Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:11:13pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
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04K: From Remix to Resistance: Music, Algorithms, and Digital Publics Location: State Room East | |
| Presentation 2 | |
Alhaji Beats: Afrobeats and the Mediation of African Muslim Identity within the Global Popular Music Market University of Michigan Nigerian Afrobeats artist Asake (born Ahmed Ololade) rose to national and global pop stardom with the release of his first album Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022), under famed Nigerian hip-hop artist and music producer Olamide’s Yahoo Boy No Laptop Nation (YBNL) record label. One of the album’s singles, “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)”, was released before Nigeria’s celebration of the Muslim Eid-el-Kabir. The hit song, which was secular in nature but utilized religious language in its lyrics, called for peace amid growing political insecurity that disproportionately affected Muslims. This paper argues that popular music opportunely centered Muslim religious expression during the holiday period, discursively challenging insecurity and generating revenue among Muslim music consumers. I draw upon Allottey-Pappoe’s (2024) description of Afrobeats as a hypernym, a broad categorization that elucidates sonic influences of Afro/Afro-Diasporic religious communities. I also use Osiebe’s (2016) conception of market-driven themes in Nigerian popular music to examine how Asake and other Nigerian Afrobeats artists address Muslim audiences in their music productions as morally attuned citizen-consumers. Their musical works subvert industry margins by sonically mediating the experiences of African Muslims, involving them as discursive citizens and popular music consumers contending with Nigeria’s daily precarities. | |
