Shallipopi has arrived as that newcomer whose art and talent attempts delineation from what’s established, his name a curious onomatopoeia, if not glossolalia: Shallipopi. His break-out song “Elon Musk” was the product of an experiment of dumbing-down; a noisy song that seductively matures after several listens. One of his more-recently popular songs “Oscroh” has an infectious tune that samples the nursery rhyme “Standard Living” or “Sandalily.”
Shallipopi is not greatly loved by some Nigerian listeners yet. He propagates a renegade style his critics translate as a lack of talent, juvenile, or which is outright nonsensical. Before now, however, between 2021 and 2022, he was waiting to be discovered with songs like “Gra Gra,” “Power,” and “Shaka”—songs rather regular and tame—but we didn’t find him; for which he returned as a new Shallipopi, almost as if to punish us, after embracing a new expression. Regardless, the criticisms haven’t stopped his rise to fame, which only keeps increasing. Only breaking out this year, he has been on a Europe Tour in Italy and Germany, across eight cities including Napoli, Berlin, and Munich.
What has been a significant marker of Shallipopi’s success is his nuance which gives the illusion of an invention or maybe different style. This style is an obvious adoption of the growing culture of Nigerian hype-men who perform pastiche freestyles to crowds at nightclubs and parties, often involving an over-repetition of lines (“comot body jor”; “your mind go dey”; “say/say”). It is often a giddy performance, if not hypnotic, which mindless clubbers give in to, joining sometimes in call-and-response improvs by hype-men. Gradually genrefied as “Afro hype,” Toby Shang’s “Run This Town” is an early example, in which the same lines are repeated in the song ad nauseam.
In an interview with Cool FM Lagos, ’Popi admits to not writing his lyrics but being extempore; evidently, his lyrics pass as playful freestyles, in the style of hype-men. His finessing of this style assumes a Shallipopi-signature built around his image, with a heavy leaning to the Amapiano sound, a subgenre of the South African Kwaito music. And what seals his ownership to this style, probably still a work-in-progress, is language. Inasmuch as his lyrics are extempore and lithe, their “playful” sophistication is apparent, approaching a wordplay game that can be termed playground poetry. But he is not sitting on an inventor’s throne as he simply employs slang and niche registers, a prominently attractive feature of his music that buoys up listeners but also makes them do frequent Google searches.
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As the term “playground poetry” implies, Shallipopi’s Amapiano-bop melodies are in tune with the times in which popular Nigerian music, all merits recognised, is much still used by Nigerians to catch cruise, to escape the harsh realities of the day. And Shallipopi presents the gaiety; the playground-ness in his delivery and lyrics induces a festive, unyoking, and playful groove akin to the tranquility of children’s folksongs. It’s what we feel even when we hear the vulgar lyrics “Dey bend her, dey bend her, dey bend her like Benz,” in the song “Ex Convict,” for example—that vainly joyful repetitiveness. Or when we hear “since the day I was born, day I was born, I dey order Oscroh.”
Following the style of his music is his polarising romance with the ubiquitous Yahoo Boy subculture which his breakout single “Elon Musk” signals—the lavish lifestyle of young, fly, and rich youngsters with abundant money and the heavy spending of it, money suspected to be made from Internet scams. We hear in the song: “All these Elon Musk boys, para dey body, BTC dey body, money dey body . . . Shey you dey confirm BTC?” and so on; an Elon Musk boy being a rich young man. In the song “Ex Convict,” he sings “your broker is active”—indicative, hinting at, and a nod to the enterprise of that subculture, which an earlier song, Bella Shmurda’s “Cash App,” glaringly celebrated (“If you get sure client, lock am”).
Perhaps the brag in the song “Elon Musk” hurt the EFCC, so much, that they arrested the singer alongside others in Kaduna, in May 2023. (The EFCC, created by former president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2002 to check financial crimes by corrupt politicians has today become a mediocre body notorious for harassing young, male Nigerians for suspected Internet fraud crimes.) Though Mr. Shallipopi pled guilty and paid bail to be let free, he rode on the publicity and a month later released an EP, Pluto Planet, from which songs like “Ex Convict” and “Obapluto” have become club anthems. His management has corrected the mess on the artist’s Apple Music profile: “ ‘Elon Musk’ had scarcely soared to its full potential when detention by the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission threatened to disrupt his trajectory.” The artist himself made the song “Ex Convict” as sarcasm to the situation, where he lists a number of his acquaintances in the song as “ex-convicts” and victims of the EFCC.
So far, he has enjoyed nothing but an undisrupted trajectory, whether by vowing to “mount Elon Musk till the kingdom come,” meaning to stay rich forever; or by simply making his music; or by using lyrics that allude to the yahoo-boy lifestyle, whether by appropriating it for commercial purpose or in solidarity with the now-behemoth community in obeisance to mammon. (In cities and slums across Nigeria, new lounges, nightclubs, and bars are being run, and the patronage sustaining these businesses is often tied with the yahoo-boy subculture which hype-men are too eager to boast about, and the clickbait of lavish spending habits.)
From nightclubs and lounges, from a growing number of mixtapes by hype-men on streaming platforms celebrating hyperbolic wealth or delusions of it, Shallipopi has created the music that perfectly suits the demographic, weaving himself into an avatar of the subculture. Bella Shmurda sang “ice on my neck” and “oni maga, bill am,” in praise to mammon and about victims to be defrauded through Internet scams respectively. He made stone tablets. Shallipopi—or shall we say Obapluto (King of Pluto)—is writing the bible, mounting metaphors, like men.
It’s Shallipopi’s season as he enjoys fame, taking up a coveted space. His six-track EP Planet Pluto is a testament, the themes revolving around one aspect: money. By Planet Pluto he refers to a world of excessive wealth. A young moneybag is not only an Elon Musk boy but a Pluto boy, as he prides himself to be one. “Your broker is active,” he sings, refers to middlemen who convert crypto- or foreign currencies for rich boys. We pick the following metaphors and innuendos from his lyrics: If e no collide then e no lap; Pluto ways no dey show for map; Pluto is active; you dey confirm BTC?—all “Plutomanian” slang. As we had with Naira Marley’s “aural pornography” which impresses listeners’ faculties with lewd symbols, as Dami Ajayi described here, Shallipopi’s glorifies vanity.
Nigerians know the hard life. And right now Shallipopi is making the kind of music that gives escape and fulfills the illusions of wealth, even if vicariously. He is erecting his empire of vanity well and selling it to an already pliant audience. The song “Oscroh” which celebrates debauchery is deceptively crafted: an 18-Rated song with a nursery jingle! No Nigerian pop act in recent times has created a cult-like image after himself in a villainously attractive way, since Naira Marley, except perhaps the ribald Odumodublvck. At 23, Shallipopi only has more energy to dispense. In a short time of his success, he has floated a record label, signed two acts, and released an album Presido La Pluto, just five months after his already successful EP Planet Pluto. He has declared in a song: “clear road for Shallipopi.”
On craft, he speaks a lot about conducting research before making a song in this Joey Akan Afrobeats Intelligence podcast. His choice for mining the Amapiano sound is because of its commercial appeal, he says (a sound the YBNL singer Asake has personalised and made magic out of already). He also incorporated the nursery rhyme Sandalily in his song “Oscroh” because he’d googled the most streamed video on the Internet and found it was “Baby Shark.” If critics want to accuse him of being shallow, he says, “artists in Nigeria with pen game are very underrated.” But he sells himself short to imagine he doesn’t have a pen game; his use of allusion and indirection is an interesting aspect and trademark of his style.
He calls his music Afro-pluto, as other singers have done to distinguish their music from the Afrobeats umbrella; Burna Boy has called his Afro-fusion, and vintage musician Lagbaja, as far back as in the nineties, called his Afrocalypso. Nonetheless, the music all converges. Shallipopi hasn’t created a subgenre yet as he believes. What he has and currently enjoys is a strong sense of his proprietorship over a style solely his, ignoring that it is simply an adoption and improvement on hype-men theatre. For now, he has the claim to have first exploited its potential and turned the sub- subgenre into something more. And he has enough time to bamboozle us with his playground vibes.♦
Carl Terver’s highly-anticipated photobook Glory to the Sky is now available for pre-order. Click image.
Carl Terver, the founding editor of Afapinen, has an arts degree from BSU Makurdi, and writes criticisms about film, literature, and music. His writings have been published in The Question Marker, The Republic, Iskanchi, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, One Way Street Journal, The Stockholm Review, and Konya Shamsrumi. He is the author of Glory to the Sky (August 2024). 🔗
