50. Are We There?

On Ayo Maff's EP Maffian

Rookies rarely arrive with a style that is fully theirs—this is why Ayo Maff should already be named Rookie of the Year. In less than six months of appearing with his Fireboy DML-assisted breakthrough single, ‘Dealer,’ and a seven-tracker gem of an EP, Maffian, his style, story, and success fold into a compelling, if not definitive, narrative of the Lagos-based Yoruba working-class Gen Z Nigerian youth.

Since the unexpected passing of Mohbad last year, there has been a vacancy for a brand of soulful Street Hop known to some by that simplistic misnomer Afro-Adura. Mohbad’s music sprawls through a larger tapestry beyond apposing desperate material needs and reproach for the divine. There are guilty pleasures, moments of vulnerability, specific nods to musical legacy, social commentary and a strong sense of mortality that contradicts its existential nihilism.

Ayo Maff sounds very different from Mohbad. He sounds different from Q-dot. Far enough from Barry Jhay. Although Maff shares similar thematic interests with T-Blaze, his approach to melody and singing is different (he sings like he is rapping.) The protagonist in T.I Blaze’s ‘Sometimes’ is the recurring protagonist in Maffian EP. The seven songs are styled like interrupted narratives that, in less than twenty minutes, recreate the thought processes of a delinquent young adult who has fled home, partly to make his fortune and partly to free his family from a responsibility they desperately fail to meet.

Home is Bariga, rapper Olamide’s neck of the woods, immortalised in ‘Anifowose’, his own moving song about urban poverty. Whilst Olamide mobilised the plaintive cry of KWAM1’s Fuji to reinforce his tale, Ayo Maff taps into a specfic kind of modern blues. Those who watched Yoruba Nollywood in the 90s would identify this improvisational style of singing that accentuates and scores the didactic drama unfolding on camera. It is part gospel, part folklore, full odyssey.

Ayo Maff is Bariga’s Homer, and Maffian is a sonic record of an odyssey about leaving home at the instance of generational poverty and urban wanderlust experienced by more than 70 per cent of Nigerian youth who pursue internet scams (and music) as acts of desperation. The proverbial cat has nine lives—Ayo Maff’s cat has seven—and every life must count for a journey that requires more than courage. The pursuit of money is not intertwined with love. Both are elusive.

On the Magicsticks-produced standout tune, ‘Are You There,’ the weary Ayo Maff sings passionately (and disruptively) about the famished road and the assurance of a friendly presence. It is almost hallucinatory. The hook is a jumble of fragments of a popular Nigerian childhood song, Yoruba Nollywood references, and Maff’s relentless rhetorical question, ' Are You There? '

What is certain about the EP Maffian is that uncertainty, an asphalt of vulnerability that sometimes demands retreat, cannabis, a maternal bear hug—any reassurance. We don’t talk enough about what kind of country we have left, GenZ Nigerians. Thankfully, folks like Ayo Maff are articulating their despair in the best possible way, in song.