A New Essay Finally Takes Stanley Okorie’s Nollywood Soundtracks Seriously

There is a particular kind of song that used to fill the gaps between Lagos power cuts in the late 90s. While a VCR rewound and a generator coughed outside, a man’s voice would narrate the onscreen melodrama in mercilessly literal terms, over a Casio keyboard preset so brittle you could almost taste the plastic. That voice belonged to Stanley Okorie most of the time. This month, writer Mary Chiney gave Okorie’s vast, odd catalogue the kind of sustained attention it has rarely received outside the living rooms where it once played. Her essay, published as The Quietus’ latest Low Culture feature, traces how a single composer’s thousands of tracks became, as she puts it, “the vocalisation of the collective id” of a rapidly shifting Nigeria.

Chiney re-creates the sensory crush of watching Nollywood films on degraded VHS tapes: the over-saturated yellow light, the theatrical weeping in red dirt, and then that music. Not a Hollywood score, no strings or brass. Instead, a compressed MIDI twang, a metronomic synth clap, a bassline stiff as a hallway. And over it all, Okorie singing the action as it happened. Hyper-literalism, she argues, was the whole point. The music didn’t interpret the story; it stated it. It was a Greek chorus for an audience that didn’t need ambiguity. The essay ties Okorie’s work to the economics and aesthetics of early Nollywood, where budgets were nonexistent and a single Yamaha keyboard had to carry a film’s entire emotional architecture.

The piece arrives in a moment when more ears are turning back to the strange, functional music that built global pop cultures on the margins. Chiney’s essay isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It maps the logic behind a sound that outsiders might call primitive but that insiders will recognise as a coherent artistic language, one that worked for its audience and still radiates a weird, undeniable power. The playlist accompanying the essay is a starting point, not a museum. Okorie’s work, as Chiney presents it, isn’t just a soundtrack to a film industry; it’s a document of a country learning to process its own upheavals in real time, over a preset drum beat, on a Tuesday night when the power had just gone out.