But for a community like Rap Joint Lagos, NAS’ premonition about the death of Hip-Hop might have come true, leaving us with the “wreckage” of DJs. Founded by Akinwale Irokosu, Rap Joint Lagos began as an online community sometime in 2020 and since then, has become a cultural sanctuary for lovers of Hip-Hop. It is a bastion, in every sense of the word, for preserving the culture of Hip-Hop, whether through listening to classics, discussing the genre, reading about it, celebrating it, or sharing remarkable moments over the same. As “an avid listener and participant of the culture,” Joshua, a member of Rap Joint Lagos who is in his late thirties, explained that Rap Joint Lagos provided an avenue to “participate” and share this culture with other lovers of the culture, especially in a time where the “focus on Hip-Hop is rare.”
Hip-Hop is one of the most enduring cultural forms to emerge from Black expression and has grown into a global identity marker for Black culture everywhere. It started during the socio-economic furnace of the South Bronx in the 1970s. Hip-Hop emerged as a vessel for expression amongst the blacks of urban America, engulfed by economic hardship, spatial segregation, and limited access to institutional power in the United States. DJ Kool Herc, the story goes, had pioneered a technique that involved extending the percussion breaks of funk and soul records, which provided a base for other innovations and expansions. It soon combusted into a movement that lit up the world with a new kind of burning, particularly amongst black communities around the world.
Rap Joint Lagos is a haven for the kind of Hip-Hop that emerged from this era, with all the memories and the feeling it evokes, particularly for those who encountered and loved it in places like Lagos. In a 2020 interview with Culture Custodian, Akinwale Irokosu described Rap Joint Lagos (RJL) as a contemporary cultural centre where everyone can relax and share intimate experiences about rap music and the life and style around it. “It was conceived on the beauty and energy that hip-hop inspires in the City of Lagos. Rap Joint Lagos offers visitors a space to explore the genre’s philosophical and socio-political depth. It’s largely retro and nostalgic in focus.”
Six years ago, Akinwale Irokosu and his co-founders started Rap Joint Lagos with a Kickstarter campaign to raise $4,708. What began as an online community for “internally displaced rapheads” in Lagos, led by 16 corporate professionals, officially opened its doors two years later, on March 9, 2022 and has grown into a community with over 11,000 followers on Instagram. It is this community that now provides an “oasis” even for people from as far out as the Caribbean. “Rap Joint Lagos has been,” DJ Mosiah remarked with pulsating passion, “an oasis in the city [Lagos]” most especially because it “makes him feel at home,” and “completely comfortable.” With Caribbean origins, DJ Mosiah was born, raised, and has lived most of his life in New York, a place he rightly recognised as “the birthplace of Hip-Hop.” He moved to Nigeria about three years ago and was introduced to Rap Joint Lagos through one of his friends.
Rap Joint Lagos is an avant-garde of the culture of music in Nigeria. “We are driving the listening culture in Nigeria,” Akinwale Irokosu said. In an age consumed by the relentless digitalisation of the means of engaging with different art forms, including music (through streaming), Rap Joint Lagos comes off as a bulwark against this fire of digitisation through its insistence on communal listening and physical engagement with music. In the past, during the era of cassettes, vinyl records, and CDs, as Mr Irokosu explained, engaging with music came with “a sense of achievement.” And with this came community building. Unfortunately, the sonic rise of streaming culture has pushed these communal rituals into the dust of antiquity.
Every month, the community gathers to listen to a pre-selected classic album, sometimes bopping, other times swaying their bodies, and many times rapping and singing along to the song. But in addition to just listening, RJL also encourages thoughtful discussions about the songs, the genre and the movement that brings rapheads together on Norman Williams Street in Ikoyi, Lagos. Discussions range from the genre’s philosophical and socio-political depth to subject matters of various songs, the impact of the song, the artists of repute and defining impact, and other peripherals adjoining retro rap culture. Listening sessions around classic projects “presents an opportunity for people to sort of discover music that they previously had not listened to, and engage in discussions on that project,” Joshua said, knowingly.
For Mr Irokosu, these albums are “springboards,” a kind of clerestory through which members of the community look back into the age and time when the songs or albums were released, and thus reengage the socio-economic and cultural realities that existed when those songs were released. “We unpack the album, we’ll speak about the era,” he remarked. “If the album was released in 95,” he began, “we asked questions like, ‘where were you at that time? What were you doing? What was the fashion of that period? Or the political challenges? [and in the responses that follow,] some people say ‘I was in primary school,’ while other younger ones will admit to never being born at the time. Some people will remember where they were living, while others remember who they were dating at that point. After which, [we] start going [discussing] into the album proper — “what was the most introspective track?” “What was the party jam on it?” and when you finish, you decide whether it’s a classic album and how do we define ‘classic album?” In his brief introspection, he astutely pointed out that an album is not a ‘classic’ until it — and its message — “has endured”
The community’s listening lounge also hosts even more intimate listening experiences. Members of the community can play host to friends and share their personal or favourite playlists with them. “RJL allows you to invite your friends to come and experience your personal playlist with you,” Mr Irokosu explained. “People have marked birthdays and other personal celebrations this way,” he furthered. In doing this, they learn from the way different people engage and interpret songs; they share new songs and playlists between one another; and importantly, the community becomes bigger and bonds more strongly.
“I have numerous memorable experiences at RJL, but I think the one that really stands out was when I celebrated my birthday about two years ago (April 2024) at RJL. It is my most memorable experience. It was awesome,” Joshua highlighted as his voice rang with mirth. On the other hand, DJ Mosiah’s most memorable experience at RJL was one that reminded him of the very first record he bought off his own money in 1999. “I would say the listening party for Nas’ ‘I Am’ because it’s actually the first record that I bought with my own money in 1999. Seeing people there — business owners — relive the feeling of hearing one of the greatest rappers of all time — I haven’t experienced anything like that anywhere else in the world, actually. It left an indelible mark on my memory because I came all the way to West Lagos, Nigeria and West Africa to see Nas immortalized in his art. So it was a beautiful experience to share that in a very intimate setting. It’s something that I always remember, and I’ll always cherish.”
For community members, the nostalgia for the songs from Hip-Hip icons like NAS, and other stars from the era of the Old School Roots to the Golden Age and the Bling Era — now an irretrievable curio of memory — is part of what draws them together. During the Golden Age, artists like Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., and the Wu-Tang Clan shaped the genre with socially conscious rap. Later, in the Bling Era, Jay Z, Eminem, and others brought a more commercial appeal with radio-friendly records. It is the desire to satisfy this nostalgia that informs a good part of the listening culture at Rap Joint Lagos. Talking about his love for Hip-Hop, Abdul-Gafar, who is one of the community members, recalls growing up on figures like N.W.A, LL Cool J, amongst others, to the extent that he tried to “emulate” them and “live up to their lyrics.”
But Rap Joint is not just about listening and singing along to music alone. Though this was its initial motivation, it has come to mean more than that. “Rap Joint Lagos has served different evolutions, and this is what makes it unique,” Mr Irokosu said to me as he sat, reclining on his chair as though he reclined into the memory lane. “We’ve morphed,” he went on, “from being a kickstarter idea when the interview started to actually having a physical space, which is a unique one; a contemporary Hip-Hop and Lagos Cultural Centre. And when we talk about culture, we really are talking about music, fashion, food and everything that has to do with the culture of Hip-Hop and Lagos,” he informed.
The community keeps “stocks of books on the culture of Hip-Hop and Lagos, sells Hip-Hop records,” and even manages a listening booth, amongst its many other flourishing spin-offs. The listening culture of the community is matched by its interest in books. Sometimes, the community hosts its affiliate and resident group called the Renegade Book Club (RBC), which focuses on hip-hop history, Lagos culture, and local politics; RBC meets on the third Sunday of each month. Another of the community’s spin-offs is its restaurant. Speaking about the community’s restaurant, Joshua had joked that “Rap Joint Lagos has an excellent kitchen,” a fact which, according to him, is severely “underrated.” Rap Joint has a “listening room, a restaurant, and a bookstore,” an unusual trifecta which the founder said one would “struggle to find [the combinations] anywhere else in the world.”
The preoccupation with Rap Joint Lagos does not end with the penchant for the golden days of Hip-Hop alone. This preoccupation is also about a fondness for a past period of Lagos. “Rap Joint Lagos is also about Lagos,” Mr Irokosu noted. Many of the pillars and spin-offs of RJL, as much as they are about Rap and Hip-Hop music, are also about Lagos. A large arm of RJL’s bookstore, for example, focuses on Lagos; “we have a whole section on Lagos,” he points out, which are all “curated in a different way — the one on Lagos as a place, Lagosians’ books on fictional Lagos, and Lagos music.” In fact, one of the goals of RJL is really to, in Akinwale Irokosu’s words, “promote” the culture of Lagos, its books and way of life,” especially when you consider the fact that Lagos is the culmination of the “best Nigeria can offer to the world.”
DJ Mosiah, who has only spent a little more than three years in Nigeria, told me that “one of the biggest things RJL has taught him about Lagos culture is the cultural concept of “Owambe”. “ I didn’t know anything about it before coming here and then specifically spending time at Rap Joint Lagos,” he explained. This cultural concept helped him “understand this idea of community, and this idea of celebrating together, coming together and how important it is to celebrate and to document, you know, these moments.” “Some of the pictures that Mr Irokosu has in the shop are from the 70s and 80s of his own family. It’s such a beautiful representation of what Lagos culture is about, and on a similar level, Yoruba culture,” he admired.
The club hosts activities endemic to the way of life of Lagosians — and Nigerians as a whole — to evoke some of the quintessential memories of the culture. “We have a Garri Soakers Club,” Mr Irokosu beamed. “Garri is part of Nigerian and Lagos culture, and it is one of the most disrespected food items in Nigeria. It is the most loved, the most underrated.” During the gathering of the ‘Garri Soakers,’ they take turns to introduce one another to how “they enjoy their Garri,” he explained further. “There are people who don’t put milk and sugar in theirs, while some prefer cold water with groundnuts. We do this every other month.”
The community is also attempting to set up a history society which will concern itself, in addition to the history of Hip-Hop and that of Lagos. At Rap Joint Lagos’ restaurant, the design of the menu is themed around Lagos. “The breakfast is called ‘Isale Eko,’” he explained. “There’s a meal called ‘Kalakuta’ (a reference to the shrine of the music maestro, Fela Kuti, which was a place virulently popular in Lagos).” The underlying tone is to “capture the life of Lagos.”
This insistence of the community on Lagos makes it “unique,” Mr Irokosu told me. Lagos has always been the cultural and economic nerve of Nigeria. During the burgeoning years of Hip-Hop, and even now, Lagos stands out as one of the few places in Africa with a thriving community of dedicated fans. It became a rude world of its own, absorbing the rhythms, languages, and culture of Hip-Hop through its many young listeners. It is no coincidence that Rap Joint Lagos is based in Lagos and seeks to sustain a culture that was thriving at a point when the city was arguably at its artistic peak and club life was new.
Though Hip-Hop is understood as a product of the urban areas of New York, it thrives on the traditions of African-Americans who were taken from Africa as slaves. Lagos itself was once the slaving capital of the Atlantic slave trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the Bight of Benin. In a way, the predominance of the Hip Hop Culture in Lagos is a form of cultural recognition.
As much as Hip-Hop functioned as a means of expression and resistance for Black Americans, it resonated just as powerfully with young people in Lagos, who found in it a language for navigating and articulating their own realities. As one who has straddled both New York, the birthplace of Hip-Hop and Lagos, where the culture continues to find adherents and continues to thrive through RJL, DJ Mosiah took a brief moment to comparatively observe the Hip-Hop community in New York and in Lagos. Over the last fifty years, “Hip-Hop has grown and travelled out of the city [New York, the city of its birth] and has acquired a different reality around the world,” DJ Mosiah observed. “In New York, Hip-Hop is revered in a very unique way; there are museums, and people come from around the world to experience Hip-Hop in New York. Similar conditions are present in modern-day Lagos that were present in the 1970s New York — economic, political and tribal conditions. Unfortunately, from my perspective in Lagos, Afrobeats just dwarfed Hip-Hop. Here, Afrobeats is a behemoth, and the artists that are coming up are directing their energy and focus to it and other subgenres of Afrobeats. I don’t really see the Hip-Hop community growing at the same pace as those other sub-genres that young people are focusing on and creating from. But again, this is very nuanced.”
Rap Joint Lagos claws back through the vortex of memory to remind members of the cultural mood and communal excitement that once accompanied the release of classic Hip-Hop records, and the prevalent geist of the period. “Rap Joint Lagos does a tremendous job at preserving the nostalgia as well as bringing it into the modern day,” DJ Mosiah admitted.
Rap Joint Lagos’ centre is also covered in graffiti. Graffiti and Hip-Hop rose to prominence around the same period, and before long, the lines between both mediums blurred, since they were both means of expression for the marginalised communities. Graffiti became the visual language of hip-hop and was reputed as one of the pillars of Hip-Hop. “When you come to the space, you see a lot of graffiti,” Mr Irokosu enthused. The graffiti designs are created in such a “thematic way that allows people who visit the space to engage with the space, and even if there is no guide, they can walk through.” “We also encourage people to write on the wall. People write their names, and write whatever on the wall,” he concluded.
By keeping the Hip-Hop community in Lagos alive, especially in a time and place where attention shifts constantly, Rap Joint Lagos is ensuring that a whole gamut of the culture associated with the rap culture is preserved, alive and kicking. And this act of preservation is one that is almost as important as the culture itself. As Mr Irokosu said during our conversation, “ If you are a hip hop head and you’re in Lagos, if you haven’t been to Lagos, to Rapjan, Lagos, you haven’t really experienced everything Lagos has to offer.”
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