Rún Jú Pa, Le’Ju Pa, Má Rèrín: Nigerian HipHop and the Body of Masculinity

“Run jú pa, Le’ju pa, Má rèrín” (Screw up your face, harden your eyes, Don’t laugh) declares Nigerian hiphop star, Olamide, in his featured verse in the recent hit song “Zazoo Zeh” by up and coming artist, Portable. In the music video, young men and women flaunt their muscles and make exaggerated tough faces to the words of Olamide – who himself is donned in the uniform of an army general, impersonating former military dictator, Abacha, and wearing an expression of utmost seriousness, near contempt. This paper examines how performances of masculinity have been central to hiphop over the last few decades. While there has been immense literature on masculinity in hiphop culture worldwide, I examine specifically, how masculinity is performatively configured on the body in ways that both shape and reflect the experiences of contemporary urban youth publics for whom hardness and toughness are often central to survival (Iwilade, 2014, Pratten, 2007). While there has been important criticism against the perpetuation of normative hypermasculine ideals of strength, violence, and sexual discrimination in these songs, I contend that examining how masculinity is produced as a bluff is essential to understanding how many young people apprehend and appropriate power in the city. Drawing on political economic and performance theories, I make two related arguments. First, I argue that these performances must situated in their broader political economic field in Nigeria, where authority is produced through hetero-patriarchal significations and mediated by big men. Second, I suggest that the body becomes a critical site to appropriate and perform forms of power that are increasingly elusive to urban youth publics (Newell, 2013).