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(African Popular Music)
Smith College
Spring 2021
Instructor: Bode Omojola, PhD.
(Five College Professor)
Time: 10:15 am ET-12:10 pm ET
Venue: Remote
Office Hours: 12:15 pm ET-1:15 pm ET
Course Description
This course focuses on twentieth-century African popular music. It examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political, and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins. Musical idioms like highlife, soukous, kwaito, afrobeat, hiplife, and afrobeats will be studied to assess the significance of popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa. The course also discusses the growth of hip-hop music in selected countries by exploring how indigenous cultural tropes have provided the basis for its local adaptation. The themes explored in this class also include music and identity; music, politics, and resistance; cosmopolitanism, neo-traditional forms, appropriation, and the politics of musical nostalgia.
- Instructor: Olabode Omojola
Course No: MUS 220
Instructor: Bode Omojola, Ph.D.
Meeting Venue: Sage Hall 215
Time: TuTh: 10:30-11:50am
Office Hours: TuTh: 12-1pm (Room TBD)
E-mail: bomojola@smith.edu or: bomojola@mtholyoke.edu
Course Description
This course concentrates on the lives and music of selected West African musicians. Departing from ethnographic approaches that mask the identity of individual musicians and treat African societies as collectives, this course emphasizes the contributions of individual West African musicians whose stature as master musicians is undisputed within their respective communities. It examines the contributions of individual musicians and ensembles to the ever continuous process of negotiating the boundaries and ambience of African musical practice. Individuals and groups covered this semester include Angélique Kidjo (Benin), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Babatunde Olatunji (Nigeria), and Dzigbordi women (Ghana). The variety of artistic expressions of selected musicians also provides a basis for examining the interrelatedness of different African musical idioms, and the receptivity of African music to non-African styles.
- Instructor: Olabode Omojola
MUSIC-220: Topics in World Music:
The Power of Black Music
Course Description
The course focuses on the musics of Africa and the African diaspora through the lens of ethnomusicology. Concentrating on selected countries, including Benin, Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States, it examines the musical performance of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality and the role of music in social and political movements. The course examines the global dimensions and resonances of Africanist musical aesthetics as enabled historically and sustained through ongoing transatlantic exchanges between Africa and the African diaspora. The course also explores the issues of representation and identity in iconic works like Black Is King & Lemonade by Beyoncé. Other topics include hip-hop adaptation in Africa and the phenomenal popularity of West African Afrobeats in the United States and globally. Class discussions will be supplemented by workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians as well as the instructor's ethnographic research in West Africa, Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
- Instructor: Olabode Omojola
- Instructor: Andrea Moore
- Instructor: Lemuel Gurtowsky
- Instructor: Lemuel Gurtowsky
- Instructor: Lemuel Gurtowsky
- Instructor: Lemuel Gurtowsky