In today’s music ecosystem, the dominant pulse is unmistakable—adult yearning, late-night escapism, and basslines engineered for crowded dance floors. Across streaming platforms, algorithms reward what keeps bodies moving and attention fixed, leaving little room for a softer, more intimate category of sound. Music intentionally created for children—thoughtful, culturally rooted, and emotionally resonant—has become increasingly rare.
What exists instead are fragments of memory. Lullabies endure, but mostly in private spaces: hummed by caregivers at bedtime, echoed in playground chants, or passed down through generations without ever touching a recording studio. Even notable interventions like the 2022 African Lullabies project—featuring artists such as Asa, Simi, and Ayra Starr—felt less like a trend and more like a corrective gesture, acknowledging a gap that had long gone unfilled.
It is within this quiet absence that Adekunbee, born Adekunbi Rekiat Kosoko, emerges with clarity of purpose. A chanter, ewi practitioner, and folklore singer, she carries both lineage and intention. As a descendant of the Kosoko royal family of Lagos Island and a former member of Adekunle Gold’s 79th Element band, her artistic trajectory could have followed more commercially predictable paths. Instead, she turns inward—toward children, toward heritage, and toward a kind of music-making that prioritizes intimacy over scale.
Her song “Marikotikoko” offers a clear entry point into this vision. The production is warm and deliberate, layering drumsets, keyboard, guitar, saxophone, and the unmistakable pulse of the gangan, the Yoruba talking drum. From its opening moments, the track feels less like a performance and more like an invocation. Adekunbee’s voice moves fluidly between melody and chant, weaving nursery rhyme cadences with something older, more ancestral.
As she calls out “Abigail”—a name that feels both personal and symbolic—she taps into a longstanding Yoruba tradition where names are more than identifiers; they are vessels of meaning, affection, and prayer. The chant unfolds into poetry, and the poetry into blessing. In eulogizing a child, she extends that tenderness outward, embracing all children within its emotional reach.
Yet the song does not rest solely on innocence. It subtly shifts to acknowledge the weight of parenthood—the unseen endurance, the quiet sacrifices, the steadfast love that underpins a child’s sense of safety. In this way, “Marikotikoko” becomes dual in purpose: a lullaby for the child and a hymn for the caregiver.
Musically, its arrangement mirrors this balance. The gangan beats like a second heart beneath the vocals, while guitar and saxophone lines glide in and out, adding texture without overwhelming the song’s core tenderness. Its brevity—clocking in at under two minutes—is not a limitation but a design choice. Like many of Adekunbee’s works, including “Agbanilagbatan” and “Alagbara Medley,” the track is concise yet potent, leaving a lasting emotional imprint without excess.
This approach is deeply rooted in ewi, a Yoruba poetic tradition that exists at the intersection of oral performance and literary expression. Historically performed in communal spaces and later adapted to recorded formats, ewi draws from older forms like oriki (praise poetry) and ijala (hunter’s chants). Practitioners such as Sulaimon Ayilara “Ajobiewe” Aremu have helped sustain its evolution, and Adekunbee extends that lineage into a contemporary context—one that embraces studio production, digital platforms, and global accessibility.
What makes her work particularly significant is not just its sound, but its intention. By recording in Yoruba and structuring her music around traditional cadences, she participates in an act of cultural preservation that is both subtle and profound. Language and tradition do not survive in abstraction; they endure through use, through repetition, through the everyday rituals of speech and song.
A recorded lullaby, especially one accessible across borders, becomes more than music. It becomes a vessel of continuity. A child in Lagos, London, or Toronto can hear it, absorb it, and—perhaps unknowingly—inherit a piece of cultural memory.
In that sense, “Marikotikoko” may be brief in duration, but its implications stretch far beyond its runtime. It stands as a reminder that not all impactful art needs to be loud or expansive. Sometimes, the most meaningful contributions are the quietest ones—the songs sung at the edge of sleep, where culture, care, and memory gently converge.