Abstract:
Popular music in the 21st century has come to fully reflect the politico-socio-economic flavours of the third millennium. The once peculiar elements marking the differences between the African, the Asiatic, the European, the Australian, and the American popular practices have all blended into one global genre called World Music. The only consideration in creative rationalization regarding World Music is the global market value. The accepted morality in international politics is economics. Economics connotes politics; commercialization condones capitalism. In the end, the winning economy not only asserts her interests, but also imposes her values. In so doing, a global culture ceases to be a picture but a feature. Creative expression is then conditioned by economic assertions. Motivation for creative innovation now has money as its prime consideration. Money that must be counted in Pounds, Dollars, and Euro. This global hegemony not only dictates but also psychologically controls ingenuity. Through a social analysis, a survey of the popular music practices in Nigeria today shows that the current craze for collaborations between Nigerian pop musical artistes with their foreign contemporaries only gives a blurred picture of the extent of threats to regional cultural self expression and artistic diversification posed by globalization.
