research

Current projects

My current book project examines the political ecology of West African popular music and its diasporic reworking in Europe and North America. I focus on the international spotlight on Ghanaian and Nigerian sounds (palmwine music’s revival, UNESCO recognition of highlife as intangible cultural heritage, and the Grammys’ formal embrace of Afrobeats) and ask how these celebratory narratives sit alongside— and sometimes obscure— environmental crises on the continent caused by gold mining and oil extraction.

At UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, I’m developing a project on how platforms, assistive technologies, and emerging AI tools shape disabled musicians’ creative labor, access, and visibility. I examine how design choices, moderation policies, algorithmic gatekeeping, and shifting regimes of intellectual property and data governance structure participation and opportunity in today’s digital music economy.

Publications

• Articles/book chapters
• “Fandom Infrastructure and the making of SarkNation.” African Music Journal (2026)
• “Music Career and Sustainability: The Strategies of a Hiplife Musician”. Ethnomusicology Forum, 2023.
• “Revitalizing Ghanaian Palmwine Music for a Sustainable Environment”. Rising Voices. Society for Ethnomusicology,2023
• “Contesting the Value of Musical Labour”. In Handbook for Economic Ethnomusicology, edited byTimothy D. Taylor and Anna Morcom. Oxford University Press. (Forthcoming)
• Reviews
• Book review
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Brew, O. Joshua 2023. Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television, 2023. Timothy D. Taylor. Journal of Popular Music Studies.

“Taylor continues to cement his reputation as one of the most influential scholars in ethnomusicology and particularly within the nascent subdiscipline of economic ethnomusicology. His impact is evident in his gamut of literature on music and economics. In this book, he illuminates complex and capacious concepts such as capitalism, use-value and exchange-value, creativity, and cultural production. His primary focus in this book is use-value, which is usually more complex for note-worthy individuals and social actors in particular places and times. Taylor heeds the advice he has frequently suggested in his previous works: ethnographic research is necessary for understanding how commodities and other sorts of cultural goods exist in what Arjun Appadurai (1986) calls “regimes of value.” Brew 2026

• Album review
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Brew, O. Joshua 2026. “Honk to Harmony: An Intimate Sonic Convo.” Horn to Horn: The La Drivers Union Por Por Group meet The Texas Horns. 2023. VoxLox 123. Produced by Steven Feld, Mark‘Kaz’ Kazanoff, and Nii Yemo Nunu. Yearbook for Traditional Music Journal.

“As someone who lived in Africa before moving to North America, I hear Horn to Horn differently. From my stereo in the US, the squeeze-bulb klaxon sounds transport me instantly to Accra’s streets. These distinctive horns—not from cars, but from Fan Milk ice cream vendors pushing their carts—would be instantly recognizable to any Accra resident. The acoustemology of the por por horns, in a gastromusicological context, evokes mouthwatering memories. Throughout the album, however, the squeeze-bulb klaxon sounds create dissonance that escapes harmonic and rhythmic boundaries. They appear consistently but unpredictably, establishing their own musical logic that evades “tonality as a colonizing force” (Agawu 2003).”— Brew 2026