This week I am honoured to share the radiant prose of one of Nigeria’s finest music critics, Wale Olowokerende. Another Ife alumnus with a sound understanding of the musicscape, he wholesomely reflects on Davido’s debut twelve years after its release. Enjoy!
As Nigerian pop music morphed from an amalgam of hip-hop, R&B, and dancehall into an unmissable global pop tentpole back in 2010, a generation of younger musicians aspired to musical success inspired by the work of early forerunners like 2Face Idibia, P-Square, and D’Banj.
Many miles away at a private university in the United States of America, Davido harbored musical hopes of his own. The last child of Adedeji Adeleke, the influential patriarch of the Adeleke family, Davido had been sent to study at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama, where he quickly embraced his musical aspirations. Davido was already plugged into the Nigerian music ecosystem, regularly hanging out with top Nigerian music stars when they visited the United States for gigs.
Predictably, Davido’s incursion into music-making at Oakwood would result in a downward slide in his grades. After three semesters, the singer dropped out and went off the radar, heading to Atlanta and London before attempting to sneak back into Nigeria.
Upon returning to Nigeria, he was arrested at the airport and handed over to his father. The singer struck a deal to attend university two hours away from Lagos at a music faculty custom-built for his education, and he could pursue his musical ambition without any restriction. It is against this backdrop of angst and bottled-up restlessness that Davido’s self-produced debut single ‘Back When’ landed. It was spiced with a rap verse from Naeto C that lent credibility to the then up-and-coming artist. If the iconic rapper’s name brought listeners, Davido’s chest-thumping vocal delivery and gusty lyrics captured their attention.
Emboldened by this gambit, Davido knew he was ascending and that his next single had to be a nationwide hit. He would accomplish this with the help of Shizzi, whose deft blend of electro-pop and Afropop percussions formed the basis of ‘Dami Duro’ Davido’s breakout single that made him a key figure on the music scene less than one year after his inglorious return to Nigeria.
If ‘Back When’ was a middle finger at haters and doubters, ‘Dami Duro’ crystalised proof that Davido was fully in motion and wouldn’t stop for any reason conceivable. It also helped that ‘Dami Duro’ became such a big hit that it penetrated the political world and showed Davido’s father his potentials.
A year before Davido’s rise to fame kick-started, a young musician from Surulere named Wizkid had marked the beginning of a new generation of Afropop stars with a series of singles that melded rap, R&B, and neo-Fuji into a youth-centric interpretation of Nigerian pop music. Drawing inspiration from Wizkid’s strategy to achieve market dominance, Davido’s approach was to similarly drip-feed a series of singles strong enough to make a mark. ‘Ekuro’, his next release, saw Davido lean into a lover boy persona as he serenaded a love interest, promising his devotion to her. Also produced by Shizzi, ‘Ekuro’ showed another side to Davido’s evolving artistry after the explosive success of ‘Back When’ and ‘Dami Duro.’
When ‘Overseas’ arrived in May 2012, Davido was already regarded as the year’s breakout star and primed to helm a new generation of music superstars alongside Wizkid. Notably, ‘Overseas’ featuring his cousin Shina Rambo provided the most unambiguous indication of Davido's creative ID as he sought to fuse the grandiosity of hip-hop with the insatiable appetite of Nigerian pop. It reflected in the themes he was fixated on: flashy cars and bling, nights out in the town with his squad accompanied by beautiful women, and more money to burn through than imaginable.
In a country bedeviled by poverty and desperation, Davido’s wealthy parentage—and his unabashed embrace of all the perks it came with—was a point often referenced to criticize the rising singer from the start. So, when the moment to release his debut album arrived, it made sense that he would reclaim his critics’ most significant talking point and recast it as a triumphant upstaging of his naysayers. Much of Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis, released in July 2012, exudes Davido’s comfort in his material security and the pleasurable life and access it affords him. After all, the album launch party was attended by his wealthy father, Davido’s godfather, Nigeria’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, and a host of celebrities who gathered to witness the coronation of a new Nigerian pop royal.
Much of the pomp, glitz, and sparkle that announced the arrival of Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis is largely absent across the 17 tracks of the album, with only a few exceptions. While Davido’s pre-released singles displayed a fastidious writing style that complimented his gruff and passionate delivery, many parts of Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis fall flat by comparison as the hip-hop influences on the album thinned out its musicality. Nonetheless the scarcity of sublime writing on the album did not make it a dreary affair as Davido’s effervescent personality saved the project.
Album opener, ‘All Of You,’ sounded like something a veteran with battle scars would make to solidify his place in Nigerian pop’s firmament, but it’s all Davido with all the weight of expectation staring into the abyss and predestinating his greatness. Grafting the world-weariness of an old soul with his youthful grit atop GospelOnDeBeatz’s atmospheric instrumental, Davido acknowledged the efforts of legends like 2Baba, PSquare, and D’Banj but stopped short of praising any other person, proclaiming himself bigger than anybody else.
Davido had no intention of crashing the scene alone, and most of those early years were spent in the company of a rotating cast of friends, acquaintances, and family who doubled as creative collaborators and posse. Working under the aegis of his self-founded record label, HKN Music, Davido and his cousins, Sina Rambo and B-Red were plotting a dynasty to last for the ages. The brothers are a significant part of Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis, embodying Davido’s devil-may-care disposition on ‘New Skul Tinz,’ another defiant statement of intent to dominate. They also feature respectively on ‘No Visa’ and ‘Enter The Center,’ making up for their rawness with bluster.
Shizzi was, undoubtedly, the creative brain trust for Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis. The six songs he produced represent some of the album’s highlights: The Kayswitch-featured ‘Dollars In The Bank’ is a masterclass in smoothening the edges of Davido’s peppy vocals for maximal effect while ‘Gbon Gbon’ built around the same template as ‘Dami Duro’ is zestful if slightly contrived. The album’s closing track, ‘Bless Me,’ attempts to conjure a spiritual essence but is scarcely tenable despite Mr May D’s best efforts.
That early partnership between Shizzi and Davido would lay the foundation for some of their iconic work, as ‘Gobe’ and ‘Blow My Mind’ would showcase a template for some of Davido’s most storied records. Similarly, a young British-Nigerian producer and artist named Maleek Berry was taking his first steps into the industry and would introduce his soulful, airy take on Nigerian pop across his three production credits on Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis, signaling the beginning of another micro-evolution in Nigerian pop. 2Baba is sublimely elegant, taking the lead on ‘For You’ nudging his host into his world with a textured verse that distils desire to its most elemental without any of the corniness that blights tracks like ‘Sade’ and ‘Down.’
Davido’s ear for forward-thinking instrumentation and trends is his superpower; that knack for the transcendental is only shaping up on this debut, but it also provides some intriguing moments. The blend of house and electro influences on ‘Mary Jane’ feels like a glimpse into the immediate future of Afropop at that time, even if the subject matter feels trite. The magnetic presence of its primary creator felt undeniable coming away from listening to these 17 songs. Whether standing next to veterans or fellow newcomers, Davido glittered.
Reviews of Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis from around its release justifiably criticised its composition, lyrical merits, and some of its production choices. One ruthless Hip Hop World Magazine review scored the album ⅕, adding that “David Adeleke’s first album fails to impress on many fronts. He would need more than his wealthy provenance to make it stick in this Nigerian music industry.” Wilfred Okiche, writing for the Daily Post, decried the album as “unbearably tedious” before adding that Davido needed help to succeed in the Nigerian music industry. Retrospectively, Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis has not blossomed into a classic of any type, but the production quality still holds up, and it is a testament to the global superstar’s enduring quests for collaboration and experimentation. The years since then have only made Davido a more prolific collaborator, and, if anything, Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis still resonates for holding some of our favourite songs from the early 2010s as a rich man’s kid defiantly planted his foot in the music arena and started to find his voice with all of us as witnesses.