Aesthetics and Performance Practice of the Music of Simisola Ogunleye

The Nigerian contemporary music industry is alive and well, displaying a wide range of musical styles and genres, including hip-hop, as a result of global cultural exchange. Hip-hop music was brought to Nigeria in the late 1980s and grew steadily throughout the first part of the 1990s. Numerous studies on various Nigerian hip-hop artists, such as Tu Face, D Banj, Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido, have been published in various research outlets. However, little research has been conducted on Simisola Ogunleye's aesthetics and performance practice as a Nigerian hip-hop music artist, resulting in a gap in the literature that this study attempts to fill. The descriptive and interpretive research approaches are used in this study, which is based on African aesthetics theory. Data were collected from 10 Simisola musical tracks, as well as 4 music videos, as part of the primary data. Secondary data consists of various discussions about her music on social media. According to the findings, Simisola, a gifted songwriter and singer, began singing at a young age in church choirs. She went on to produce a gospel album before transitioning into the secular hip-hop music industry in the country. Her songs are written on the street and reflect the social life of Lagos, where she grew up, providing her with compositional resource materials. However, the focus of this research is to conduct an ethnographic investigation into Nigerian hip-hop culture in Simisola‟s musical work as well as engage in scholarly discourse on how Simisola's work is influenced by exposure to various musical traditions and cultural phenomena. The significance of the study is to aid people working in the fields of popular art and media in understanding how music artists use everyday human experiences to compose their innovative musical works, how African artistry contributes to global contemporary culture beyond its geographical boundaries, and provide insight into the creative process. The creativity in her work expresses how she manipulates sounds to create unique melodies and arrangements that capture cultural elements. It also highlights how her positive lyrics explore meaningful themes such as self-identity, ancestry, and resilience with an uplifting message.