Popular Music and Genre in Mainstream Nollywood

This article examines how genres of Nollywood soundtrack, which draw mainly from Nigerian popular music, effectively give Nollywood film genres their unique identification. This music genre-film genre association not only sets Nollywood apart from other cinema traditions, but also confers a marginal genre identity on its film music. The approach of this study is primarily ethnographic: pooling and teasing out inferences from the local discourse on film music practice, which the experiential evidence from forty classic Nollywood film samples support. The outcome shows that popular music is and can be a critical tool for distinguishing among film genres.