Nigeria’s Hip-Hop Problem

For much of the 1990s, Nigeria’s popular music scene was saturated with highlife, local reggae and Fuji. As the country’s long night of military dictatorship wound down, a new generation of singers arose, heavily influenced by American hip-hop of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, the so-called ‘golden age of hip-hop’ that threw up The Fugees, Naughty By Nature, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Nas, and Jay Z.

In Nigeria, the new generation of singers fully imbibed the hip-hop zeitgeist. These pioneers wore the baggy pants and large FUBU shirts of the Bronx. Tony Tetuila of The Remedies, perhaps the most popular group of these early years, wore a singlet and dyed his hair blonde like Sisqo. Eedris Abdulkareem, easily the group’s most prominent member, imitated American-style rapping, doing tongue twisters and dropping bars like Busta Rhymes. Wale Thompson, a juju artiste, featured The Remedies in ‘Lalale Friday’ (2000); and Maintain, a different group, evolved a unique sound by sprinkling humour over a blend of hip-hop and Fuji, signalling possible futures for hip-hop. ArtQuake’s ‘Abule Lawa’ (1999), one of the most memorable hip-hop songs of that era, sampled Lauryn Hill’s ‘Doo Wop’ (1998). ArtQuake’s video featured Plantashun Boiz and The Remedies, the flagbearers of a new dawn in Nigerian music. Hip-hop culture, for these pioneers, was a welcome relief from the dreariness that had come before.