Earlier last month, Sound Sultan released a mash-up single featuring a slew of artists who decidedly built their careers off music deeply ingrained in the struggle of the streets. The single, titled “Ghetto Love” features nostalgic appearances from African China, Marvellous Benjy, Baba Fryo, Daddy Showkey and Danfo Drivers, who all come under the umbrella-moniker, ‘Ghetto Soldiers’.

It’s unclear if Sound Sultan had bigger intentions beyond an attempt to sell a hit with the nostalgia of what Nigerian music used to sound like, but “Ghetto Love” attempts to transplant listeners into different defining times for Nigerian music. When it comes together at it’s best, “Ghetto Love” is proof that good music will always be good music regardless of time and quality of production otherwise, it brings to mind what seems to be a watershed erasure of music from the slums of Lagos.

Fela would always be the go-to reference for social issues, but no one will forget the incursion of African China, Stereo Man, Ortishfemi amongst others whose became firebrands for the struggle within the streets in the violence rife, Tinubu-era of the early noughties. These were artists who had lived through the turmoil and poverty of the ghetto life and thus authentic voices for a lasting struggle. The purpose of their causes is ever so evident in injustices like the demolition of Otodo-Gbame, by a government forcing urbanization on ancestral waterside communities. Because today, a sharp contrast will see artists only getting involved in social justice issues for cheap social media points. Some even forsake the common man completely for political handouts and pro-government campaigns.

Still, there is a greater war to be fought here. Nearly three hundred thousand people have been internally displaced by military thugs and Lagos State Task Force so I won’t bother demanding outcry from a social class disconnected from the regular man’s sufferings. But the absence of modern day truth-tellers like the some of the fore mentioned names, despite a timeline of events that stretches as far back as last year, only further proves why the battle for communities like Otodo-Gbame has been languid.

So where is the music of outrage now? Are there really no artists out there with the basic human decency to lend their voices to a cause worth the lives and safety of others? Is the ‘streets’ only a metaphor or does it connote some literal responsibility after the hits have been made off its sensibilities? Where in God’s earth is the fucking outrage?

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