Nigerians have long had a tricky relationship with internet fraud. While it’s universally regarded as a societal ill, in the wake of a worsening economic blight, citizens, especially young adults, are increasingly turning towards vice as a ticket out of poverty. This tricky relationship often finds expression in the contemporary music of the country. Yahooze, released in 2006 by Olu Maintain, is one of the canonical, if not the most canonical, internet-fraud-themed songs of contemporary times. It’s a record with a storied history, towering cachet, and acute ramifications. Other songs had explored internet fraud before Yahooze, but it would create a template for exploring the topic — not treating it as an objectionable vice but as a bonafide thematic anchor for sprightly pop bangers.
In 2023, nearly two decades after Yahooze released, Shallipopi rose to mainstream prominence with hits embodying the same essence Olu Maintain heralded in 2006. If Yahooze galvanized the initial inferno, then consider Shallipopi’s gambit over the past year and half, a play at expanding the scope of this wildfire to epic proportions.
Today, fraud culture is more deeply woven into the fabric of society than ever before. Slangs like “Bombing” and “Azaman” have carved out spots in the vernacular of everyday Nigerians. Rema’s recently released sophomore album Heis generously borrows from fraud language, perhaps to infuse the project with street cachet. There’s a song making the rounds on TikTok, it’s not exactly a song but a desultory mashup of playful sing-talking and a whimsical beat. On it, the singer flits through a range of internet fraud-related topics. It’s been used in over half a million videos on the platform, leaving aside videos from other platforms. What’s perhaps most interesting about this TikTok sound is how it’s used, and by whom it’s used; not by soulless fraud proponents, but everyday people—vendors promoting their products, teenagers mucking around on camera, comedians deploying it as the soundtrack to slapstick showcases.
This pattern extends to fraud-themed songs in general. Songs belonging to the genre are rarely ever exclusive to fraudsters or fraud sympathizers. Shallipopi’s Elon Musk extends an arm in an embrace to anyone willing to revel in its festive atmosphere. Calling out to innocent children enraptured by its meandering rhythms; civil servants kicking back after a day of grueling work; and seasoned criminals sharing a sense of camaraderie with its reprehensible themes—all with equal urgency.
But what does it mean when people who would otherwise bristle at actual fraud, not only accommodate fraud-themed music but actively revel in it? It’s a question that begs to be poked at, but not one that can be threaded finely. Maybe it means nothing. To their credit, these songs tend to be catchy. And Nigerians will dance to anything. We danced to Omah Lay’s Soso, paying little attention to his brokenness as he screamed, at the top of his lungs, for his anguish to be extinguished. And we made, and still, make merry to BurnaBoy’s Last Last, even though he almost tearfully interrogates the inscrutable contours of heartbreak.
But heartbreak and fraud are entirely different things. The wasting effects of the vice are all around us, in clear view. It steadily chips away at the country’s already enfeebled reputation; and juts up against the possibility of a civil society, where denizens can exercise mutual trust. We’re both acutely cognizant of its drivers and its wasting effects. But this hardly detracts from enjoying this particular flavor of music.
The ability of humans to compartmentalize, to confine reality and fiction into separate mental silos, might help explain the contradiction. Debates around the moral contradiction, and societal impacts, of consuming morally questionable content as entertainment are not unique to Nigeria. When graphic video games arrived in the US in the 70s, a tide of fear-mongering swept through the country. Concerns teetered between the morality of gleaning pleasure from violence, and a fear that the violent depictions in video games would lead to an increase in real-world violence. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident these fears, however noble, were overstated. Compartmentalization, it turns out, allows people, who otherwise have no inclinations towards violence, to engage in virtual violent acts — sniping at a member of a rival team in Call of Duty; and running an innocent pedestrian over in Grand Theft Auto. We recognize this violence as fictitious. And so it doesn’t curdle into real-life blood lust.
The same applies to our collective appreciation of fraud-themed music, Yahoo music. Every day people can relish this type of music, without having to deal with the ethical implications, because their minds can interpret it as fiction, just a song, or entertainment. An analog to this, our collective appreciation of fraud, in music—is the haunting presence of gang violence in Hip Hop. Since its provenance, Hip Hop has been marked by undercurrents of gang violence. Casual listeners relish the swagger of notionally affiliating with the streets, without bothering about whatever ripple effects it leaves in its wake, or the milieu out of which the music was born.
But occasionally, a grim punctuation mark in culture materializes, and forces listeners to confront its darker implications. On September 13, 1996, Tupac was fatally shot in a drive-by attack. Originally from the East Coast, New York, he became strongly affiliated with West Coast Rap music, and the Bloods gang, after signing with Death Row Records in 1995. His music straddled themes of gang violence and street culture, much to commercial acclaim. His rivalry with East Coast rappers—Christopher Wallace, The Notorious B.I.G, being his main antagonist—was a central fixture of the East Coast-West Coast feud that dominated 90s Hip Hop, which ultimately culminated in his death.
The specter of this event still hangs over the genre. Most recently it has manifested in the form of the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Beneath the facetious mudslinging lies a conversation about cultural appropriation. Kendrick Lamar, by way of scathing diss tracks, has accused Drake of treating aspects of black culture—not least the subject of gang violence in marginalized communities—as fodder for pop hits, without himself living those experiences.
His final blow to Drake (Not Like Us) was less a play at character assassination than a marking of territory; a separation into Us and Them. With Not Like Us, Kendrick calls into question the ethics of consuming aspects of black culture purely as entertainment; of an outsider, to the culture, allowing themselves the license to compartmentalize, to abstract weighty, complex, morally reprehensible themes away, just like one would do with fiction. The question of the ethics of consuming censurable music, purely as entertainment, also rings pertinently in Nigeria, where fraud is at once objectionable and ubiquitous.
That being said, art, in its various forms, has always sought to depict the human situation in its entirety. The Renaissance, a period in 14th to 17th century Europe, was marked by the sentiment of rebirth. Impelled by the rediscovery of classical antiquity, this sentiment gave rise to humanism, a movement that placed humans, individual potential, and the pursuit of knowledge, at its center. The art of the era reflected this shift towards humanism. Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, a masterpiece of human anatomy, is emblematic of the era’s zeitgeist.
The Baroque era similarly marked a shift, but this time, from the idealism of the Renaissance. The centerpiece of the Baroque era was the Counter-Reformation; where the Catholic Church sought to reaffirm its ascendency in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The dynamism in the Baroque art—Carravagio’s intense contrasts of light and shadow; and Bernini’s animated sculptures—reflects the fraught temperature of the era.
Fraud themes in contemporary Nigerian music, mirror the state of the society. However repugnant, thorny, or complicated, this genre of music fulfills the purpose of art: to reflect the state of society. Whatever it elicits from one’s soul—joy, camaraderie, indifference, derogation, disgust—should perhaps call for inner reckoning and prompt action in the real world. This concept, of art existing to reflect society, brings to mind W.H. Auden’s poem, Musée des Beaux Arts. Inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s landscape painting, The Fall of Icarus, it reflects on the ability of art to embody the panoply of experiences that constitute the human condition, especially human suffering. In it, Auden writes “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position.” Art, however objectionable, is never wrong, so long as it reflects the human condition.
