S/exploitation, Self-Sexploitation and Self-Expression in Nigerian Music: Lyrics and Body Designs in the Videos of Yemi Alade

Abstract

Some videos produced in the Nigerian entertainment industry are lush in the objectification and s/exploitation of the female body, which is common with hip-hop music superstars. This has continued to attract scholarly attention in feminism and media studies. In spite of the backlash, some Nigerian female music superstars have also adopted this trend in their music video productions. This article focuses on a Nigerian female hip-hop music star, Yemi Alade, with specific reference to two of her videos, Ferrari (2016) and Shake (2019), as uploaded on YouTube on 25 March 2016 and 20 November 2019 respectively. Adopting the Theory of Visual Pleasure as proposed by Laura Mulvey’s (1973), the study employs ethnography and netnography methods of data collection. By ethnography the visual content of the selected videos were adopted as data, while through netnography, selected comments by YouTube viewers were captured as data, and for analysis. Among other things, we observed that Alade’s fans were divided along different ideologies in her demonstration of objectification and s/exploitation, while many ignored the import of these projections. Many expressed discomforts at the messages and visuals of the videos, while others find pleasure and satisfaction in them. The study reveals that the import of objectification and sexploitation is detrimental mostly to women, while it delivers profiteering to the artiste-producer.