of praise song and social dance music. They are widely disseminated via mass media and performed at urban nightspots, but make their greatest ideological impact at the hundreds of naming, wedding, and funeral ceremonies hosted every weekend by Yoruba businessmen, traders, chiefs, professors, executives, and civil servants throughout southwestern Nigeria.
Hierarchy:
The core image remains that of a leader clearly distinguished from, and positionally defined by, his subordinates.
Traditional principles of social hierarchy are vividly represented by the stylized behavior of wealthy celebrants...The leader or "captain" is invariably a praise singer, who inserts relevant biographical data into formulaic patterns laced with "deep" Yoruba proverbs, and,...takes most of the money.
The social distinction between captain and band boys, leader and chorus, individual call and communal response, is also encoded in apparel and spatial relationships. Subordinate musicians stand behind or flank the band captain.
Hierarchical values are embodied in the aural structure of Yoruba popular music. The most successful juju bands, for instance, are comprised of three semiautonomous units.
The guitar section is made up of a lead or solo player supported by rhythmically interlocked tenor and bass guitars.
The senior talking drummer improvises on a rhythmic base created by the interaction of repetitive supporting patterns.
The praise singer is flanked by his egbe (the chorus, literally, "supporters" or "followers").
The fundamental relationship between the ele (the lead vocal part,
literally, "that which drives ahead of or into something else") and the egbe
(signifying both the chorus and the responsorial patterns it sings) is thus
reproduced within each section of the band.
The aural gestalt generated by the intersection of these micro-hierarchies metaphorically predicates an idealized social order: a congeries of localized networks focused on big men.
Community: Responsibility and equal opportunity
A countervailing ethic of mutual responsibility and equal opportunity is also enacted in popular music.
In much Yoruba instrumental music, each part defines, as it is defined by, the others. The whole is always contingent upon the principled interaction of the parts.
Juju and fuji performances at modern outdoor celebrations where the wealthy boost their reputations, the struggling entrepreneur seeks elite status, and the urban poor are afforded free food, drink, and entertainment, externalize these values and give them palpable form.
Music for an imagined community:
Benedict Anderson argues that nations-and societies within nations-are imagined communities
I have argued that the notion of a unified Yoruba tradition is a modern development.
Hegemonic values enacted and reproduced in musical performance portray the Yoruba as a community, a deep comradeship founded in shared language, political interests, ethos, and blood.
Musical metaphor plays a role in the imaginative modeling of Yoruba society as a flexible hierarchy anchored in communal values, or, as a popular idiom would have it, a hand (owo) comprised of interdependent fingers.
Simultaneously articulating communality and an urbane sense of historical perspective, syncretic musical styles such as juju and fuji embody in sound, proxemics, and behavior the image of a deeply-grounded yet modern society, a kind of cosmopolitan electronic kingdom.
Yoruba popular music portrays an imagined community of some 30 million people; a sodality that no individual could know in entirety through first-hand experience- and embodies the ideal affective texture of social life and the melding of new and old, exotic and indigenous within a unifying syncretic framework.
The images of cultural unity and depth
externalized and socially reproduced in Yoruba popular music are neither
etched in stone nor spun of thin air. As one juju band captain succinctly
phrased the matter, "Our Yoruba tradition is a very modern tradition"
