Theorizing Intimacies and Articulation in Nigerian Hip Hop Music

Abstract

This paper explores how Nigerian hip hop music, lyrics, and histories illuminate connections and relationalities, intimacies, and articulations, among and across African and African diasporic communities. Drawing on the works of Lisa Lowe, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick, and others, I demonstrate how these intimacies and articulations allow us to reimagine hip hop, focusing not on origins or beginnings (or African American authenticities) but instead as an expressive transnational mode of cultural production. In this way, I discuss the significance of Black politics in popular music and foreground how intimacies and articulation produce new ways of theorizing race.

Introduction

Nigerian hip hop music is a strand of (global) hip hop that is growing and developing exponentially in Nigeria and globalizing with rapidity. Bolstered by digital technology, and corporate endorsements from multinational companies since the late 1990s, Nigerian hip hop music has become the most versatile and accessible cultural form of enunciation for Nigerian youth. Its spreadability and popularity across various African countries, increasing collaborations with Black diasporic hip hops, and heavy multilingual adaptability make it a dominant transnational youth culture in Africa (Omoniyi, 2009). For decades, Nigerian hip hop music has continued to serve as a viable route for youth liberation from poverty, functioning significantly as a space for the voiceless, a platform for sociopolitical engagement, and a site of resistance and agitation for new possibilities. This, however, does not erode its deviationist popularization and performances of misogyny, hypersexuality, hypermasculinity, cybercrime, and substance abuse (Ajayi, 2023; Onanuga and Onanuga, 2020; Tade, 2019). These antithetical embodiments are not peculiar to Nigerian hip hop music alone; they constitute the defining cultural aesthetics that contentiously place hip hop cultures in continuous conversations and foreground its controversial ideologies (Perry, 2004; Rose, 2008).

While various forms of popular music in Nigeria such as Juju, Fuji, Apala, Waka, and Highlife align with specific ethnicities (Forchu, 2009; Omoniyi et al., 2009; Onwuegbuna, 2010), Nigerian hip hop music is unique in its transcending capacity to relegate such ethnic boundaries and serves as a subcultural bond among the youthful generality of Nigerian populace. Thus, Liadi (2012) notes that “the Nigerian version of the [hip hop] music has been overwhelmingly accepted by a good number of youths in the country irrespective of class, religion, and social status” (p. 3). Gbogi (2016) corroborates this observation by stating that Nigerian hip hop music “represents a new transethnic, transnational popular music that renders the idea of specific ethnic ascriptions pointless and indeed impossible” (p. 171). The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards ceremony held on 14 March 2021, in which two Nigerian Afrobeats and hip hop artists (Burna Boy and Wizkid) won Grammy Awards further reinforces the global acceptability and recognition of this national hip hop. While Burna Boy’s album “Twice as Tall” won the “Best Global Music Album” category; Beyonce, Saint JhN and Wizkid’s song “Brown Skin Girl” featuring Blue Ivy Carter won the “Best Music Video.” All these milestones are pointers to the fact that Nigerian hip hop music has fully matured and has been enjoying international appeal and patronage.

The enthralling ascension of Nigerian hip hop music on the global music stage and its untamable influences on Nigerian youth have made it a focus of scholarly engagement. As a result, several engrossing studies have examined this youth pop culture in Nigeria from diverse invigorating perspectives. These studies can be broadly categorized into three: those that focus on the language practices (Akande, 2012, 2013; Forchu, 2020; Gbogi, 2016); those that interrogate the lyrical content and thematizations (Christopher, 2013; Eze, 2020; Lazarus, 2018; Olusegun-Joseph, 2020; Onanuga and Onanuga, 2020; Tade, 2019); and those that situate this youth pop culture within postcolonial positionalities and identities (Olusegun-Joseph, 2014; Omoniyi, 2006, 2009; Omoniyi et al., 2009; Shonekan, 2011, 2013). Although all these studies provide insights into the linguistic, cultural, and political aesthetics of Nigerian hip hop music, there is still a dearth of research around situating this youth culture within Black Studies frameworks such as intimacies and articulations. It is against this backdrop that this paper attempts to theorize these concepts in Nigerian hip hop music to spark a scholarly dialogue. In doing this, I also draw on Iton’s In Search of Black Fantastic, Simone’s Improvised Lives, Keeling’s idea of Black Future, Gilroy’s Dialectics of Diasporic Identification, Kelley’s Freedom Dreams and others to drive home my arguments. My methodology involves a close reading of the relevant texts and qualitative analysis of purposively selected lyrics of Nigerian artists. Hence, in the subsequent sections, I discuss global hip hop centering on its features, antinomies, and influences. I proceed to elucidate intimacies and articulations as the theoretical background and theorize these phenomena in Nigerian hip hop music. The significance of this paper lies in its capacity to initiate a new theorization in relation to pop culture in Nigeria and generates a conversation in African studies and Black studies generally.

(Global) hip hop: features, antinomies, and influences

Hip hop represents a conglomeration of “cultural practices” including Mcing, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing/youth dance (Alim, 2009a: 2). It also includes other sites where cultural expressions are articulated such as dressing, language use, styling, knowledge, and cultural politics, to fomulate “Hip Hop Culture” (Alim, 2009a: 2). Hop hip nations, therefore embody cultural sites where “transcultural flows,” performances, tensions, and diverse identities are radically created, negotiated, and performed to demonstrate authenticity (Morgan and Bennett, 2011; Omoniyi, 2009; Pennycook, 2007). Hip hop started as an African American youth culture in the mid-1970s in New York and has unprecedentedly registered its cultural, political, and economic influence the world over (Forman, 2000; Osumare, 2007; Perry, 2004; Rose 1994). As Rose (1994) observes, hip hop in the United States “grows out of the cultural potency that racially segregated conditions foster” (p. xiii); focuses on the challenges of racism and economic subjugation; and gives priority to Black voices from the marginalized American communities. To project the transborder signification of Black youth music, Gilroy (1991) remarks that “the issue of popular music as a vehicle for political sensibility which transcends nationality is central and unavoidable” (p. 10). As Campbell (2018) explains, hip hop underscores the verbalization and practice of Blackness through its politics of rawness, resistance, and rehumanization. The strength of hip hop lies in its youth-centeredness and resistant potency as well as its historical and transnational force to suggest “other possibilities and generate other plausible models” for Black survival (Gilroy, 1993: 77). This tallies with Hall’s (1993) positionality in his article What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture? when he opines that cultural strategies “can make a difference and can shift the dispositions of power” (p. 104). In addition, Gilroy (1993) further explicates in his book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness that “[hip hop] demonstrates the aesthetic and commercial fruits of pain and suffering” (p. 107) and foregrounds the significant roles of musicians in amplifying Black struggle, imaginative prowess, and finesse. In all of these, hip hop embodies a multilayered cultural genre that articulates the political, social, cultural, racial, historical, personal, and commercial as they relate to everyday realities and imagined realities.

Despite its foundational political ideology that endears it as a vibrant popular culture and youth movement of resistance in various connected geographies, hip hop epitomizes controversial cultural practices in contemporary world. As Gilroy (1993: 79–83) maintains, while hip hop could be read as “critical social theories” because of its philosophical and political praxes, its “misogynist tone” and “masculinist direction,” orientations and glorification make it a site of antinomies. To support Gilroy’s claim, Oloruntoba-Oju (2019) highlights the complex, contradictory, and paradoxical roles of popular music by arguing that they are sites of “resistance and compliance. . . characteristic of postmodernist cultures” (p. 61). As Hall (1993) rightly states, hip hop is a cipher of contradictions in that it is a product of modernity, a designation that is difficult to delineate due to its haunted problematic (p. 108). Hall further contends that popular culture generally should not be read in “binary oppositions” in that such oppositional readings relegate its alternative sensibilities and essentialities (p. 108). I share Hall’s view in this regard in that if our appraisal of hip hop is dialogic, there is a tendency to understand the new possibilities of positionalities embedded in hip hop practices. However, I must admit that the level of sexism and antisocial behavioral representation in hip hop is disturbing and difficult to ignore. While gangsterism, women objectification, and drug sale and abuse have formed part of the aesthetic representations of hip hop in America (Perry, 2004; Rose, 2008), Nigerian hip hop music has been notorious for lyrical and video promotion of cybercrime, and women commodification and degradation (Ajayi, 2023; Onanuga and Onanuga, 2020; Tade, 2019). However, it is crucial not to deconstruct these practices in isolation but to situate them in contexts of productions. Generally speaking, hip hop is produced across societies where Black women, Black queers, and trans-folks have been victims of patriarchy, exploitation, oppression, racism, and structural binarity from time immemorial. The retention and representation of such biased ideologies in hip hop reflect the colonial gender structure that must be resisted through practice in all guises. As a reaction, the objectifications of men have also remained constant in women’s hip hop and feminist hip hop to signal resistance (Khong, 2020). Indeed, Black feminist hip hop in Nigeria and worldwide (e.g. Weird MC, Teni, Simi, Tiwa Savage, Ayra Starr, Lil Kim, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte, Foxy Brown, Megan thee Stallion, among others) and the objectification of Black and other non-Black men are simultaneously a performance and critique of patriarchy. With this, femininity confronts, disrupts, and dismantles hip hop patriarchal politics by challenging its authenticity. However, with all the paradoxes and incongruities that pervade hip hop cultures, it continues to stand for Black lives and freedom, and navigates diverse human terrains to exert influence across continents.

Intimacies and articulations: some clarifications on theoretical background

The book The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe (2015), upon which my theorization of intimacies is based, explores the shrouded historical linkage between Europe and its colonial bases in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia. Lowe’s argument is that “liberal philosophy, culture, economics and government are implicated in colonialism, slavery, capitalism and empire” (p. 2). Lowe contends that the connections between “slavery and settler colonialism” are rarely discussed in scholarship (p. 2). To do this, Lowe examines colonial state archives to uncover colonial relationship and violence that are subsumed under modern justification. To achieve her objectives, Lowe discusses four interconnected journeys: the first was the autobiographical journeys of a former slave-Olaudah Equiano; the second was Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in conjunction with the journeys of colonial items that connect the colonial bases; the third was the movement of Indian firm to China, setting up opium trade connections and labors; and the fourth was the cruel journeys of African slaves and their concealment in the narrative of history and emancipation which are also not evident in the accounts of C.L.R James and W.E.B. Du Bois (Holmwood, 2016). Based on these, Lowe argues that hidden connections exist in the archives linking these colonial subjects and sites not only as victims of colonialism and slavery but also as victims of modern liberalism. Lowe defines intimacies from two main perspectives: the connections to “global geography,” the colonial sites that are often considered spatially distant from one another; and the relations between slavery abolition in the Caribbean and their colonial replacement with Chinese labor ironically considered as “free.” By implication, intimacies uncover proximity between colonial geographies and subjects ordinarily considered unrelated.

In a review of the book, Joseph (2016: 903) notes that Lowe highlights “geographical” intimacies to designate the links between colonial bases, and “subjective” intimacies to mean the lived experiences and stories of persons and their domestic spaces that highlight the mechanics of capitalism. In another review, Suarez (2017) asserts that intimacies as deployed by Lowe relate to the historical relations between “capital, empire, and slavery” (p. 204). Therefore, Lowe contends that these colonial relations are deliberately unspoken of to maintain the general narrative of modernity but surprisingly, the intimacies are scattered all over the archives (p. 35). Lowe further emphasizes and differentiates between residual and emergent intimacies. While residual intimacies are past colonial factors that continue to have effects and manifest in the present “social formation,” emergent intimacies are new elements in modern “social formation” brought to bear by “residual processes” (p. 19). Based on the foregoing, I read intimacies as embodying the historical and colonial connections between nations, individuals, groups, or cultures to unmask the workings of colonialism, neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and modern liberalism. Intimacies exemplify colonial connections among peoples with historical oppression. In this sense, intimacies can be read and put into perspectives from national, personal, social, political, and cultural relations. At this point, it is vital to shift focus to the notion of articulation.

The concept of articulation in Black Studies and Cultural Studies has been greatly popularized by Stuart Hall. As Hall (1986) posits, articulation can be delineated as an expression that which designates to speak, to express, or to enunciate (p. 53). Articulation can also mean “a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” even if it can join elements in specific circumstances (p. 53). Hall exemplifies this second notion using a “lorry (truck)” metaphor. As Hall agues, even when the “front (cab)” and “back (trailer)” are usually tied together, their connection is not always necessary (p. 53). Accordingly, theorizing articulation provides a dual means of comprehending how “ideological elements” are linked in specific circumstances and how such a linkage may not be necessary in other conditions. In other words, articulation “enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socioeconomic or class location or social position” (Hall, 1986: 53). The point Hall is making here is that it is possible for Black people to delineate their cultural identities as not necessarily tied to colonial logics despite the historical connections to slavery and colonialism. This is not to elide our history but to emphasize our cultural identities not only in the light of the past but also in the sense of becoming (Hall, 1990: 225). In this light, cultural identities belong to the past and to the present and to the future (Hall, 1990). The reasoning is that the articulations of connective Black survival and cultural practices could be outlined not necessarily in alignment with colonial entanglement, because Black people are walking the path of independent political subjects that defies the workings of colonial logicality. Black collective imaginations, hopes, dreams, and aspirations are in themselves articulations that defy their biopolitical and necropolitical configurations. I proceed from this juncture to the following section.

Discussion

My theorization of intimacies in Nigerian hip hop music stems from the connections between hip hop and Nigeria. If we adopt Alim’s (2009a) concept of Global Hip Hop Nations, an umbrella term that expresses a coverage of all national hip hops, and operational as “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006), we may enunciate that African American hip hop nation and Nigerian hip hop nation exist under this theoretical parasol. The relationship between African American hip hop nation and other hip hop nations has been a subject of debate in scholarship. For instance, Barret (2016) notes that some hip hop artists across the globe often maintain that no country can claim ownership of hip hop, “while others emphasize historical or political connections with African American culture” (p. 145). It is true that several scholars have alluded to the African American productive foundation of hip hop (Charry, 2012; Forman, 2000; Perry, 2004; Rose, 1994, 2008). However, in the Nigerian context, Omoniyi (2006) insists that Nigerian hip hop music as well as other African hip hops on the continent “is a reappropriation of a musical form that was originally domiciled in the region [Africa] and became globalized only after transplantation through the Middle Passage” (p. 204). The interpretation is that Omoniyi attempts to disparage the American-root narrative of hip hop and argues that it is a product of precolonization that was exported to the United States through the Atlantic slavery, refashioned culturally, technologically, and philosophically, and imported back to the motherland, Africa. And this form of Black popular culture was later reappropriated in various African countries. While Omoniyi’s “boomerang hypothesis” is ample and robust, a critical theoretical approach will also provide an opportunity for more interrogation and dialogue on the contestation.

Therefore, an array of studies authenticates and traces the emergence of Nigerian hip hop music in the 1980s to the imitation of African American hip hop, which is a Black diasporic culture. Charry (2012) writes: “after an incubation period in the 1980s marked by imitation of its American source, African rappers came into their own in the 1990s” (pp. 16–17). Whereas Charry acknowledges the presence of traditional practices such as storytelling, chanting, poetry, incantation, and recitation in pre-and post-colonial Africa, he opines that hip hop on the African continent did not originate from these traditions in that the majority of the first set of hip hop artists in Africa had no intense connection with these traditional practices. Consequently, Charry concludes that many national hip hops in Africa had their initialization from their African American counterparts. Gbogi (2016: 173) and Onanuga and Onanuga (2020: 142) further echo this narrative of African American origin of Nigerian hip hop music in their description of the developmental stages and trends in Nigerian hip hop music. I align with the perspective of these scholars in that it is tricky, if not almost impossible, to disconnect the root of Nigerian hip hop music from its Black diasporic ally. This social, political, and cultural umbilical cord between Black hip hop nations cross the Atlantic embodies my theorization of intimacies.

While the origin of Nigerian hip hop music can be tied to its Black diasporic counterpart, its domestication, which is not necessarily tied to this diasporic influence, constitutes an act of articulation. However, rather than focus energy on delinking the two, it is more insightful to foreground their connections, relationalities, and synergy in articulating Black politics. As Iton (2008) rightly maintains, Black politics requires “the negotiation, representation, and reimagination of black interests through cultural symbols” (p. 5), and this form of politics is essential for Black articulations. What I am theorizing here is that the intimacies between the two hip hop nations should be accentuated as a collaboration of Black voices that persistently echo and assert Black existence, survival, uniqueness, aesthetics, reimagination, and identities. Hip hop has provided a space for intimacies of Black cultural articulations like no other mode of articulation and has largely made efforts in mending “racial relations” in the Americas and across continents (Shonekan, 2013: 181). For example, while a genre such as poetry and other art forms present their signification in articulating Black consciousness, they do not exert global influence, neither do they enjoy global privilege such as hip hop in unraveling Black survival dynamics that are not necessarily tied to colonial logics. This is because poetry, despite its aptness, aesthetics, awareness, and politics, is not specifically youth oriented. Poetry as a genre is entangled in colonial, exclusive, and elevated language and does not command youth movement in marginalized and local communities such as hip hop. Reinforcing this enunciation, Folajimi (2016) observes that some elitist popular cultures, including drama, do not enjoy the patronage of a wider audience because of “the impenetrability of their language and style of production” (p. 189), but the rise of digital technologies now enhances the popularization of some of these elitist arts. However, the paradox is that hip hop music thrives on lyrical poetry accompanied by sonic, technological, visual elements, dance, and other multimodalities. Yet, the uniqueness and global flows of hip hop cultures and diversities are hinged on hip hop affinity with the youth, the subaltern, the marginalized, and its free accommodation of local cultures, languages, and identities. These unmatchable sensibilities, inclusivity, and liberatory politics position hip hop as a vibrant global youth culture, cultural movement, and critical sociocultural theories and practices (Alim, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; Campbell, 2014; Morgan and Bennett, 2011; Omoniyi, 2009; Pennycook, 2007). Regardless of the global flows of hip hop cultures, a robust articulation of Blackness is that which requires drawing on different cultural genres and sites to underscore connections, relationalities, divergences, and opacity (McKittrick, 2021).

The complex connections between Nigerian hip hop music and its African American counterpart have also been examined in the light of power relations and cultural imperialism (Shonekan, 2011, 2013). As Shonekan (2013) argues, vast numbers of Nigerian artists have arrogated hip hop to a level that “the indigenous pop music that is created there has the overwhelming taste of American hip hop” (p. 182). Furthermore, Shonekan (2011) argues that “the hegemonic nature of [American] pop culture ensures that it strangles local creativity of indigenous popular forms. Many Nigerian rappers who were once creative and innovative now simply emulate the rap performances they see via cable TV” (p. 17). A major ground for Shonekan’s argument is that many Nigerian hip hop artists are adopting nicknames like their African American allies. While this is largely true, it is also crucial to mention those who deploy their Indigenous names as their stage names to showcase and authenticate their roots and identities and they include Olamide, Asake, Adekunle (Gold), Simi, Teni, Niniola, Eedris Abdulkareem, and many more. Also, whereas Shonekan’s assertions are illuminating, they can only be satisfactory if they relate to the emergent phase of Nigerian hip hop music in the 1980s, a phase that Gbogi (2016) labels “the Phase of Mimesis” (p. 173). Following Gbogi (2016), I argue that the current Nigerian hip hop music is not an imitation of its American counterpart in that it has been domesticated and indigenized since the 1990s and has been enjoying local and global distribution and consumption since the new millennium.

Nevertheless, Nigerian hip hop music is similar and dissimilar from African American hip hop in its various cultural productions and practices despite its domestication, and this is the general characteristic of many hip hop nations. For example, the raps of Mr Raw, Lord of Ajasa, Dagrin, Olamide, Phyno, Zlatan, Naira Marley, Falz, Chinko Ekun, and others are all sophisticated Nigerian Indigenous raps devoid of projecting American flavor. Furthermore, most of the pop songs of Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, 9ice, Tiwa Savage, Simi, and Teni are all highly multilingual in promoting Nigerian ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities and cannot be fully ascribed to American taste. These forms of Indigenization contribute to Nigerian hip hop’s authenticity, and it is unclear how Black diasporic pop culture has made Nigerian artists uncreative in this dispensation of professed cultural domestication and originality. In fact, as Osumare (2007) insightfully notes, native people are not careless adopters of Western items and popular culture as they often reprocess and reinscribe new denotations and values onto the “foreign” (p. 66) cultures in their native cultural space through the processes of localization and globalization. Osumare explicates that “such inscription of meaning utilizes local values, customs, and everyday practices, creating an experience of global interaction moment-by-moment in the lived experience” (p. 66), and that is the case of Nigerian hip hop music since in the 1990s. The inspired mutuality between African American Hip Hop and Nigerian hip hop and others is what Osumare (2012) calls “the arc of mutual inspiration” (p. 34). Indeed, the blending of the local and global cultures, norms, traditions, languages, and practices in popular culture has been defined as “glocalization” (Robertson, 1995), “transcultural flows” (Pennycook, 2007), and “hybridity” (Akande, 2014). I, therefore, argue that the collaborations of sounds, outfit, dance, beats, and songs between the two hip hop nations are imperative, mutually beneficial, and symbiotic as the intimacies privilege the two sides of the Atlantic. It is through such cultural intimacies and articulations that the cultural identities of both Black diaspora and on the continent can be renegotiated, refashioned, and reimagined within Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism missionizes as practice optimism, togetherness, new possibility, and freedom for Black people (Keeling, 2019). As Strong and Chaplin (2019) clarify, the afrofuturistic standpoint stimulates “a way of viewing Black culture in a fantastical, creative and hopeful manner” (p. 58), while prioritizing our agency and combining the ancestral past with the futuristic new possibility as imagined and proclaimed in the Black Panther movie. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (2018) compels us to look beyond afropolitanism, which celebrates Africa’s connection to the global, and invests more in an afrofuturistic consciousness that mobilizes us to embrace Black joy, happiness, hope, liberation, and future. Afrofuturism as a way of thinking transcends aesthetics and poetics to include Black “empowerment, resistance, communication and imagination within popular culture” (Smith and Coleman (2022: 1). Although afrofuturism has been alleged to privilege only the interests of the Black diaspora (Hodapp, 2022; Okorafor, 2019), I read it as a framework that is dynamic, broad, and elastic—that which engages in the articulations of global Blackness. This progressive Black ideology is sustained in the undercurrent politics of this paper. The understanding of Afrofuturism permits us to embrace intimacies from the two sides of the Atlantic to envision Black liberation and Black “possible impossibility” (Keeling, 2019: 4).

My second reading of intimacies in Nigerian hip hop music relates to Osumare’s (2007) notion of “connective marginalities” (p. 63). That is, I am interested in intimacies that signal marginalities and link Nigerian hip hop music with others within the configuration of hip hop nations. As Osumare (2007) theorizes, “connective marginalities are the resonances of social inequalities that can manifest as four particular configurations in different parts of the world- youth rebellion, class, historical oppression and culture” (p. 63). Apart from Blackness which carries the burden of oppression in most societies, most Black youth, women, and queers globally also constitute victims of social inequality. And popular culture has established a space for them to contest the status quo, crave change, and advocate new alternatives. When such resistance is articulated in any hip hop nation, it “instigates global connections of understanding about various peoples’ marginal status at the local level” (Osumare 2007: 64). Nigerian hip hop artists such as Eedris Abdulkareem, African China, Dagrin, Falz, and others have deployed the instrumentality of their songs to react to the polity and instigate youth consciousness and youth intimacies in Nigeria and beyond. Some of their conscious music are not just mere expressions of socioeconomic conditions or bitter lived experience; they are articulations that uncover the hidden realities in relation to postcolonial conditions to raise a conversation. The teleology of their lyrical ideological practices is geared toward connecting the youth, who are largely marginalized and in quest for new possibilities. These conscious songs often resonate with the youth, shape their understanding about power relations, create a space for reimagination, and articulate an illocutionary force that may transcend the locality of production. The implication of this argument is that many conscious political Nigerian hip hop music that articulate youth marginalization often trigger youth intimacies that could generate new directions of actions and self-reflection as a society and instill a politics of hope. This is in line with Morgan and Bennett’s (2011) enunciation that youth worldwide are growing into organic social actors, “those who use hip hop to develop critical thinking and analytical skills that they apply to every aspect of their lives” (p. 178). The outcome of this movement is the rise of local hip hop space where artists deploy their music to challenge, epitomize, and critique marginalizing conditions, thereby creating a translocal intimacy (Morgan and Bennett, 2011).

Another intriguing and significant theorization of intimacies that can be brought to bear in Nigerian hip hop music relates to “(neo)colonial intimacies.” Here, the deconstruction of lyrics that evidenced (neo)colonial framings and entanglements are given prominence. The songs articulate colonial consequences and create a connection between geographies with colonial and slavery experience. In addition, the content of the songs can also be explained as articulating these entanglements and also articulating them as erasure in constructing ongoing Black identities and liberations. I would like to project Fela’s Afrobeat song, Why Black Man Dey Suffer, as a point of departure in my theorization of (neo)colonial intimacies. My projection is not to delineate Fela’s music as a hip hop song but as a foundational Afrobeat and anticolonial popular music that has significantly inspired and shaped the consciousness of many hip hop artists in Nigeria and all over the world. Many popular Nigerian hip hop artists have acknowledged in their public interviews or through their songs to drawing some inspirations from Fela’s music and his radical conscientizing politics. My reference to this song is thus necessary because of its historical significance as it reminds us of colonial infiltrations of Africa and the onset of Black experiential suffering and discord wherein the consequences continue to define, redefine, and entangle Black lives and survival even in the so-called epoch of modernity. Fela sings:

. . . some people came from far away land, they fight us and take our land, them take our people land, spoil our town, . . . our riches them take them to their land, in return them give us their colony, them take our culture from us, them give us them culture we no understand, Black people we no know ourselves. . . . That is why Black man [people] dey suffer today.

While the intimacies embedded in this song connect both Black people in Africa and the diaspora with respect to colonial bitter encounters and the rupture, the articulation uncovers the effects of Western intrusion into Black cultural heritage. Fela foregrounds European expropriation and exploitation of Africa, apartheid, and cultural imperialism and implicitly calls for unceasing resistance as practices that are geared toward liberation. This confirms the view of Ajayi (2017) that Fela always articulates an ideology in his music that projects European colonizers in Africa as “intruders” (p. 51), whose dehumanizing capitalist adventures of slave trade and scramble for Africa have irretrievable effects on Black people, culture, economy, and practices worldwide. But despite all these blurring colonial past and present, Black people persist in their survival and navigations of colonial entrapping and remain resolute in the assertion of their existence as autonomous beings. Similarly, in Burna Boy’s song, Monsters You Made, he samples and plays Ama Ata Aidoo’s words and voice as follows:

Since we met your people five hundred years ago. Look at us, we have given everything, you are still taking. In exchange for that, we have got nothing, nothing. And you know it. But don’t you think that this over now? Over where? Is it over?

These words and voice of Aidoo in Burna Boy’s song remind us of centuries of Black colonial entrapment and persistent Black struggles. The continuous struggle despite the post-civil rights era in the Americas and post-independence in Africa is reverberated in the two questions “over where? Is it over?” as is evident in the verse. This constant struggle resonates with Iton’s (2008) arguments of “prophylactic state” and “duppy state” symbiosis, in which Black freedom appears elusive but can be won (pp. 133–135). As Iton expounds, the prophylactic state embodies governmentality, racialization, biopolitics, and necropolitics, in which Black subjects are configured as disposable “objects” and are framed to exist only in the benefit of White supremacy. Equally, the duppy state represents the geopolitical space where “emancipation” is haunted by coloniality (Iton, 2008). Thus, citing Walter Mignolo, Iton argues that “[T]here is no modernity without coloniality . . . coloniality is constitutive of modernity. . . [W]hile modernity is presented as a rhetoric of salvation, it hides coloniality, which is the logic of oppression and exploitation” (p. 133). The deducibility from this framing of modernity is that while Black diaspora have been participating in formal politics and African countries have gained their independence, both are still haunted by colonial forces. Aligning with this claim, Mbembe (2003), in his article Necropolitics, explains that in modernity, “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (p. 27). And within this frame, the colonized are those configured not to survive through racism. To put it differently, racism is an instrumentality of death constitutive of modernity, colonial, and neocolonial frames (Mbembe, 2003). To substantiate Mbembe’s position, McKittrick (2011) asserts that

racist and colonial practices wipe out different facets of geographic life, buildings fall and people are put to death, and the execution of place and people is bound up in the corpse, the displaced survivors, the perpetually lifeless and disposable. (p. 952)

It is imperative, therefore, to reject the designation of modernity as if it is an end of colonialism as both imbricate in practice (Iton, 2008; Mbembe, 2003). The connection between Black unfreedom across the Atlantic despite the deployment of the concept of modernity constitutes the nucleus of (neo)colonial intimacies.

Another lyrical representation that can be considered here is from Falz’s This is Nigeria, based on its emphasis on the violence of capitalism and neocolonialism. Below is the verse:

Extremely poor. The medical facilities are poor. We operate a predatory, neocolonial capitalist system, which is founded on fraud and exploitation and therefore you are bound to have corruption. Many criminal cases are settled in police station.

The verse above agrees with Hall’s (1990) argument that (neo)colonialism with its characteristics of capitalism, extreme penury, and racism “has positioned the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation” (p. 233). This is because the forces of (neo)colonialism prioritize human segregation, exploitation, and dominance for White hegemony. To challenge and resist all canons of colonial, imperial and neocolonial structures require some concerted “cultural strategies” of articulations (Hall, 1990: 234). As evident in This is Nigeria, hip hop constitutes a vibrant mode of articulation not only for the identification of persistent Black (neo)colonial situations but also for the articulations of resistance to subjugated Black positioning to spark new alternatives. To validate Hall’s idea of cultural strategies, Gilroy (1991) affirms that Black music has continuously showed an invaluable “commitment to the idea of a better future” (p. 10). The reasoning is that Black music engages in the articulation of “politics of transfiguration,” which exposes the embedded complications of modernity, and participates in the “politics of fulfillment” that believes in the realization of a better future (Gilroy, 1991: 12). The commitment affirmed by Gilroy is transnational, especially between the Blacks on the two sides, and the transnationality exhibits an iota of intimacies between them. In addition, an allusion to the neocolonial capitalist system as being fraudulent and exploitative in This is Nigeria brings to bear Lowe’s (2015) description of “colonial divisions of humanity” (p. 6). As observed by Lowe, such a division is tailored toward “affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the various colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for liberty” (p. 6). It is reasonable, therefore, to support Iton’s (2008) argument that the concept of modernity must be rigorously challenged, because it is still haunted by the shadows of coloniality whose instrumentalities are subjugation, exploitation, and racial hierarchy.

A new dimension to the idea of (neo)colonial intimacies in Nigerian hip hop music lies in its lyrical representations of violence such as corruption, poverty, insecurity, and police brutality, which function as constellations of decadences in many “former” colonies. These malfeasances are indicators of postcolonial catastrophes, some of which are prompted by historical colonial conditions and unfortunate leadership structure. These themes are echoed in Falz’s songs This is Nigeria, Johnny, and Hypocrite. They are also evidenced in Phyno’s Get The Info, 2baba’s E Be Like Say, Da Grin’s Democracy, African China’s Crisis, Eedris’s Jaga jaga, Asa’s Fire on the Mountain, and Jailer, and others. If Black communities in North America are still considered as internal colonies in the contemporary world (Cole, 2020; Wang, 2018), and Nigeria as an external colony within modern and neocolonial framings (Falola, 2009), the reverberation of these themes in Nigerian hip hop music foregrounds intimacies between racialized spaces across the globe. The point I am making here is that these problematics are not necessarily peculiar to Nigeria. They are global violence that can be tied to the consequences of coloniality but can also be viewed as pathways to interrogations, discussions and reimagination of new possibilities. For instance, police brutality has been a major thematic preoccupation in Nigerian hip hop music and some of the specific songs that foreground this cruelty include Falz’s Johnny, Psquare’s Oja Police, D’banj’s Mr Olopa, Asa’s Mr Jailer, laycan’s Fuck you (End Sars), Zlatan’s EndSarz, Rude boy’s Oga, Ruggedman’s Is Police Your Friend?, Dremo’s Thieves in Uniform, and others. Analyzing Fal’s song entitled Johnny is useful here:

LYRICS TRANSLATIONS

Johnny just drop Johnny was just killed

Na po po shoot am down It was the police that gunned him down

This motherfucking trigger happy nigga. . . This motherfucking trigger-happy nigga

Just cause unnecessary sorrow for him family just caused unnecessary sorrow. . .

All because dem no oblige. . . All because (Johnny) refused to give bribe

No fucking dreads no weapons No dreadlocks, no weapons

Just him and his guys in his car. . . Just him and his friends in his car. . .

U hav d guts to tel me U accidentally discharge You have the guts to tell me you accidentally discharged

Mad man waka (Police), you are crazy people

You be bloody bastard. . . (Police), you are bloody bastards

You waste a life and try to tell me You wasted a life and tried to tell me

That you sorry after That you were sorry thereafter

Trying times and dark days Trying times and dark days

It’s just becoming darker It’s just becoming darker

It’s still the same sad story. . . It’s still the same sad story

Just another chapter It is just another chapter

Johnny drop for Borno. . . Johnny was killed in Borno

Johnny kpie for Plateau Johnny was killed in Plateau

Some blame it on religion Some blame the (brutality) on religion

Some dey fight for Malu Some are protecting cows

Johnny drop for Lagos Johnny was killed in Lagos

‘Cause a foolish man overdo Because a foolish police officer overreacted

Johnny continue to drop Johnny continues to be killed

Eyan melo lo ma ku How many youth would die (of Police brutality)?

In the song above, Falz deploys the name “Johnny” as a trope to reference Nigerian youths who are constant victims of police brutality in the country. The line “Johnny continue to drop,” meaning “Johnny continues to be killed” exemplifies the ongoing practices of police brutality in Nigeria. Falz’s allusion to states/places such as Borno, Plateau and Lagos indicates that police violence is widespread across the nation. While the triggers of police brutality in the West are racism and Black youthfulness (Cole, 2020; Wang, 2018), the profiling marker in Nigeria is youthfulness such as wearing dreadlocks, slim fit jeans, and tattoos, queering, driving nice cars, and refusing to give bribe to the police. The social relevance of “Johnny” as a trope and as a song is transnational in its resistance politics to police brutality against Black youths generally. From this lens, I read police brutality as a violent colonial legacy and a constant malicious postcolonial practice that is persistent in violating Black youths and valorizing deaths on them all over the world. The problematics of police brutality as perpetuated in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, and Nigeria and their transnationality symbolize a (post)colonial police structure linking Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, thereby constituting some intimacies. These intimacies signify a brutish colonial architecture of policing in which brute force is the cultural normalization of operations against the colonized. In my opinion, the weeping aphorism “I CAN’T BREATHE” popular among Black victims of police brutality in the United States can be theoretically framed to symbolize a resistance to general violence against Black people, and alludes to the clamor for freedom and survival from the slavery era, from the forced labor on the plantation, from colonialism in Africa, to the contemporary racialized neocolonial capitalist world where all these vices are still perpetrated against Black people. Thus, I argue that police brutality relates to what Lowe (2015) calls “residual intimacies,” which embody past colonial violence that is still in vogue but adopting different guises, and “emergent intimacies” that designate unfolding practices in new domains (p. 19). Consequently, racialized predictive policing with the use of technology, violence against queers of color, youth necropolitics, digital carcerality of Black space, and hyper-surveillance could be framed as emergent practices drawn from residual racist practices and processes (Cole, 2020; Wang, 2018).

With respect to the theme of corruption in Nigerian hip hop music, it is possible to argue that corruption persists in Nigeria not necessarily because many Nigerians are extremely poor, but largely because Nigerians have become a political force transformed through historical experiences. This transformation allows Nigerians to bypass the box of colonial entanglement and change into new political subjects capable of creating new alternative ways of Black life. This framing is not a reinforcement of corruption in Black geographies. According to Keeling (2019), citing Audre Lorde’s A Litany For Survival, Black people generally are not meant to survive within colonial calculus, and our survival has transformed us in different shapes (preface). And now that we are surviving, our survival has given us the capacity to envision that “another world is possible” (preface). That is, Black survival has exposed the failure of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism and has opened doors for a reimagination. Indeed, the violence characterizing Nigeria places the country within Simone’s (2019) theorization of “the uninhabitable” (p. 9). As Simone elucidates, societies deemed uninhabitable are “not fit for human habitation, [they are] environments full of toxicity and violence, fast and slow” (p. 9).

However, Simone contends that the uninhabitable are not always completely negative as they over time formulate a “rhythm of endurance” in which the uninhabitability becomes erasure through everyday struggles, and bustle and hustle. While these violence and catastrophe configure Nigeria as the uninhabitable, the resilience, localized knowledge, and everyday improvisations of Nigerians articulate the unexpected positivity embedded in that configuration. This positive rhythmic endurance with new possibilities is what is constantly elided in the single story of Western media coverage of Africa in which only negativities such as diseases, terrorism and corruption are the focus to cast Africa’s image in perpetual colonial negative light (Barber, 2018: 1). “Average” Nigerians and Black people generally have always devised spontaneous problem-solving mechanics to navigate and grapple with their everyday difficulties and complicated configurations (Barber, 2018). The enduring positivity that defies colonial reasoning in the uninhabitable as evidenced in Nigeria is resonated in tropes such as “suffering and smiling” or the Nigerian Pidgin version “We dey suffer, we dey smile.” These tropes are popularized in songs such as Falz’s Talk, Eedris Abdulkareem’s Country hard, and Fela’s shuffering and Shmilling, which beam light on the enduring dynamics of Nigerians’ cultural behavioral practices. Despite these daily improvisations, I must acknowledge that abolition is the undertow practice that is essential in the face of these social vices. By this, I am referring to Gilmore’s (2017) theorization of abolition, which is not just a concept but a practice in which what requires abolition in specificity are the “processes” that make possible the violence of racialization, deprivation, and disposability in human geographies.

Furthermore, both intimacies and articulation are entrenched in the language practices of Nigerian hip hop music artists as exemplified in their appropriation of Black diasporic linguistic resources. As Akande (2012) demonstrates, Nigerian hip hop music artists deploy and appropriate African American English (AAE) and Jamaican patois to index Black diasporic identities and membership of global hip hop. Akande observes that linguistic authenticity in this youth culture is hinged on artists’ ability to index the local and the global simultaneously through language mixture and through the process of glocalization (p. 242). It is not my intention to repeat this succinct deconstruction in this paper. However, extending Akande’s perspective of appropriation in Nigerian hip hop music, I argue that such language styling creates and indexes intimacies through transnational styleshifting of race in language use. This perspective falls within Alim’s (2016) idea of raciolinguistics, the study of race and language through the lens of each other. In this sense, the purpose of language appropriation includes establishing a connection that is signaled and articulated through linguistic resources as part of hip hop authenticity. Multilingual practices in Nigerian hip hop music, including the representation of Black diasporic features, could therefore be deconstructed as an intimate part of resistance to hegemonic language ideology, embedded in the colonial monolingual valorization of the so-called Standard English on Nigerian educational system, despite the presence of many robust African ancestral languages in the country.

Ultimately, the use of Black diasporic linguistic features in Nigerian hip hop lyrics can also be theorized as articulations of racial solidarity. Nigerian hip hop artists often create connections and relationalities between them and other African countries and Black diaspora through language practice to demonstrate a connective sense of racial and class solidarity. While such a language practice could be considered as being commercially motivated, it is more apt and insightful to view its underpinning politics of class and racial intimacies. As Smitherman (1991) points out, the importance of language is palpable in its “dominant role in the formation of ideology, consciousness, and class relations” (p. 117). With this, it is conceivable to ascribe ideological meanings to language practice in conscious social genre such as hip hop. Apart from linguistic features, sounds or beats are essential markers of intimacies in Nigerian hip hop music. Hip hop artists in Nigeria often amalgamate varieties of sounds such as Highlife, Hip hop, Jazz, Reggae beat, Juju, Afrobeat, and others to give their music a multidimensional and transnational sonic appeal. Ultimately, this youth pop culture from Nigeria becomes appealing to Jamaicans, African Americans, Black Canadians, Black diaspora in the United Kingdom, Ghanaians, and others as the likes of P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Beyonce, Cardi B, Wiz Khalifa, and Drake have been shown on YouTube “vibing” to Nigerian hip hop music, and a lot of collaborations exist between Black diasporic artists and Nigerian hip hop artists.

My theorization of intimacies and articulations in Nigerian hip hop music will not be complete without reference to how this youth culture has become a site of resistance to queer necropolitical configurations in Nigeria and has developed into a conscious space of articulations for queer freedom and identities. Black queers in the diaspora and on the continent are those that must die because of colonial imposition of gender binary (Butler, 2004; Keeling, 2019; Puar, 2007; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2013). In Nigeria and many African countries, state violence against queer people is activated and reactivated through criminalization of queer practices, and condemnation of queer “bodies” through incarcerations and death. Queer deaths in these locales portend what Butler (2004) has explained as “unmarkable and ungrievable” (p. 35). As expected, Nigerian hip hop music constitutes a formidable cultural site for championing the affirmation of queer humanity and liberation. Such articulations echo freedom for queers of color in all connective milieus where Black queerness is criminalized, racialized, and oppressed. A good example of this resistance politics can be found in Falz’s song titled “Hypocrite.” Falz sings:

LYRICS TRANSLATIONS

. . . We dey talk about human right We are talking about human rights

We no respect am We do not respect it

Who are we to crucify the homosexuals? Who are we to crucify queer folks?

In these lines, Falz’s resistance politics clamors for the disruption of colonial gender ideology and queer necropolitics. Black queers, women, children, youth, and Black lives generally deserve the required opportunities to blossom, thrive, survive, and actualize their dreams. Undeniably, through conscious hip hop, queer hip hop, feminist hip hop, and women’s hip hop, we can read how these marginalized Black communities—Black queers, Black women, Black trans, and gender non-conforming (GNC) folks—emerge precisely because intimacies and articulations allow us to “see” them differently. As such, hip hop elicits liberation for nondominant Black communities and nests these nondominant Black worlds within the context of coloniality. Thus, intimacies and articulations not only allow us to “see” and track Black transnational connections; they also show us how Blackness—as a framework—is fissured and dynamic and queer and feminist (anti-essentialist). It would be more gainful if the constant Black struggle against colonial ensnarement, postcolonial failures and post-slavery violence is holistic. It is through this inclusive politics that what Iton (2008) has described as “Black fantastic” can be actualized in all productive forms. This could be one of the reasons McKittrick (2015) notes that Black music, especially love songs, participates in the articulation and affirmation of Black love, and in this manner, Black music could be appraised as a “Black method” in the reconfiguration and reimagination of Black humanity, future, gender justice, and liberation. Expanding on the idea of Black method, McKittrick (2021) explains that “Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. . . . [it] involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas” (p. 5). With this, intimacies and articulations enable us to “visualize” how Black love, method, humanity, and future are re-envisioned, re-enacted, and reaffirmed in related Black geographies across the Atlantic.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have theorized the phenomena of intimacies and articulations as underscored in Nigerian hip hop music through historical connections, thematization of (neo)colonial violence, and language practice. I have also attempted an arguable categorization of intimacies in Nigerian hip hop music including root-connection between Nigerian hip hop nation and African American hip hop nation, intimacies of youth connective marginalities, (neo)colonial intimacies, and linguistic and beats ideological intimacies. I have emphasized the manners in which the lyrical representations of (neo)colonial epidemics in Nigeria amplify intimacies across (post)colonial spaces, and how this lyricization constitutes an articulation that highlights Black politics and survival. In sum, I have untangled the ways in which hip hop expresses the complexities of Black voices and how Nigerian hip hop provides a useful political narrative—both local and global—that attends to and expresses the outcomes of coloniality. Considering all these, I read Nigeria, and by extension, all Black “nations” as well as our cultural practices as political projects in motions in which hope, and togetherness are fundamental in the actualization of our potentials for new possibilities and what Kelley (2002) calls “Freedom Dreams.” This is in consonance with Davies’ (2015) avowal that Black collectivities can enormously contribute to our sources of hope, strength, progress, love, and happiness. The hope emphasized here is not just a mere optimism, but a practice that is embraced all the time by every Black subject (Kaba, 2021: 27). While it is apparent that Black struggle is in continuum, it is germane that we continue to articulate and shape our entanglements into erasures through legitimate everyday improvisations and livingness, and through popular culture. And collaborative cultural strategies, especially hip hop, are vibrant and viable in these freedom struggles. The day we cease to practice dream and hope, the day we cease to exist as a people, for freedom is an endless battle (Davies, 2015; Kelley, 2002).