Popular music genres are often studied as part of a “world music” phenomenon whose significance has been interpreted in different ways. The works of Mark Slobin and Veit Erlmann, which date back to the 1990s, are particularly significant in setting the main analytical positions on the study and impact of globalization. Slobin's position stresses a cross-cultural dialectic involving the “subculture, interculture and superculture,” and characterized by “code-switching and cultural counterpoint,” while Erlmann's analysis proceeds from the perspective of a “global ecumene,” a musical order, which, in its encompassing manner, generates a dichotomized, unequal, and hierarchical relationship between the global and the local. Reflecting on these two positions, Ingrid Monson has noted that although Slobin's position is less apathetic than that of Erlmann’s, both arguments tend to marginalize the significance of individual agency, and the diverse nature of the ethnographic contexts within which musical behavior and social practices are shaped. Perhaps too much analytical emphasis has been placed on the dialectic between the local and the global, to the detriment of the internal social factors that help define social and musical practices of individuals and groups within the local space. My discussion of Yorùbá popular music in this chapter is driven by the need to accord greater attention to exploring how the performances of individual African musicians reflect on the issues of power and identity as shaped within their respective local communities. To engage such issues is to accord greater significance to “practical actions and agency” than to globally framed “ontologies of identity,” and thus pave the way for a more robust exploration of alternative spaces of social activity. In navigating the depth and breadth of such alternative spaces, I take cognizance of Slobin's concept of “cultural counterpoint,” and Monson's observation that “hybridities are not random.”

Without denying or ignoring the apparent imbrications of Yorùbá popular music with the Western/global music order, I focus mainly on the local sphere, and argue, first, that for most Yorùbá popular musicians, the “cultural counterpoint” that pervades their music-making decisions is defined ultimately by the social dynamics of their immediate locality, in spite of the constant forging of hybridized musical forms that incorporate Western and globalized elements and speak to global issues of power.