Cultural conceptulisations in Elijah Akintunde’s Yoruba ballad gospel song Ijo Odi ‘Dance of the Deaf’

1 Introduction

Music is an essential part of human life which expresses collective cultural values and communicates collective memories and the cognitive understanding of human experience (Idamoyibo 2016). It can therefore best be expressed as a repository of cultural and ideological significance of a given society as well as a fulcrum for harnessing and transmitting indigenous knowledge and experience towards attaining societal goals. In most societies, music is an indispensable phenomenal tool for cultural preservation; historical documentation; invigoration of sociality; invocation of the deities; promotion of moral rectitude, and representation of socio-cultural realities, such as identities, ideologies, values, beliefs, philosophies and traditions.

In social situations, music can be distinguished in terms of classifications and certain factors such as participants, target audience, age, setting and social goals. Consumers of music select it based on its suitability for their social needs. The functionality of any music is contingent to the context and domain of use. Broadly, music can be secular or religious. It is religious when it incorporates elements of any of the religions – traditional, Islamic, Christianity or any other religion; and it is secular when it reflects on the socio-cultural experiences of the people. However, over the years, in Nigeria the socio-cultural lives of the people have infiltrated their religious songs, and studies such as Taiwo (2008) and Udok and Odunuga (2016) corroborate this. These studies reveal abundant influx of socio-economic and cultural experiences into religious music. So, the various religious songs serve as outlets through which the socio-economic realities of the people in Nigeria are conveyed.

Among all religious songs in Nigeria, Christian gospel music is one of the most popular. The raison d’etre for its popularity may be due to the growth of Christianity in the country. Owing to distinct contemporary innovations, the gospel music in Nigeria has experienced diverse phenomenal changes. Adedeji (2005) classifies the gospel styles into three: foreign, indigenous and those derived from popular musical forms. Babalola (2014), with an integrated modification, categorised the music styles into two: those that are derivatives of traditional music and the acculturated styles. Of the authors’ identified styles, the song being researched in this paper, Ijo Odi ‘Dance of the Deaf’ by Elijah Akintunde belongs to the acculturated or the indigenous style.

Since language is the vehicular expression of every music, gospel songs patterned after indigenous language contents usually relate with the people’s conceptualisations and constructions of physical and abstract realities. With the foregoing, the present study addresses cultural conceptualisations in a gospel song based on schemas, categories and metaphors that are projected in the song with a view to describing the construal of the Yoruba world view and the cognitive classification and mappings of their cultural domains.

2 Yoruba worldview in Christian gospel songs

The Yorùbá are found to predominantly occupy the southwestern part of Nigeria and originally, they practise mainly variants of traditional religion. With the infiltration of Western cultures due to trade, Christian mission and colonization, Christianity and Islam gained a rapid ascendancy within the region and consequently, many people converted to the new religions. Christianity is one of the most popular and advertised religions in Nigeria, especially in the Yorùbá land (Odejobi 2014). While Christianity rejects what it considers as the paganist aspects of the Yorùbá culture, it however accepts the perceived positive cultural values of communality, hard work, integrity, respect and many others that reinforce biblical principles. Based on the foregoing, the reception of every song is usually contingent on its alignment with the cultural and ideological perceptions of the people. Thus, many gospel songs in Nigeria promote collective socio-cultural perceptions of the people blended with biblical principles, which Ijo Odi typifies.

Odejobi (2014) observes the importance of religion in the African culture and the great influence it exerts on the conduct of the African people, being closely bound up with the traditional ways of the people’s life. Within Nigeria, most gospel songs in indigenous languages, especially in Yorùbá, usually eject the indigenous local flavour of the language in order to promote the shared cultural experience, which identifies with the people’s socio-economic challenges and remove abstractions about the supernatural. To corroborate this view, Taiwo (2008) submits that:

In order to reflect contemporary values in the Nigerian society, the thematic tentacles of worship songs have extended to embrace issues that would not normally be featured in worship songs, such as success, competition, challenge, etc. The socio-economic climate of Nigeria has led to the incorporation of songs that address the challenges being experienced by Nigerian Christians. (p. 8)

Rendering gospel songs in indigenous languages gives it the necessary appeal to the cognitive understanding of the people. Gospel artistes in the Yorùbá land, such as Tope Alabi, Sola Allyson, Ojo Ade, Niyi Adedokun, Elijah Akintunde and others are known to employ cultural models that encapsulate cultural memories to communicate the Christian values to the listeners.

3 Contextualising the song Ijo Odi (Dance of the Deaf)

The song Ijo Odi is composed by Elijah Akintunde, who began his music career as a church choir master till he became a renowned artiste in the Southwestern region of Nigeria. He affirms that he was ordained by God to minister salvation, deliverance, reconciliation and restoration to souls. His inspirational songs, such as Aworan ‘The picture’, Olorun ko so bee ‘God does not say so’, Akuko Gagara ‘Huge cockrel’ and Ijo Odi ‘Dance of the deaf’ have become popular and inspired many of his fans, especially in the southwestern Nigeria.

The song Ijo Odi ‘Dance of the Deaf’ projects the imagery of a dance without music or a dance that does not synchronise with drum beats. The cognitive understanding of the song is to envision a deaf man dancing and imagine the absurdity that will characterise such a dance. The song X-rays God’s supernatural miracle that beats human imaginations. Based on the lyrics, since God is immortal, he has the power to bring about unimaginable miracles and wonders.

The song narrates a real-life story, which according to Akintunde, occurred at Ijebu-Ode, a major town in Ogun State in the southwestern Nigeria. The moving story revolves around a poor old man trying to make a living by using a tricycle for commercial purposes. One day, during one of his trips, the driver of a luxurious car moving in front of his tricycle suddenly braked hard and by the time the poor old man applied his brakes, it failed and his tricycle hit the luxurious car and broke one of its rear lights. The rich man, in anger, alighted, slapped the old man and tore his clothes and demanded for a replacement of the light, with the market value of one hundred and twenty thousand Naira before he would be released. The incident caused a heavy traffic and in annoyance and curiosity, a stranger alighted from his car to see what was happening. Eventually, the stranger ridiculed the rich man by buying his car for fifteen million naira cash down and handing over the key to the old tricyclist with a cheque of two million naira for the man to start any business of his choice. As a result of this miraculous encounter, the old man in wild amazement and perplexity started rejoicing, dancing and displaying behaviours that could be considered absurd, such as running up and down and leaping like a frog. It was the old man’s behaviour that inspired the title of the song. This story connects with the daily realities of Nigerians.

Contextually, the title of the song presents a binary opposition of distinctive concepts: DANCE and DEAFNESS, connoting that the deaf cannot dance meaningfully. This contradiction is what the artiste exploited to teach the theme of supernatural intervention of God in a man’s life which can make him display an absurd kind of dance that can only be meaningful in the context of good news. The story is deployed to inspire faith in God’s ability to do unimaginable things in the life of those who trust Him. The effect of the miraculous on a person is metaphorically captured as “the dance of the deaf” – an uncoordinated dance, borne out of perplexity and bewilderment which makes the dancer a subject of derision. What kind of miracle will make a person dance like a deaf? This is the question this artiste tries to answer with his amplification of the cognitive association of miraculous acts with the reaction of the person who experiences them. The cultural conceptualisations in the song are meant to trigger faith in the consumers of the song, who are mostly impoverished people within the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder. The artiste’s engagement of a story further brings his message home.

4 Cultural conceptualisations in music

Music, just like language use is a complex symbolic system, a socialising agency deployed to express people’s socio-cultural practices. It typically conceptualises the cultural world view of the artistes and the social groups they belong in order to express their identities and ideologies. In doing this, musicians employ cultural and conceptual models through the use of linguistic elements. Existing studies have focused on the engagement of metaphors in music, especially in traditional ones among the Igbo and Yoruba, as well as in popular music (Ajayi 2020; Igwebuike 2017; Ogungbemi and Bamgbose 2021).

As observed by Igwebuike (2017), metaphor has been found to be one of the vehicles through which meanings are conveyed in music. In his study Igwebuike identifies five metaphorical source domains of animal, journey, plant/food, war/conflict and family deployed by Egwu Ekpili musicians to represent ideological positioning and inclinations of the Igbo people.

Looking at another music genre among Yoruba, the Fuji music genre, Ogungbemi and Bamgbose (2021) describe the role of imagery as engendering artistic, thematic functions and reflecting ideological stances in the music of Saheed Osupa, one of the popular Fuji artistes in Nigeria. Prominent imageries in the music of Osupa include, food, celestial and animal imageries.

Cultural projection and identity formation is also the subject of a number of scholarly essays on popular music, most especially hip hop in Nigeria. In the context of emerging urban youth lifestyles, Ajayi investigates the music of Abolore Akande (9ice) and his deployment of metaphors to describe sociality in the urban social spaces. Among other issues, many contemporary urban social realities in Nigeria, such as sex, gender, social status and crime can be visualised and understood through the music of 9ice.

Conceptualisation of the other in African music, especially the enemy is the focus of Adeduntan (2016) who sees the idea of the enemy being central to Yoruba musical imagination. Examining this in the music of Sunny Ade, a Juju music singer, the author describes the artiste as an exegete whose performance of abuse tempered through referential inexactitude leads the audience to multiple meanings. The consideration here also captures the use of cultural metaphors from wildlife, which is considered antagonistic to man, especially in the context of man’s claim to superiority over other creatures.

Due to its importance in the performance and negotiation of spirituality, gospel music has received a lot of attention in research, however, research on cultural conceptualisations in the gospel music genres in Nigeria are still very limited. Kwiyani and Ola (2021) examine conceptualisation of God in Akan and Yoruba religious songs. They affirm that the songs of Afua Kuma and Tope Alabi, two top gospel artists in Ghana and Nigeria respectively lead Africans into thinking and talking sensibly about God in consistence with Africanness.

In a similar and more recent study, Ayorinde and Ajose (2022) discuss how Tope Alabi’s dress, lifestyle, and material life project and shape listeners’ understanding of the ideas of spirituality and everyday subjective happiness, and social and economic wellbeing. Similarly, Ajose (2022) discusses the role played by gospel songs in facilitating religious experience and articulating social concerns. Using a popular Yoruba gospel song Amona tete maa bo by Joseph Adebayo Adelakun, Ajose explicates the deployment of the artistic tools of eschatological narrative and the metaphorical conceptualisation of Amona ‘The Guide’ to a call for guidance and direction in the social, economic and political life of Nigeria. In Ijo Odi, the song being considered in this study, the artiste also deployed storytelling to communicate the subject of God’s miraculous intervention in human life.

All these existing studies have a point of convergence, which is that gospel music provides contexts for artistes to conceptualise, internalise and perform spirituality (Ayorinde and Ajose 2022) and through them; we are able to understand the complex interactions between socio-cultural lives of Nigerians and messages being projected. The foundation for this study is laid on these views. However, the present study is a significant departure from the existing ones because it draws insights from Cultural Linguistics which gives consideration to an in-depth understanding of conceptual structures such as schemas, categories and metaphors that are enacted as a result of interactions between members of a cultural group.

5 Methods

The data for this study is the Yoruba gospel song Ijo Odi, composed and sung by Elijah Akintunde. The song was downloaded from YouTube and transcribed with the provision of English glosses. The analysis focused on how the linguistic elements are deployed for cultural conceptualisations within the Yoruba world view. The conceptual framework of Cultural Linguistics guided the interpretation and analysis of the data, Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of Linguistics that investigates the intersection of human language features and cultural conceptualisations, as expressed in cultural models, cultural categories and cultural conceptual metaphors (Sharifian 2015, 2017).

Cultural Linguistics emphasizes the role of culture in conceptualizing human experiences of different kinds. It asserts that cultural knowledge emerges from the interactions of members of a linguistic group as they construct their cognition through the organisation and interpretation of information of cultural meanings (schema). Cultural schemas according to Sharifian (2015) “captures the encyclopaedic meaning that is culturally constructed for lexical items of human language” (p. 518). For instance, the concept of kinship in Yoruba is derived from the knowledge of the culture. This accounts for the understanding of the pragmatic meanings of kinship terms like uncle, father, brother and so forth, which differ to a great extent from their original English meanings.

Cultural conceptualisations can be captured in the different usages of the English language that results from its domestication across the outer circles in the world, leading to different varieties of the language we now have. English usage that derives from cultural schemas, which had hitherto not been associated with English is considered as part of the process of the localisation of English (Sharifian 2015: 522).

Conceptual metaphors derive from how language users perceive their world, which according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has to do with “the way we think, what we experience and what we do everyday” (p. 454). The assertion of conceptual metaphor is that we understand new domain of experience (typically abstract) in terms of another (typically concrete). For instance, we often link certain internal body organs with certain emotions, e.g., HEART with LOVE and SYMPATHY and LIVER with COURAGE. In each case, the concrete domains of the HEART and LIVER are conceptually mapped with the abstract domains of LOVE, SYMPATHY and COURAGE, respectively. The resultant metaphor may be seen in expressions such as my heart goes out to the families of the victims of the plane crash, where the emotion SYMPATHY can be identified or he is lily livered, which depict the socio-cultural conceptualisation of the liver as the seat of courage.

This study draws insights from Cultural Linguistics with its key analytical notions of cultural cognition, cultural schema, cultural category and cultural metaphor to investigate the cultural conceptualisations in Ijo Odi. The gospel prayer song based on a true-life story is meant to inspire faith in the listeners to conceive God’s miraculous intervention in their lives. It is deeply rooted in the Yoruba cultural models and the internalized cognitive schemas of MIRACLE, DANCE, DEAFNESS and ABSURDITY.

6 Findings and discussion

The song Ijo Odi is a conceptualisation of the miraculous from the perspective of its effect on the receiver. In the Yoruba culture, it is considered absurd for anyone to dance without drumbeats. This conceptualisation of a dance without beats – jo lai r’ilu is deployed by the singer to project and reinforce the message of the kind of behaviour that unexpected pleasant news can elicit in a person – DANCING WITHOUT BEATS. The resultant absurdity informs the title of the song.

The song is set in two parts, the first part is a preamble that prepares the listener for the story on which the song is themed. The preamble focuses on the miraculous (pleasant and unexpected news) and how it triggers an absurd dance that could be compared with that of the deaf. This first part begins with a chorus, that is repeated all through the song – a prayer for the miraculous that will elicit a dance likened to that of the deaf.

Literally, this chorus prays for the expectation of a pleasant and miraculous news that will culminate in the celebratory dance that is typically part of a monthly ritual in most Christian congregation in the southwestern part of the country.

The second part of the song is the story that inspires the ballad, which the singer describes as a real-life occurrence. The singer intends this story to inspire faith in listeners for expectation of pleasant and miraculous news that will make them dance like the deaf. This story conceptualises wonderful news and absurdity that it elicits.

7 Conclusions

This paper addresses cultural conceptualisations in a ballad gospel song Ijo Odi. The song is a narrative of the experience of an indigent tricyclist’s experience of a grass to grace story. The gospel song, Ijo Odi is characterised by a surfeit of Yoruba cultural symbols, which are deployed to amplify the cognitive understanding of the message of faith and hope in God, as well as prosperity, especially in conditions of extreme despondency. Interpretation of the conceptual structures (schemas, categories and metaphors) in the song reveals that DANCE and DEAFNESS are mapped to uncover the kind of PERPLEXITY and ABSURDITY that characterise reaction to SUDDEN PLEASANT NEWS. The artiste invokes cognitive schemas and cultural memories of dance in Yoruba, cultural class categories and metaphorization of dance and its internalized network of cognitive associations to project the message. This resonates with the view that language is firmly grounded in cultural cognition and the complex socio-economic lives of humans can be captured in the negotiation of every aspect of their lives, including spirituality in gospel songs as seen in this study. The significance of this study lies in its ability to stimulate a lucid understanding of the cognitive associations of cultural memories and categories in the communication of common human experiences. Future research may explore how the artistic performance of other music genres equally evoke cultural imageries in communicating other diverse social issues.