Rap music and making money, Interview with a prison warden during COVID-19 | The best Nigerian articles of the week
Each week here at YNaija, we round up the best Nigerian writing on the internet, highlighting the stories, profiles, interviews and in-depth reporting that rise above the daily churn.
Here are the ones that caught our attention:
Making Great Rap Music and Making Money Are Not Mutually Exclusive – Dennis Ade Peter
In Nigeria’s needlessly segregated hip-hop scene, there’s the currently held belief that being overtly ‘lyrical/hardcore’ is a recipe for constantly fighting obscurity, while rappers who are commercially successful by peddling different varieties of pop-rap aren’t to be looked at through a lens of critical (rap) acclaim.
Is the Extended Lockdown Taking Its Toll on You? – Mfonobong Inyang
This new normal comes as a shock to many people and since they don’t have a reference point for it, they are not processing this in a safe way. We don’t just need people alive, we need them alive and sound. Some people don’t have the luxury of learning new skills right now; they just want to survive this chaos.
The Importance of Women sharing their Experiences through Music – Tami Makinde
Men have used gangster rap as a tool to empower each other and let the world know about the struggles they had to overcome from the violent conditions of the hood. They have used music as therapy to deal with their mental stress, whilst making enough money from it to get out of their situations, and this should be the case for women too.
A Week In The Life of Prison Warden During a Pademic – Hassan Yahaya
One of the chairmen of the cells used to be an armed robber. He killed an 8-year-old girl because she recognised his face from a robbery. This kind of thing makes sympathy for inmates hard. It affects you psychologically. It’s not easy to be kind to this sort of person.
