‘Chop Life, Wahala No Dey Finish’: Combating Despondency and Evoking Positivity in Selected ‘Pandemic’ Nigerian Hip-Hop

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.