ABSTRACT
African popular urban music, most commonly referred to as “modern music,” owes its current shape and sound, mostly, to its cultural encounters with Europe or the Caribbean, or both. With the nation as an “imagined community,” national labels emerged as the overriding context for the production of modern music. Benedict Anderson thinks that the nation “is an imagined community because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” 1 He further clarifies the concept in the following terms:
it is imagined as a community, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is the fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. 2
