Its first verse, by Dark Poet, wields an unrelenting grip on its listeners—it was for me—overwhelming the second and third verses by Falz and M.I, respectively; so that in my initial listens I focused too much on the verse, wooed by Dark Poet’s lyrical flex and strong delivery, which successfully distracted me from the song’s greater qualities. Falz’s verse is similar this way, and I think it is because, rather than directly criticising—as the last verse by M.I—both Dark Poet and Falz’s verses speak about police corruption tangentially, and even selfishly, in how they may exploit it.
Dark Poet’s verse: about a rapper, who, after a studio session on a Friday night, is taking his girl home. To avoid hassle with a police officer at a checkpoint, he gives the officer his half bottle of Hennessy. Falz’s verse: a disgruntled police officer who laments about a system that poorly rewards him for his work, and therefore schemes to abuse his job in ways that’d profit him. One way to do this is to profile and arrest young and rich Lagos boys, who, “if dem talk anyhow dem go go station”!
However conscious “Ripple Effect” is as a song—although not so conscious, given its overbeaten subject—it always interests me when a work of art, whether by accident or its infinite possibilities, surpasses itself, especially without the intent of its creator. And permit me to go into a long digression here in relating this sentiment to Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker, which confused a lot of American critics who wrote hate pieces about it in the name of reviews. Todd Phillips had struck a chord within America’s political consciousness during the Trump administration with Joker, and many missed it, unable or without patience to appreciate the movie. And this is partly why I have become disinterested in the capitalist demands of popculture criticism today. It is often reactionary and shallow, clockwork criticism dictated by the speed of click culture and SEO optimisation, without enough time for critics and writers to fully contemplate what they’re writing about.
A. O. Scott, then film critic at the NY Times, who remains one of my writing heroes, wrote one of the most bromidic criticisms I’ve ever read, because he had to devolve into an art class about what a movie is. “A movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it,” he’d written. This is bad pontificating; prescriptive nonsense that doesn’t appreciate artistic freedom, and for which any good critic knows: that once you start lecturing in your review, you’ve lost it. (And I couldn’t believe it when veteran Richard Brody, who excellently reviewed Chi-Raq—a quite difficult movie to review, especially in how his erudition shone in it—missed the absurdist leaning of Daniel Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once and wrote an anguished review of it.[i])
With Joker, Todd Phillips saw what he felt as creating a real movie, a break from franchise, but not “to push buttons”—meaning to provoke—as many perceived or were irked by the film. “Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film,” he said in this interview. “It wasn’t, ‘We want to glorify this behavior.’ It was literally like, ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it f—king Joker’. That’s what it was.” As if the Oscars wanted to prove its critics wrong, Joker was nominated in 11 categories and won 2 out of those, revealing critics’ short-sightedness.[ii]
Anytime I return to “Ripple Effect” I am reminded of its endless appeal. It could either be its enduring replay value or in how it espouses the traditional ethos we like to relate rap music to, as an art form that traffics in consciousness: activist, political, meditative. This isn’t just in its social commentary, but how it re-enacts the oldest trope in art, tragedy, in its three fates structure. Moreso, is how Nigerian the story in the song is. Not because it’s about police brutality, which we remain plagued; but that the troika of personas played by the rappers—a musician, a policeman, and a lawyer; although not altogether within the same demographic—embody the spirit of the Nigerian hustle, which is punctuated by the all-too-familiar, little Nigerian misfortunes lurking by, that the song captures.
For the musician in the first verse, it is a police checkpoint at late night. As every Nigerian knows, whether young and profile prey-worthy, or middle-aged, a checkpoint is, well, a checkpoint, where anything can happen. It’s already bad that he’d lit a roll of weed seconds ago, so he braces himself: “Oh shit, play it smooth like a fun guy / Roll down the windows as I try to get unhigh /Stepping on the roach just hoping the blunt dies.” (Badass bars there.) The next bars are even more graceful, but after the officer asks, “How far, anything for the weekend?” the rapper hands over his half bottle of Hennessy to him. The verse ends with the words of the officer who allows the rapper to carry on, in paean to the Hennessy, “Oga, you too sabi, wallahi carry go,” which Falz, role-playing an officer on his verse (the second), picks up, “Carry go carry go, wallahi carry go . . .” Not because this is Pidgin, but the transfer of lyrical baton from DP’s verse to Falz’s is so communally Nigerian in the complexity and social mythos that allows for it to happen. Falz’s verse will decry the fate of a Nigerian policeman; the life of penury, for example. And it is when the lawyer in the third verse, played by M.I, meets him that the story comes together.
M.I’s verse (the lawyer’s) begins, “DP no go ever pick when I need him / Now he got me driving to the Island [Lagos Island] just to meet him.” It appears our lawyer has been already upset by something; remember “little Nigerian misfortunes”? Aha! This is why he intones when reaching the checkpoint, “Oh God, who be these ones wey dey for road block? / What police are doing is wrong but if I don’t stop . . .” Buoyed up, he confronts the policeman instead: “I’m a barrister, I know my rights / If you no get search warrant, omo free me lemme live my life.” He continues his provocation, threatening the policeman’s job, to report him and to get him sacked the next day. Gun pointed now, M.I tells us. Then we hear a gunshot, bringing the verse to its end.
The tragedy or tragedies of our heroes in this three fates story is unified in the tragedy of Nigeria itself, as place, and as time, orchestrating their individual journeys through life. I have been thinking of what I like to call “Nigerian Death” for some time now; we all know it as the avoidable cases of death that Nigeria permits, simply because Nigeria will happen—which is the case of the lawyer, the most tragic hero of them all, in this story. Here, a wicked denouement is unravelled: there is no need to be upright. It reinforces the wisdom of older Nigerians who are withdrawn to confront the country’s corruption or the engines powering it, which younger Nigerians often scold them for. This youthfulness is sometimes mere hubris, and maybe arrogance too—arrogance is good; justice sometimes only answers to chaos—which is the scenario we find the lawyer, an intelligent guy with righteous uppity, who knows his rights.
That Nigeria doesn’t recognise your rights isn’t novel. It is as ubiquitous as daylight, or the dark poetry of our occasional collapsing national grid. Many references have been made in popculture but none perhaps remain ever-resonant as Nigga Raw’s 2005 rap song “Obodo,” when he laments about police harassment: “I begin halla based on say Naija na my nation / I no sabi say my rights no dey for Constitution.” Before this, he’d questioned the policemen, asking them, “who una be . . . Man-O-War, soldier men, Mobile Police or Bakassi?” And adds, for the sake of a coupling rhyme, “because e be like say una dey envy my Versace,” drawing their ire. Accordingly, he is punished by the uniform men. His crime? He “mis-yarned” (he’d spoken imprudently to them).
And now, zooming in on this word “Constitution,” a word, so-called, that bears the unifying vision of citizens, or what they expect represents their values and identity. This “Constitution” would be backed by a system of justice that ensures fairness or the ever-so-illusive pursuit of their rights. If this is not almost a non-existent ideal in Nigeria, it is almost sadly ironic. What is good is not cherished. What will result in justice or a semblance of a straight path is not cherished. A fitting analogy of this scenario in the country’s recent history was in the political landscape, with former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who rode on such an ideal, combining good grace, valour, and brilliance, in presenting his vision for president at APC’s primaries in 2023. But this wasn’t just good enough, as with other better candidates who should have won that ticket. They were too straight to be cherished. The writing on the wall is clear: this is not that kind of country. And it seems we cannot even ask anymore: but for how long? Nigeria amazes me in that exact way Achebe himself came to his amazement, that “being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting.”
So what do we do rather than beat on like boats against the currents of our shared tragedy, Nigeria? This is what the trio in the story are trying to do, after all: survival, the hustle for bread, the only true Nigerian spirit. Early in the lawyer’s verse, we learn that he supports the rapper’s career because “if he [the rapper] blow now to be im lawyer be the next thing.” So he is driving, following the same road the rapper passed moments ago, this road which now takes significance in the story, where another contract of survival was agreed on with one man’s gift of a half bottle of Hennessy to another, both finding middleground, the negotiated space or wisdom explained earlier (of older Nigerians surviving Nigeria); for which the lawyer, when it is his turn, disobeys.
The bending of one’s will in Nigeria is a tacit secret rule of survival, not a dent on one’s integrity. Or as one eventually learns in the theatre of life: you give to the owners of the world what belongs to the owners of the world. A slow shiver crawls up the spine when it hits you that even with the innocence of the road—as it brought these three together—the rapper gives a half bottle of Hennessy to the policeman, and the policeman, under the influence of that same Hennessy, murders the lawyer who’s the rapper’s friend. Ripple effect. A slower, colder shiver comes after the last verse, as my friend Younglan Tayloung would express the first time he heard the outro. A mechanical news report, so soulless, of the night of the shooting:
Men of the Nigerian police force late last night shot and killed a suspected armed robbery gang member along the Lekki-Ikoyi link bridge. Addressing newsmen at the scene, the Lagos state police spokesman said a locally-made pistol and about five rounds of ammunition were recovered from the attacker, said to be a young male in his early 30s. A sergeant Sammy Iheanacho, an officer who reportedly engaged the suspects in a fierce shoot-out, recounted that his team patrol was almost ambushed, saved for quick reflex and experience on the part of the crack squad . . .
As Burna Boy sang an extempore at his Madison Square concert in 2022: “Wahala for who no bow for Nigeria.” Such a poignant moment of reflection during his performance in that New York square, it could have easily been a drifting moment to the crowd. But when one sees it, one reckons: what moment could be painfully more Nigerian? For me, it was the innumerable crimes, the innumerable cases of inhumanity in this proud land. The outro of Dark Poet’s “Ripple Effect” for me is not in the normalcy for which such falsehoods have thrived and continue to; it is the tragedy of how it sums up the fate of the lawyer, in a very atrocious single story, as a metaphor of the truer “Constitution” of the ordinary Nigerian.♦
Listen to “Ripple Effect”
Notes
[i] For a more reflective review of Everything Everywhere All At Once, read Marya E. Gates’ review here.
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Carl Terver was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2024. He writes on film, literature, photography, and music; and is the founding editor of Afapinen. 𝕏