“It is a Spiritual Thing”: Notes on Daniel Olukoya, Music-making and Everyday Spirituality in Contemporary Lagos

How do musical arts and performances ways express the sacred or become sacred in themselves in a postcolonial African Pentecostal context? What might it mean to explore the gospel adaption of popular music genres like highlife music and African folksongs as spiritual tools? In this presentation, I focus on Olukoya’s approach to music and how African (Nigerian) folksongs, popular music genres and modern art music become spiritual tools for people’s deliverance and spiritual well-being in Lagos.  Using Harry Garuba’s (2003) “animist unconscious,” I explore ways music and music-making at MFM constitute sites where people negotiate spirituality and everyday.