How 1970s album covers told the story of a nation finding its rhythm.
Face The Music (2023)
Focus: Visual culture, identity formation, postcolonial modernity
“What portraits were used to sell music in the tumultuous, mercurial decade of the 1970s, when Nigeria’s primary concern was the construction of national identity, the making and re-making of a country?
What secrets about this national project did the musicians’ faces hold?
How was the zeitgeist written on their bodies, the bodies with which they sang the songs of the people?”
Read more:
https://magazine.waxpoetics.com/article/nigerian-1970s-album-covers-wuruwuru-archives/
Summary:
Through the lens of 1970s Nigerian album covers, this essay examines how music, photography, and design became intertwined tools for expressing personal and national identity in a newly postwar, oil-boom Nigeria. It traces how visual aesthetics, from the cover of Fela Kuti’s Zombie to the cover of Geraldo Pino’s Afro Soco Soul Live, mirrored and molded the aspirations of a society grappling with military rule, class mobility, and modernity.
By reading album art as social text, I interpret these visuals as coded negotiations of respectability, rebellion, and freedom, revealing how Nigerians reimagined themselves through image and sound alike.
For commissioning editors:
This project demonstrates my capacity to translate cultural aesthetics into socio-political insight, bridging art and strategy. It is a good example of how I approach visual grammar (in this case, of desire and aspiration), how I’m able to map cultural production to national mood and identity, and my sensitivity to textures of dignity, joy, and freedom in postcolonial or transitional contexts.