AYO ADEDUNTAN University of Ibadan Email: grandeekay@yahoo.com Rhyme, Reason, Rogue Yoruba Popular Music and the Hip Hop Amoral Turn 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. KEYWORDS Nigerian popular music, Yoruba hip hop, culture, critique INTRODUCTION: ROGUE, THE OUTSIDER As far back as 1985 , communication scholar Luke Uka Uche expressed some anxiety that popular musical practice and consumption among Nigerian youth mimic the Western type privileged by the broadcast media, especially the FM radio stations that had begun to multiply at the time. 1 Even though the sonic and performative affinity between the Western and the African forms is one of the factors that endear the new popular music to young people, Uche considers selective sponsorship of the Western forms by the multinationals as a more formidable acculturative factor. Therefore, “the African youth craves for the Western and Western-influenced popular music because what is being marketed to them is theirs [only] in concept but Western in technological refinement.” 2 More significantly, corporate patronage and sponsorship determine ascendancy in pop- ular performance space. And in that arena of exchange, the African performer and audience are in thrall to corporate manipulation. It is in the context of this imperialist cultural siege that African institutional intervention is considered imperative. For “when we talk of cultural imperialism and the endangering of local culture, we should as well be 1 . An earlier draft of the article was presented as guest lecture at Africa Department, INALCO, Paris on 10 December 2019 . 2 . Luke Uka Uche, “The Youth and the Music Culture: a Nigerian Case Study,” Gazette 37 (1986 ): 69 . 44 Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 34 , Number 1 , pp. 44 –67 , Electronic ISSN: 1533 -1598  2022 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10 .1525 /jpms.2022 .34 .1 .44 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article-pdf/34/1/44/505946/jpms.2022.34.1.44.pdf by guest on 01 July 2022