.@YemiAladee & @PhynoFino Dedicate "Pounds & Dollars" To The Dreamers!
Some days are tough, and we all need some sort of pick me up to get us going. Today, we head over to Nigeria to check out AfroPop star Yemi Alade who offers something positive with the single, “Pounds & Dollars”.
With a video directed by Clarence A. Peters, “Pounds & Dollars” features Nigerian Rapper Phyno, and it finds Yemi Alade providing some encouragement here for the dreamers. The video…
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ALBUM REVIEW: YEMI ALADE - AFRICAN BADDIE
In late 2013, Yemi Alade's breakout single, "Johhny", debuted and opened a new dimension to a Nigerian music industry that was then coming of age. At the time, future stars Wizkid and Davido were on the first lap of a journey that would be synchronised, not by coincidence, with Nigeria's dominance in world music. Burna Boy was not operating at nearly the same wattage, but the quality of his early work was never in contest, even though it was not to be properly appreciated until much later — he, quite literally, was leaving an impact for eternity.
Across the gender line sat Tiwa Savage and Seyi Shay, soprano vocalists retraining their voices to contend with the bustle of Nigerian pop, and finding success with tracks designed to scratch the love itch without piercing too deep to reveal heartbreak. Yemi Alade's entry into this mix was a welcome addition that filled a quota we didn't realise was open — one of a puissant performer, who could swing thighs for the most energetic delivery all the while maintaining a vocal tone that compelled you to join her in this loosening of joints. Her music is simple, designed to pull you to the dance floor by any means possible but mostly through the route of romance. With music like this, lyricism comes a distant third to a crafty beat and an ability to flow with it, so that it is not uncommon to hear neologism inserted when the English language reaches its limitation and cannot produce a word or phrase suitable to fit into both the song's discourse and rhyme.
After a while, she would come to use French to widen her vocabulary, adding it to her already impressive repertoire of English, Igbo, Yoruba and Swahili(!) to become a true polyglot. More importantly, as Africa's colonisation struggle ultimately saw most of the continent split between England and France in obeisance, the knowledge of these two languages was the engine behind her spreading her tentacles across the continent to lay her claim as Mama Africa.
Her first reach for the title was the 2014 release of "Kissing", the folk love ballad that accelerated the K-i-s-s-i-n-g nursery rhyme into a pop cadence that was placed over beats borrowed and refined from Coupé-décalé of Ivory Coast. For its remix, she dug deeper into her French inclinations, recruiting French-Ivorian singer Marvin with whom she swapped lines of French-glazed romance. For its poster, the then upcoming singer, only two years removed from her breakout single, made a bold statement — replacing the middle "A" of her surname with the map of Africa. With hindsight in our corner, we can proclaim this move to have been equal parts prescient and foundational, being the earliest building block of a career that grows in both stature and span, as she employs collaborations and languages to draw more and more regions from Africa into cognizance of her, to throw its citizens under her self-styled motherly wing.
In the years since this, however, Afropop has shed off a lot of its vim, and as a lot of its creators work their melodies into slower, more engrossing production, music begins to cater for the slow Saturday morning as much as it did for the bustling Friday night before. The Nigerian charts shine favourably on those who aim for mellow groove rather than back-breaking dance. For African Baddie, Yemi Alade's latest project, however, she remains unevolved, for better and worse. The album opens with "Pounds And Dollars", where she enthuses the 'Soft Life', and the wealth in foreign currencies that accompanies it. Her guest is the Eastern Nigerian rapper, Phyno, and as is his characteristic, he takes rap lines for a spin in English and then Igbo languages. His delivery is not from the top drawer in either language, but as his host had already set the bar so low with such a lazily written chorus, his verse is left with most of the heavy lifting to bring creativity to the opener.
Elsewhere on the album, Yemi Alade's lack of evolution evokes feelings of warmth and not indifference. The very next track, "Overload" brings improvement in buckets, though it recycles a well worn Nigerian pop line to make yet another appearance — "My baby, my baby, my baby give me overload". As stale as these lyrics are, the way they are deftly applied to lift the chorus grant it a spark that several songs on the album sorely lack. Unsurprisingly, French phrases can be found inserted into certain points, mainly used to complete a rhyme sequence when English ran out of ink, but code-mixing like this allows the album to wear the first word of its title with pride.
Elsewhere, the word is dropped from the album's near-eponymous track, "Baddie" and she unveils both patois-speak and ragga, nifty tools for crafting a Jamaican leaning track out of Afropop. The carribean country may not lie within the geographical confines of Africa, but Mama Africa demonstrates her reach to surpass such traditional boundaries. She tows this line once more on "Bubble It", featuring an excellent Spice who is right at home spitting patois lines on wriggling and moving a backside to a beat that is just as bouncy. Once more the actual material is paper thin, but this is one of the tracks that covers up this flaw by dousing its weak writing in music that is simply irresistible.
With her features, she imbues diversity, but quality and cohesion are more erratic. A trio of tracks in the second half of the album all feature artists from outside Nigeria's shores — Bramsito on "Dje Dje", Lamar on "Get Down" and Joé Dwét Filié on "My Man" (French remix) — but the songs are held back greatly by uninventive writing, which is not sufficiently covered for by its music flow. This makes for a contrast with "Ikebe", featuring Zlatan, as its heavy afrohouse production is able to bail out what would otherwise have been the most thematically shallow track on the album.
With this being her seventh album in as many years, Yemi Alade failing to reach her characteristic highs on African Baddie may be attributed to a burnout. A less optimistic take, though, would instead finger her inability or refusal to evolve in keeping with Nigerian music. However, for as long as she occupies the self-given title of Mama Africa, her music must be viewed with lenses bigger than those used for national-directed music. It is here that African Baddie shines. With her gaze directed at the rest of Africa, she is able to — with strategic features and crafty reworking of African genres — bring her latest effort to a fine finish.
This article was written by Afrobeats City Contributor Ezema Patrick - @ezemapatrick (Twitter)
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