Flowers for Wande Coal?

Flowers for Wande Coal?

Oluwatobi Wande Ojosipe known as Wande Coal. Collage by THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / music dept.

Flowers for Wande Coal?

Wande Coal has had a mixed music career and while his latter projects may not have the same rave, there is no doubt about his legendary status, or is there?
Flowers for Wande Coal?

Oluwatobi Wande Ojosipe known as Wande Coal. Collage by THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / music dept.

Flowers for Wande Coal?

Wande Coal has had a mixed music career and while his latter projects may not have the same rave, there is no doubt about his legendary status, or is there?

Afrobeats, now strangely reduced to describe the recent Nigerian music boom, is in stasis; or its movement—Afrobeats to the world—has ‘hit a new conundrum,’ as Joey Akan, music journalist and Afrobeats Intelligence podcast host, puts it. Afrobeats’ explosion, circa 2019 till the dusk of 2023, was, after all, a result of an age’s restless demand for new things; in music, it was for a new sound, bored by what had come before and segued into triteness. But this appetite emerged, unfortunately, in a time where data, short attention spans, and the constant need to refresh the newsfeed dictated taste. Running on this machinery of speed, Afrobeats, it appears, lacked re-invention: Asake extended its lifeline with the Amapiano style, which could also be seen as the cause of its slump because, after him, nothing bangs better. But Afrobeats’ recurring sound and energy have remained monotonous.

In 2023, Davido held the frontier firmly with Timeless (a highlight in his career), while Burna Boy, in his continuous nostalgia for reliving 1990s American hip-hop and RnB sound, through sampling and fusions, veered off totally on his LP I Told Them… Some of the sonically best songs of 2023 in the mainstream include Odumodublvck’s ‘Declan Rice’, CKay’s ‘Hallelujah’, Kizz Daniel’s ‘Too Busy To Be Bae’, Bnxn’s ‘Gwagwalada’, Burna Boy’s ‘Big 7’, Asake’s ‘Lonely At The Top’, Tems’ ‘Not An Angel’, Lojay’s ‘Yahweh’, Ayra Starr’s ‘Rhythm & Blues’, Olamide’s ‘Jinja’, and Wande Coal’s ‘E Choke’, from his latest album Legend Or No Legend. Not many listeners may know the last song.

THE STUFF OF LEGEND

In 2007, Nigerian teenagers, who had no better love song to strap their Freudian dreams of romance to, were hypnotized when the nursery-rhyme tune of Wande Coal’s ‘Ololufe’ began, followed by hums, the salvo (‘You’ll be the girl for me… it is you that I want and I need’), and the kick-off of the first verse. This was so because, for the most part, the song had to be caught on FM, television, or at a roadside records shop. The song crescendos at a repetition of ‘I do, I do,’ followed by an outro that diminuendos into angelic magic. As one of Nigeria’s best love songs ever recorded, albeit with fairytale lyrics, it was in the line-up of tracks from the joint album, Curriculum Vitae (2007) of the defunct Mo’ Hits All Stars (which had continental hits like ‘Booty Call’ and ‘Move Your Body’). ‘Ololufe’, a highlight moment in Nigerian music, was an announcement of the promise of a star born. This was also seen in Wande Coal’s performance on ‘Booty Call’, where he was undoubtedly outstanding.

With such oomph and artistic command, Wande Coal (or ‘Black Diamond’, as he pronounces himself today) went on in 2009 to give Nigerians an album that secured its place in any top ten Nigerian pop albums in any given age or time: Mushin 2 Mo’ Hits (M2M). The album set a standard so high even Wande Coal did not foresee he’d be unable to surpass; so that it seemed quite unimaginable—but not surprising—that since then, he only orbited the success of the debut, remaining in that orbit, and thus in limbo. How else can we explain the great rift from M2M to when his second album, Wanted, was released seven years later? During such a long no-album hiatus, that promise of a star being born seemed unlikely to be met. 

THE STRUGGLE TO KEEP UP APPEAL

The endurable displeasure of Wande Coal’s fans is that being true to himself as a gifted singer, Wande Coal didn’t even try to plagiarize himself or duplicate the formula that gave him his first success. He simply descended into sweet mediocrity. After fans’ long wait, the second album, curiously titled Wanted (Wande Coal relying on a bygone appeal of himself), was an incredibly weak album, with a corresponding bromidic intro by Seyi Law in an attempt to address the artist’s lassitude or return; followed by an even more terrible track list. In retrospect, the album is like a document of Wande Coal’s self-indictment on the state of his almost-lost career at the time. 

Reviewing the album in 2015, the year of its release, culture critic, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, judged that Wande Coal was in doubt. Clearly. It was a less-disguised kamikaze project to fill the void that’d replaced the artist’s name. It was less inventive with sound and silently passed almost unnoticed. The songs were without charge and it was easily deducible to judge that Wande Coal put no soul into it. Its second track, ‘Superwoman’, tried to recreate ‘Ololufe’, and by exception was the only song on the album ahead of its time. The song was prophetic about the kind of sound that’d be popular years later in the cohort of Oxlade, Fireboy DML, Joeboy, and CKay. The other songs pass by easily; not even the eponymous ‘Wanted’ convinces a second listen. The single, ‘Baby Hello’, which comes later in the tracklist, is where we feel Wande Coal at last (the missing charge); maybe he’s in his best form when most passionate (‘The Kick’, ‘Iskaba’). 

Did the dissolution of Mo’ Hits affect Wande Coal and plant setbacks in his trajectory? In Mo’ Hits, Wande Coal, one of the two youngest singers in the crew, shone, not to prove himself as the group’s star. His energy—not only because he was a new kid artistically replenished—could have been drawn from a sense of having a strong music family. To reckon was also the dynamic of the artist/producer relationship he had with Don Jazzy, which ensured guidance and synergy.

In 2011, Mo’ Hits All Stars, which gave Wande Coal a family, was signed to American singer, Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music. But the next year, D’Banj, who Kanye West expected would be produced by Don Jazzy, broke up with the latter, leading to the dissolution of the former music group. Although Wande Coal, alongside Dr SID and D’Prince, was drafted into the new label, Mavin Records (which Don Jazzy started in 2012), Wande Coal left the label the next year over a copyright dispute and launched his label, Black Diamond Entertainment. Music streaming wasn’t popular yet and artist management remained very traditional; it turned out that Wande Coal failed to properly manage his only signed artist: himself. Not a very introspective artist, he couldn’t turn his challenges into great art as is often the case. 

What resulted in Wande Coal’s setback or disconnection from his genius? For culture critic, Jerry Chiemeke, who I interviewed briefly via email, Wande Coal’s trajectory is a curious case. Minus what pertains to the legendary status accorded Wande Coal, Chiemeke wonders: ‘Would there be anything left?’ The seven-year delay of a sophomore release hurt the waning momentum Wande Coal suffered since the artist had already lost the platform and leverage Mo’ Hits/Mavin provided, which Wand Coal’s career never quite recovered from. According to Chiemeke:

Some would suggest that he got complacent and believed in his own hype. This is harsh, but I think he could have been more deliberate in keeping tabs on the pulse of things, how the industry was evolving, the transition between eras, and even the explosion of sounds for which you could draw a straight line from him. Several artists like Wizkid (and later, Fireboy DML) were able to own their space due to the impact of Wande Coal’s first album. But what of the things that may have been happening behind the scenes? We may never know. Did he lose motivation? Was he battling with his mental health?

Yewande Osamein, a day-one fan of Wande Coal I chatted with on X, wondered if the artist’s dipped performance could have been ‘poor management or lack thereof? Also, personal issues he faced; he apparently had a breakdown at a point. Who knows? Either of the two.’ The breakdown she refers to are rumours in the last decade that kept resurfacing of the artist’s battle with himself and of alleged addiction to substance use, the latter of which has never been confirmed. Needless to say, it sounds a lot like a familiar trope.

Talent is not always enough, and it is a known paradox that geniuses have been known to stumble—as James Baldwin, the prolific African American writer once put it: ‘I know a lot of talented ruins.’ Was M2M a glitch in the matrix when it was released? It appears inserted into a period not of its time, remaining a unicorn in the nostalgia of Nigerian pop history. Its only probable comparison with similar status is the sophomore LP, Gongo Aso (2008) by 9ice. Wanted (2016), which took Wande Coal seven years to release, tragically flopped. Coinciding with a time when the Nigerian music scene was in its initial rehearsal for a new age, Wande Coal’s eclipse began: Wizkid’s ‘Ojuelegba’ (2014) had come before, setting the stage, followed by crossover project Sounds From the Other Side (2017). Skales’ ‘Temper (Remix)’, sampling Fela’s ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’ began the new age’s proper assimilation of Fela’s Afrobeat into its sound, as seen in Airboy’s ‘Ayepo (Remix)’ (2017). Tekno’s ‘Rara’ (2017), Tiwa Savage’s ‘All Over’ (2017), and Seyi Shay’s ‘Yolo’ (2018) all introduced a new tempo. And on his stellar Outside album (2018), Burna Boy delivered the last stroke with ‘Ye’, already heating up the scene with songs like ‘Gba’, and ‘Déjà Vu’. All these prepared the deluge of 2019 for the trio of Joeboy, Rema, and Fireboy DML, in ‘Baby’, ‘Dumebi’, and ‘Jealous’, respectively, sealed by Davido’s A Good Time (2019) album, which featured hits like ‘Fall’, ‘If’, and ‘Blow My Mind’. This was the prelude or beginning of the Afrobeats boom and Wande Coal’s star power had nearly atrophied.

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FINDING MAGIC AGAIN

‘Come My Way’, the single released in 2021, appeared from a Wande Coal who seemed to have returned from a retreat, its tone gospel-jubilant espousing a secret joy. Full of joie de vivre and with its Angélique Kidjo-esque chants, it felt finally like a return. The song’s energy is palpable and one can feel Wande Coal in it. But after a decade-plus of losing one’s spark, resurgence can be too much to ask for. But then still came the album Legend Or No Legend, two years after ‘Come My Way’, and seven years after the album Wanted. 

Age, time, and hindsight have a curious way of granting clarity: in the titling of Wande Coal’s last album, we see that all these come into play. The album title, ‘Legend or no Legend’ passes as the artist’s judgement of himself—both as self-praise and criticism of himself. In this sense, we are not allowed to pass judgement of our own. It is a legerdemain Wande Coal contrives to make us ask: does he wants levity from critics, is it resignation, is it contentment, dribbling, or does he just not give a plain fuck? The album was not one of the best from last year—which seemed to be a year of album let-downs—but was one of the few good ones, following the ethos of what an album should be. Legend Or No Legend has a strong opening track, ‘Nobody Holy’, which features a sample of Sade’s ‘Sweetest Taboo’. The track ends with surprisingly eloquent Spanish phrases—Vuela mi talento, traigo la luz sobre mi gente—translated in parts as ‘Fly my talent / I bring the light on my people… I know what I want / I am always patient.’ 

13 songs strong, ‘Come My Way’ comes as the second track, followed by ‘Dues’, a Trap song, where Wande Coal flexes his vocals. In ‘E Choke’, quite a dopamine booster and the album’s best song, produced by Kel-P, we get the constant hum of a background melody that awakens 1990s nostalgia. Cued in the song are lyrics reminding us: ‘It’s like you forgotten, let me remind you / Bad man from long timing.’ T-Pain appears in a feature (‘Streets’), as Wizkid (‘Ebelebe’), and Fireboy DML (Jabo); and ‘Kpe Kpaso’, a pre-album single, appears on the tracklist that ends with the equally fine ‘Don’t Feel Love’. 

An aside: Is Afrobeats really in a slump? I made the point earlier that its more recent ‘genrefied’ iteration resulted from the desire for a new sound, even globally, as pop today has entirely succumbed to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Afrobeats had this answer, and on the global stage, its exoticism increased its appeal. What isn’t brought into account is how it was gradually turned into a product delineated from the nuances and plurality of Nigerian pop sound and history. It evolved into a monotonous signature with a hundred and more artists producing almost the same sound and tempo which became a good to be delivered on demand. ‘More,’ the consumer demanded, ‘give us more!’ But for how long?

We have contributed to its slump: everyone is overdrunk from it. And too drunk, we cry: no more! One thing, however, remains certain: it’s a false cry; we only need to hear a favourite Afrobeats song at a party or gathering to re-assess our judgement. Because Afrobeats is not dead; it is we who are insatiate. As the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard once noted, ‘Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there’s too much.’ Legend Or No Legend, like some projects from last year, like Burna Boy’s I Told Them…, Lojay’s Gangster Romantic EP, Bloody Civilian’s Anger Management, Tay Iwar’s Summer Breeze, Mannywellz’s Don’t Tell Anyone, and the sound of artists like Fave and Ajebo Hustlers, are reminders of the pool of Nigerian sound and the possibilities of making it more, than plying the one lane that has brought us to an Afrobeats alley.

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INDEPENDENCE OF STORY

Another looming problem is the lack of independence to figure out what stories we get to display. As a creative, I believe that the emergence of an enduring film tradition is inextricably linked to the independence of our cinema, an independence that we can’t claim to have had at any point in our young country’s history.

In the 1950s, the Enugu regional government sought to answer that question and gain that independence. At the time, Lloyd Young, an opportunistic independent producer out of Burbank, California came upon Nigerian shores looking to make his film, Mark of the Hawk. Young’s production company and the Enugu regional government made a deal. The Enugu regional government held up their end of the deal by providing Young with locations and subsidized costs with the filmmaker promising to ‘help’ the Eastern Region develop a Hollywood-style ‘movie colony’. That promise, to date, stands unfulfilled.

Presently, we have profit-driven international partnerships with our biggest studios to consider and with these media houses owning production studios, distribution houses and theatres (vertical integration, a vicious tool of monopoly in film industries), less populist Nollywood productions and independent filmmakers are at the mercy of these budding conglomerates. An example is FilmOne Entertainment whose international partners (exclusive theatrical licenses in West Africa) range from the Coca-Cola Company to the Walt Disney Company, Warner Brothers Discovery, Sony Pictures Entertainment to Empire Entertainment.

With so many of these companies to strategically satisfy, we find less and less of our indigenous and independent films on the screen with, for instance, local cinema giant, Filmhouse’s available screens (their theatrical chain) going to the company’s produced (and distributed) films and industry favourites. Given that FilmOne Entertainment has a 75 per cent market share in distribution in West Africa and is the largest theatrical chain in Nigeria (controlling 47 per cent of the industry as of 2023), it signals a growing threat to the industry, as far as displaying less populist indigenous and independent films go.

The control will influence the direction of stories emerging from our industry, with other studios looking to make the ‘kinds of films’ that will appeal to the team at FilmOne Entertainment, in a bid to secure whichever prime theatrical showing spots are still available to the rest of the industry. To paint a clearer picture, on the weekend of 23 February 2024 to 25 February 2024, seven of the top ten best-performing films at the box office were distributed by FilmOne Entertainment.

It’s encapsulated in Ofeimun’s aforementioned quote that an enduring film tradition had not emerged in the late 2000s. He then went on to say, ‘The great Nigerian film has not yet been made. When would it be made? Who will make it? Within what themes can such a film be made?’

Ofeimun’s questions are worth answering if we must come into our own as an industry. Already, a major animated television series, Iwájú, has been produced by Disney in collaboration with a British-based, Nigerian-helmed studio and Nigerian voice talents. However, Iwájú was received poorly by the Nigerian viewing audience, with many claiming that the show encapsulates nothing but the ideas of what the West thinks the country is.

This isn’t further helped by the fact that Disney+ the streaming platform hosting the series is not available in Nigeria. Whatever the result might have been, it signals a definite growing interest in the medium, one that has, in the past, depended on folklore and myths for source material. How much of a future does this medium have in our industry and will this medium—folklore source material already tried and tested—be a good place to start telling stories that deftly reflect the realities of our society?

It also begs the question of just how much control we can exert in the animation space in Nigeria if we are beholden to the expertise of established industry players like Disney. Is there a risk of losing control of the budding industry to foreign entertainment’s financial interests?

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

Interestingly, there has already been a promising move towards exploring myths, legends and folklore among independent Nigerian filmmakers. The critically acclaimed Juju Stories (2021) by the Surreal 16 Collective (Michael Omonua, Abba T. Makama and C.J Obasi) is a three-film anthology in which the filmmakers each tackle a juju story rooted in Nigerian legend. The three filmmakers take care to adapt these stories in modern contexts, laden them with all the societal ills and fears, while also finding space to consider their thematic pursuits as filmmakers. The films touch on ill-fated love, class and its consequences, and an almost religious obsession with a friend, taking care to reflect current Nigerian realities in the worlds that these stories occupy.

Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) is another indie production that leans towards that direction with considerable success and acclaim. It touches on the decline of traditions, the erasure of culture and the heavy hand of those who perpetuate modernity for personal benefit. As far as considering the representation of West African spirituality on the big screen, it succeeds in sidestepping the demonizing approach endemic to Nollywood and instead celebrates the beliefs and the worship of the oceanic goddess, a first in New Nollywood Cinema, also visually representing Black skin’s beauty, with the hues and shadows creating an ethereal effect underrepresented in Nigerian Cinema.

In the animation space, we find Ajaka: Lost in Rome (2023), a story about the oft-forgotten elder brother of Sango. Ajaka finds himself in Rome, betrayed, captured and made a gladiator and must find his way back to Oyo, to take his revenge on Sango and those who conspired to depose him. Produced by Spoof Animation, the nineteen-minute reimagined animated film is exceptional, engaging and cohesive, providing a strong basis in Nigerian cultural heritage which is in sharp contrast to Iwájú which, even though it’s set in a future that we cannot exactly predict, finds no basis in the realities that would have connected a Nigerian audience to the body of work. Ajaka: Lost in Rome has received critical acclaim from local audiences and critics with the production company seeking funding to make a feature-length film, pushing the boundaries of what animation can do on the Nigerian cinema landscape.

Another short film worth spotlighting is Ugo Azuya’s Swimming in a Sea of Trauma. A deft, dense body of work with a six-minute thirty-second runtime, the film explores the trauma incurred due to the genocide of the Igbo people during the Nigerian Civil War. Azuya imbues this story with the specificities of Igbo spirituality, also engaging with trauma that Nigerian regime after regime has, to date, refused to engage or acknowledge. It succeeds in opening up a dialogue about this deeply traumatic event in our country’s history and conversations about this reality will only move us in the direction of healing these wounds.

In mainstream Nollywood, The Origin: Madam Koi-Koi, a television series based on the urban legend of Madam Koi-koi, a tale legendary across secondary schooling institutions in Nigeria, was released in 2023, heralding the possibilities of more folklore and myth adaptations being created for a wider, theatre-going audience. Looking across West Africa, we find similar stories steeped in mythos endemic to their respective regions, including Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings and Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum.

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LEGEND OR NO LEGEND

Can one album make an artist a legend? Maybe yes when you’re a pioneer. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) made her a legend as she inspired so many emcees (female and male) to cultivate a style traceable to her golden years, right from the Fugees’ days—the magic of her verses in ‘Fu-Gee-la’ and ‘Nappy Heads (Remix)’—becoming a longstanding hip-hop avatar others would emulate. It is the same way one might consider Wande Coal. Aigbokhaevbolo has written that Wande Coal, in Mushin 2 Mo’Hits, ‘invented the zeitgeist, creating a pop style that became mainstream, trailed by all of the variations and deviations that come with the honour.’ Perhaps this was Wande Coal’s job, to have made one of the greatest contributions to Nigerian sound and music, belting an indisputable legacy. And maybe this was the only job the gods tasked him with, which, in ignorance, we forever hold him to ransom to do more than the gods asked.

In the video of ‘Kpe Kpaso’, there is an almost conscious regality of Wande Coal’s appearance and performance. You watch him: there’s that animation on him from years ago in the video of ‘Bumper 2 Bumper’ as he does what only he alone can, with all his flexes, as you spot it: there is the legend. The truth in the title of the album, Legend Or No Legend is that no current Nigerian artist can give us this kind of album, except the one and only, the greatest, the legend, with all flaws: Wande Coal⎈

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