Divine Ikubor, Nigerian singer, popularly known as Rema / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Still from Rema’s Trouble Maker music video, 2023. REMA / YOUTUBE.
the ministry of arts / MUSIC dept.
The Exuberance of Rema
Divine Ikubor, Nigerian singer, popularly known as Rema / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Still from Rema’s Trouble Maker music video, 2023. REMA / YOUTUBE.
the ministry of arts / MUSIC dept.
The Exuberance of Rema
A video on YouTube—the EA FIFA 21 Performance—shows twenty-year-old Rema in a different element. For many of his day-one fans, Rema was a poster boy of a kind of fusion of Trap music and Afrobeats, and a music avatar of a rising demographic of young Nigerians, specifically Gen Z, associated with the kind of art predominantly influenced by technoculture and cyberpunk, as exemplified in his first project, the Freestyle EP (2019).
He has retained this latter identity while effacing the former. In his new album HEIS, he brings back a lot of synths in his soundscape (a characteristic of cyberpunk), which he had suspended after the single ‘Dumebi’. In Rema’s former identification, it appears he could go on singing—or rapping—forever; it felt like his perfect element, which many would have assumed was a style he’d identify with or pursue. But he didn’t. Although he had posted on X in April 2022, that he had to ‘bring back Trap Rema fr,’ in the deluxe of his debut Rave & Roses, we didn’t see that either.
A CASE FOR DEVIANCE
The Rema we got, as opposed to the Trap musician, was of songs like ‘Beamer’, ‘Woman’, and ‘Bounce’, lewd in lyrics, raunchy in taste, and with bouncy sound, which, at some point, began to look like what Rema represented and a deviation from his Trap roots. But one imagines that if Rema had pursued Trap, he’d have been a little off-kilter and moving in the opposite direction of the local environment so that as it turned out, this bouncy sound was what, even though as a stint, sustained Rema’s momentum during that period. He learnt not to be the outlier, but even so, rigged the game in some way and still became the outlier. For what could be termed the ‘Nonsense & Loud’ sound—which a singer like Terry G was bold enough to proselytize but which became tempered following his exeunt from the music scene—was what Rema, understanding the average Nigerian’s palate for noisy music, resurrected in these songs.
But Rema is dynamic, proven to be so time and again. He soon abandoned this style; and leading to the release of his March 2022 debut Rave & Roses, we were enjoined to the beauty of ‘FYN’, and ‘Calm Down’ (which became a worldwide hit and an unofficial soundtrack during the 2022 World Cup). Before then, he had given us ‘Peace Of Mind’, a great song reminiscent of Fela’s ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’, which was his response to the 20 October 2020 #EndSARS shooting at the Lekki Toll Gate. Similar to his performance on JAE5’s ‘Dimension’, these songs showed the versatility and fearful mastery of the young singer in being exactly what he wants to be on a song: limitless and daunting.
shop the republic
-
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
shop the republic
-
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Rema has always preferred to deviate over minting an already established style, as his brief discography has shown. And his latest album, HEIS, is a result of this. The question every new listener to the album asks is: what is this sound? The album has drawn backlash and misguided and shallow criticism—but is HEIS even an attempt at inventing a subgenre as it suggests? If listeners loved the track ‘DND’ from Rema’s last EP Ravage, why the alarm when the same song provided the template for HEIS?
‘March Am’, the opening track on the album, with a fusion of heavy metal-like percussions and experimentation of inverting the Trap sound, is similar to ‘DND’, and works as a thesis of HEIS were the album an essay. It carries the base sound—which might remind a classical ear of the fate motif of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony—that characterizes the rest of the album, so that ‘Yayo’, with its Amapiano prominence feels like an intruder in the album, in the same way as ‘Benin Boys’, although the latter being a bad song. Only the second track, ‘Azaman’, offers a brief break from that monotonous base sound template by the lacing of an atilogwu bop, with an interesting drum loop in its outro. And as if in tribute to Don Jazzy, the Mavin Records boss, who has championed stars like Wande Coal and Ladipoe, we hear in the songs on this album an imitation of Don Jazzy’s signature mellifluous growl (as in the hook of serenades like ‘Pere’, and ‘Adaobi’). This is incorporated as an accessorial style in HEIS, although Rema weaves it into the comical or sardonic when, for example, he quips, ‘I never even use all my power / I never even use my Abido Shaker’, in the track ‘Hehehe’.
shop the republic
shop the republic
IN THE IMAGE OF THE COUNTRY
But what, in the end, are we to make of this album? What kind of title is ‘HEIS’? Is it noise, music, rage, rave, exuberance? Afro rage? Afro metal?! I don’t want to do this, but for the sake of ‘sub-genrefying’: Afro punk sounds a lot better. But has Rema really made a statement here? The first, perhaps, would be that he’s bold enough to make this kind of album without fear of risking a gamble; he appears to be reaping the fortune of the brave, after all. On the other hand, it is a mere show-off. For what can we say of the madness of a song like ‘Ozeba’, in which, finally, in being a brand ambassador of Monster Energy drink, Rema makes an appropriate anthem? (Monstrous, beastly, Ozeba?)
To show off is the pervading ethos of the album—his success, his talent, his bank account. ‘When I talk “another banger” you better believe am’; ‘Monday morning talking about me while I’m making money,’ he sings in ‘Heis’, and ‘Hehehe’, respectively. He is letting his exuberant and hedonist self loose, of which he had forewarned in the song, ‘Are You There’, where frustrated by the country’s woes, he sang, ‘People dey talk say na woman I sabi talk about / So leave me make I just dey talk about am . . .
I no fit focus on the negativity inside my country
So me I got to change the matter
I don talk I don shout I don vex I don calm
I don tweet I don cut my dada
Cruise no dey finish inside the country
So once in a while I got to turn up uh huh.
The job of the Nigerian musician is rigged. He can’t sing enough conscious songs; the constant woes of the country only throw up good fodder, but what does it matter? The artist who risks consciousness as a trademark also risks sounding stale.
So, this is Rema turning up on his sophomore, HEIS, finding his own escape, and in the process chronicling a typical aspect of Nigerian life: music as escapism. Music as hedonism; a flight from the harsher realities. Music as a placebo. Music as indulgence in a little nihilism. Music as all-round criticism; both of the self and of the country. It could be noisy; it could be loud and nauseating; it could be mind-fuckery; it could be Dadaist (a negation of the accepted standards of aestheticism); but it is music, for all these are expressions valid in art, of which Rema didn’t falter in this project. The Nigerian artist has always been created in the image of the country; in HEIS, Rema gives us a glimpse of that image⎈
shop the republic
BUY THE MAGAZINE AND/OR THE COVER
-
₦20,000.00 – ₦60,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
₦140,000.00 – ₦150,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page