Linguistic, cultural, and religious self fashioning as strategic market branding: Performing multidimensional identities in Nigerian hip hop

Abstract

This article investigates how Nigerian hip hop artists construct and circulate multidimensional identities as a core aesthetic and commercial practice. Drawing on insights from scholarship on language, youth subcultures, and cultural hybridity, the study focuses on the deployment of linguistic, cultural, and religious resources in lyrics and performance. Using qualitative textual analysis of selected tracks and videos by mainstream Nigerian hip hop artists, supported by discourse‑analytic concepts such as code‑switching, metaphor, and “street” personae, the article examines how vernaculars, Nigerian Pidgin, indigenous languages, and English are strategically mixed to index authenticity, subcultural belonging, and mass appeal. The analysis highlights how artists hybridize global hip hop forms with local musical idioms and cultural symbols, and how they weave Christian and Muslim references into narratives of struggle, morality, and success. These identity practices function simultaneously as ideological expressions—challenging cultural imperialism and reasserting Nigerian values—and as deliberate branding strategies that expand fan bases across age, class, ethnic, and religious divides. The article concludes that Nigerian hip hop is a key site where identity work, cultural politics, and market logics intersect, and that its multilingual, hybrid aesthetics are central to both its local legitimacy and global visibility.