THE DANGER IN P SQUARE’S TYPE OF WAHALA

THE DANGER IN P SQUARE’S TYPE OF WAHALA
By
Lasunkanmi Bolarinwa
laskyb@yahoo.co.uk
You can almost find anything you are looking for in hip hop of the Nigerian mode. I guess this is true of the genre in other parts of the world too just as it might be true of other popular arts and social phenomenon. It is a fine combination of the pleasant and the not so pleasant. Understandable therefore is the multi layered reactions from different sectors of the society about what it does and what it should not do. For some, it is grossly antisocial and should either be legislated against or censored in a way such that some age long perception of music and its function(s) can be preserved.

One of the reasons I am not in tune with anything in the mode of such a suggestion, especially when it comes from people who do not seem to understand fully the place of art in social developments and engineering is that each time when I listen to even some of the presumably most mundane of the songs, I find it easy to make a connect and I am not sure I am a lone traveler on this path.
One of the major culprits of Nigerian hip hop music is a rhetoric that seems to be at variance with the lager society’s communicative pattern and patience to engage meaning beyond the surface. Keeping this in mind among other things, let us take a look at P Square’s Danger from an album of the same title. It has been around for about a year in the market now.

When it was fresh in the market, it did not climb easily. A number of fans expressed their disappointment based on their expectation from the previous albums of the group but as is usual for P Square, the Danger track, like all others soon became a party rocker. However, for the not too fanatic fan of this genre of music or of the artiste, there are issues still probably unresolved.
The offending part of the song is with the resonating repetition of: see me see wahala hey, wahala dey, omo wahala dey, I dey see danger, omo see danger, we dey see danger and you go see danger all taken together as a passing metaphor for something avoidable and abhorrent by a large spectrum of people.

You could hear examples of flipping the script in the use of wahala dey meaning in the literal sense, there is danger but which in this sense means wahala of a positive sense. It is the same way you flip the language when you see a young pretty girl or nice young man whom you find irresistible and would gladly say yes to or encourage to make a pass and you either mutter to yourself or open up to the girl with a pick up line that there is a problem and she is the one to solve it. It is another in the instances of verbal cleverness that stands the group out among others.
Good use of rhyme and repetition when the chorus takes the last phrase or word off the lead’s mouth and repeats in one or two of the verses such as you hear in enter, instrumental, centre, mental, yearn again, rhyme again, danger, agenda, calendar, December, defender, fender eh, surrender eh, tire eh, don tey, stranger, remember, sender helps the overall musicality.

The shock for those wary of the message of the genre is in the title of the track “danger” and the constant repetition of wahala dey all through. Ironically, you are likely to find a lot of people who ordinarily do not subscribe to the idea of seeing danger in any form, no matter how well clad still dancing to it while rejecting the message. There, the group is able to show the power of a hook in their instrumentation by creating something irresistible in the dancehall.
The song however bears testimony to the survival instincts of the musical group and its triumph even beyond the shores of Nigeria having gone to “play away matches” as evident in the number of foreign shows it had featured in especially on the African continent.

Outside of the meaning of the lyrics of the song however, I tend to ask myself when opponents of the genre use this particular music as a case study and wonder why in all the names of the good things we all profess to believe in, any sane person or group of persons would play or promote a music that obviously speaks about the predominance of danger and tend to encourage a situation of verbal and psychological violence; Is there no genuine cause to sound the alarm in a country with such dwindling official managerial fortune as ours? The danger in the real sense of the word is partly in our ability to listen to ourselves. Is there no danger when kidnapping is the general blanket that does not leave any strata of our society uncovered?

When I think of the gloom that lies ahead in terms of the present lack of positive governance and commitment to the good of all in the land, one of the tunes that come to my mind is: wahala dey. Only then, that is in a different context but can any other person see the danger? Can you?