‘Chop Life, Wahala No Dey Finish’

Combating Despondency and Evoking Positivity in Selected ‘Pandemic’ Nigerian Hip-Hop Songs

Authors

Abstract

Songs as creative cultural products perform functions beyond entertainment. Indeed, in many African cultural contexts, songs are useful for teaching and performing religious rites, as well as stimulating social consciousness. Contextualised in the (post-) COVID-19 pandemic period, the study whose findings this article reports applied positive discourse analysis (PDA) to examine selected Nigerian hip-hop stars’ ‘resistance’ voices against depression, despondency, and dispiritedness. More specifically,  the article analyses representative lyrics of four songs from popular Nigerian artistes. The songs were produced between 2020 and 2021, marking the heights of the global pandemic. They were purposively selected based on their thematic preoccupations about survival strategies during the pandemic. The article identifies how these artistes adopt a utopian stance and project an ‘overcomer’ trope through four discursive processes: their explicit identification of life as a blend of opposites and contraries, their reconstruction of problems as an ever-present enemy, their projection of ‘chopping life’ as false consciousness; and rendition of money as the source of happiness and solution to problems. The article, based on the analysis, submits that through lyrical creativity and awareness of the subsisting social realities, music discourse can help advance coping strategies to overcome challenges for the depressed group.  Therefore, the study calls for further on other African artistes’ COVID-19-related songs to provide more insights into the interconnections between language use in music and positive health and well-being, especially in health crises.

Keywords:

Nigerian Hip-Hop, COVID-19 pandemic, Positive Discourse Analysis, Despondency, Positivity

https://dx.doi.org/10.56279/ummaj.v11i2.1

Author Biographies

Ebuka Elias Igwebuike, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany & Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Nigeria

Distinguished academic and researcher with a focus on discourse analysis, media representation, and cultural studies currently affiliated with Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria.  He has also held positions at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in Germany, where he contributed to the academic community from 2020 to 2024.

Paul Ayodele Onanuga, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria

Department of English and Literary Studies, Senior Lecturer

Frolence Rubagumisa Rutechura, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Department of Foreign and Linguistics,  College of Humanities, Lecturer

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Published

2024-12-31

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2024): Umma Journal of Contemporary Literature and Creative Arts

Section

Articles

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