Our current music landscape yields with adult longing, club bangers, bass-heavy bounce of our cosmopolitan nightlife and algorithmic churns of streaming playlists. If you look closely, there’s hardly any music crafted with kids and children in mind.
Lullabies exist, yes, but they live in the oral tradition, passed from grandmother to grandchild, hummed at bedsides, or sung in playgrounds. They rarely make it into a recording studio. When Platoon and Apple Music assembled the “African Lullabies” project, in 2022, with artists like Asa, Simi and Ayra Starr, the initiative itself was an admission that this music barely exists in recorded form.
Out of this necessity and neglect rises Adekunbee, born Adekunbi Rekiat Kosoko. She is a chanter, an ewi practitioner, folklore singer, descendant of the royal Kosoko family of Lagos Island, former member of her brother Adekunle Gold’s 79th Element band, and someone who, by all appearances, has decided that the most needed and unique thing a Nigerian artist can do this year is make music for children.
“Marikotikoko” opens with a warm production; instrumentation of drumsets, keyboard, guitar and saxophone and gangan (talking drum). Adekunbee’s voice rises in nursery rhymes of Marikotikoko, repetitive and calling. By the time she gets into the first verse, she is already in chant mode, calling Abigail, probably her daughter’s name, into the air the way Yoruba mothers have done for centuries, turning the musings into a poem, and a poem into a prayer. She eulogises Abigail, and in extension, every little child.
In the spirit of parenthood and prayers, she spreads the eulogy to parents too, the ones whose love is measured in what they endure. The song holds both the sweetness of a child sleeping and the enormity of what it costs to keep that child safe, fed and dreaming.
When Adekunbee gears back into the song’s chorus, the gangan pulses through the chants like a second heartbeat, the guitar strums through the arrangement and the saxophone breezes in and retains some of the most memorable notes in the song.
All of these happen in under two minutes, and that brevity is deliberate. Adekunbee’s songs like “Agbanilagbatan” and “Alagbara Medley” follow the same blueprint: short, potent, titled in Yoruba, steeped in emotion and rooted in either family values, gospel devotion or narrative depth.
This style of music expression comes from somewhere specific. Ewi, the poetic tradition Adekunbee practices, emerged many centuries ago as a Yoruba verbal art, and it moved from village squares to vinyl records, mouths of court poets to airwaves. Scholars describe it as a form that lives between the oral and the written, one that draws freely from older traditions like oriki and ijala. And like other notable ewi chanters like Sulaimon Ayilara “Ajobiewe” Aremu, Adekunbee absorbs what the modern world offers such as studio recording, social media, digital distribution. She brings this tradition into a different arena: music for children, families, faith and feeling.
The act of recording in Yoruba and structuring a performance around the cadences of oriki, an artist like Adekunbee is doing something that looks small but carries weight. Languages survive in the mouths of people who use them. Traditions survive in the hands of people who practise them.
A lullaby, sung in Yoruba or any language whatsoever, recorded and released into the world where a child born in London or Toronto or Lagos can hear it, is an act of transmission. It carries culture forward in the most intimate way possible: through the voice of a parent or caregiver, at the hour when a child is most open to receiving it.
“Marikotikoko” is short in length but enormous in purpose. It is a lullaby for children, a hymn for parents and an act of cultural preservation. It’s definitely an important record for Nigeria’s contemporary pop culture, and a legacy defining record for Adekunbee.
