Negotiating societal crises through eschatological narratives in Yoruba gospel music: Notes from evangelist J. A. Adelakun’s “<i>Amona Tete Maa Bo</i>”

Abstract

Scholars have discussed how gospel music offers a framework for responding to the religious, social, and economic experiences of people in the society. Beyond performing religious and evangelistic purposes, how gospel music illuminates societal crises–politics and ecology–is yet to be known. This study examines the role of gospel music as a tool to facilitate religious experience while articulating social concerns. Specifically, it discusses the approaches employed by Yoruba gospel musicians in evoking spirituality in their discourse on societal problems. Reference is made to the musical performance of a popular Yoruba gospel music album titled “Amona Tete Maa bo” by Evangelist J.A. Adelakun which was accessed on YouTube. Further information is gathered from other internet sites including blogs, social media as well as periodicals which provided the secondary sources of data for the study. Through textual and musical analyses of the first and longest track in the album, and relying on critical discourses from musicology, religion and cultural studies, this paper demonstrates how gospel musicians deploy musical and theological approaches to reference and negotiate their social, political and environmental ‘salvation’ through eschatological narrative. The article explains the extent to which these approaches in gospel music and by extension Yoruba gospel musicians are evocative of the general spiritual dimension to almost every social, political and ecological crisis in Africa.