What is God’s Best Genre of Music?
The year was 2004, in the noughties, when the frenzy of the new millennium was still hanging in the air. My life was about to change drastically. Firstly, my family moved into a new neighborhood. I had lived my formative years in our previous house at Santos Layout, Egbeda Lagos. The streets were quiet and life was calm at Santos. But Ogba was different, it was bustling with life. People were constantly coming and going. There was enough to keep the curious mind busy. This change seemed radical to me; I had come to love Santos. I was gradually coming out of my shell; I even had a crush on our neighbor’s young daughter Adesuwa. I had gotten used to the rigor and discipline required to live on the mainland and school on the island. My mother would prepare my siblings and me for school before 6 a.m. to beat the 3rd mainland bridge traffic and get to Airforce Primary School V.I., before 8 am. Often we would come home late from school and hurry to do our assignments, before bedtime. Weekends provided some respite, we would watch cartoons or Mount Zion movies, either at our house or the Omoikes. This was the life I had gotten used to. However, with just one term left of primary school, my siblings and I were moved to Airforce Primary School Ikeja. This meant we no longer had to wake up so early to prepare for school, as the distance from our new house at Ogba, to our new school was not so much. I preferred things as they were before, I was only consoled by the fact that I was leaving home for a boarding school several miles away pretty soon. I missed my former school, my former friends, my former house, and my former life, and it was all yanked away more or less in a jiffy. My young, prepubescent mind was devastated. Everything changed when something, gravely unusual happened. My father let me go to the barber’s shop alone on this fateful day. I was used to my father, escorting me to the barber’s shop. I was always infuriated when he insisted that I have the same haircut every time. As I wrote this, I could hear his voice, ‘Oya put parting here’. But that day I was all by myself, was this a segue into adulthood, was this the ‘great power that meant, a great responsibility’? If he could trust me with this, I could only imagine what else was possible. I entered the barber’s shop and teenagers and young adults were waiting their turn. My eyes quickly went to the television, I loved watching television as a child. However, television in our Christian home was heavily scrutinized. We were allowed to watch cartoons, Christian songs, and Christian movies. We were a middle-class family and my father felt cable TV, was an unnecessary luxury. Hence, most of our entertainment came from local television and DVDs. I was drawn to the television that day because every time I came to the shop with my father it was switched off. But that day it was switched on and there was a music video playing on it, and it was not a Ron Kenoly video. Akon’s Gunshot was playing from M.T.V Base and for the first time, I saw everything my father preached against depicted in one video. But instead of being disturbed, the guys around me relished the music. Then he started to play some rap songs from the 80s and 90s and I was hooked. The lyricism, the bars, the poetry, and the delivery were all captivating. It didn’t matter that many of the videos had nudity, substance abuse, and violence in them, the rap music was the bait and I fell hard. For a child who took an early interest in poetry, the first time I heard good rap music it was like an introduction to a different type of high. The barber’s shop became my favorite place to go to. It fueled my interest, I wanted to be like those rappers. It looked so cool, to smoke, drink, and have scantily dressed, big booty chicks (pardon my French) all around you while dropping some hard bars. I was intrigued, even by the videos with violent depictions.
Then I went to a Christian, boarding Secondary School far away from home. It presented me with a similar dynamic to what I had back home. Secular music was not allowed in school, but at almost every turn, someone was singing a secular song. I had friends who knew whole rap songs by heart. By the second year of secondary school, my parents were heartbroken when they saw one of my shirts, with G-Unit boldly written. By this time 50 Cents had become a global phenomenon and my parents were bothered about my influences. By JSS 3, there was an M.I. craze, my fellow rap fans had a Nigerian rapper we could look up to. This short black boy from Taraba was spitting fire and revolutionizing the game in Nigeria. Crowd Mentality almost became my national anthem. Rap groups started to form at every corner of the school, my friends got together and started one we called Grand Sapphire. My rap name at the time was J-Dawg. We would write Christian rap songs and perform them during social nights. Then with some resistance from the school management, we introduced Christian rap songs, as part of the songs played at the school’s chapel. Then there was the Lil Wayne era, there were many music artists in this era, but I believe he defined that era. There was just something about his style and that sound of the lighter before every song that got you hooked. I remember how boys would gather in classes and together rap A Milli from beginning to end. People read lyric books like they would read for their school exams.
Rap was and will always be my best genre of music. I had allowed my influence to rub off on my younger relatives. I remember one time; when I was on a car ride with my cousin and two of my aunties. They were both yapping away in front of the car and Mirror on the Wall came on the radio. We both started rapping every line of the lyrics, then we got to the part where Lil Wayne said ‘I look just like my fucking Dad’. They both exclaimed in shock after they heard it and they turned off the radio. I had a metal rock phase when I started doing drugs at the University. It seemed like a great mix, with every high. My best group at the time was Bullets for My Valentine. That was also my Fela and Bob Marley phase. I just loved the rebellion and defiance that made its way into the music, it was brazenly bold and it perfectly defined who I was at the time. However, at just the right time, Jesus Christ found me, before I completely ruined my life. After Jesus, I started thinking deeply about my music choices. I was in a Christian University where listening to secular music was an offense, but many students still had several gigabytes of secular music on their laptops, and people like me took it up a notch by producing secular music in school. But now my allegiance was to Jesus, does this mean I have to give up rap music? What were my alternatives? What type of music did God like? My quest led me to the realization that God’s favorite genre was not even music at all, but a life completely surrendered to him. A life where he is truly Lord. It is from the lips of such a person that true worship rises to God like a sweet-smelling savor. It wasn’t first about the music, but the person. This could be the only reason the 13 Letters by Lecrae and the 116 Clique was my first encouragement to explore the Pauline epistles, although it was a rap album. Before that album, I grew up thinking that the Pauline letters were so out of grasp in terms of understanding. I preferred the dramatic stories of the Old Testament, like David and Goliath. But the Pauline epistles are to Christianity, what Mathematics is to students of Nigerian Secondary Schools. Even if you hate them, you cannot do without them or make so much progress until you understand them. But when Lecrae poetically articulates Corinthians, as a person and not a place, in 16 bars it started to make sense, it became more relatable. This is my outcry; Lord I miss the old Lecrae!! It was also on that album I heard about commentaries for the first time, in all my years of going to church, I had never heard a preacher refer to a bible commentary and what help they are to bible study times. Highlife is a popular music genre played mostly in beer parlors and palm wine joints in South Eastern Nigeria. However, when a submitted minstrel like Pastor Nathaniel Bassey receives a highlife sound from heaven- Ebenezer is born. So, what is God’s favorite Genre of Music? It is the melody of a surrendered life. A body yielded as a temple of God. A life lived to give praise to God, in word, thought, and actions. This is His type of jam. No matter what genre of music is utilized, such a person would always produce the type of music God loves to hear.
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