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Many had wondered in 2011, if DʹBanj signing to Kanye West’s GOOD Music made any sense then. We can finally see it didn’t; except maybe for the bag he chased. It felt like a little betrayal to the Nigerian music industry, too, after the fallout with Moʹ Hits. Some of us may have felt hurt even—Like damn, Bro leaving? I remember thinking at the time what DʹBanj was going to sing in the US. Would the new territory work in his favour?—but also wary if it wasn’t a mistake. So, we waited for the magic that was to follow this crossover record label deal. After all, it was after DʹBanj’s big hit “Oliver Twist,” which climbed to No. 2 on the UK Hip Hop and R&B Singles Chart in May, 2012, and which had been preceded by an earlier hit, “Mr Endowed” (2010), a song ahead of its time (credits to Don Jazzy’s production skills), that it was remixed with a Snoop Dogg feature. But no magic came. It was painful anticipation: for the DʹBanj who’d gained so many titles at home, as sang in Igwe, including “Ósi Na Nwata Bụrụ Ọgaranya” (The One Who Has Been Wealthy Since He Was A Child); we waited like a village council for word from the District Officer about an appeal to the central government. But what finally came, if you were lucky to catch that song on the radio, was DʹBanj as a backup singer on “The Morning.” Not just so, only towards the song’s end do we hear him raising a chant. “The Morning” is such a hardcore rap song, as in gangster-hard—what is to expect, with rappers like Pusha T and 2 Chainz on it?—that it is only tragic to imagine what place DʹBanj had on it; the very DʹBanj who’d delivered a strong verse in “Booty Call.”
We understand why DʹBanj hopped onto that GOOD Music deal. Prior to the signing, the music scene, hell-bent, had its gaze to the West—mostly the US, the global centre for music entertainment. And artists sought to shoot their music videos abroad for optics (South Africa, London). To boost this effort, international features were done, like P Square featuring Rick Ross on “Beautiful Onyinye (Remix), and Akon on “Chop My Money.” So for DʹBanj, who it seems had outgrown the scene, being the No. 1 star at the time, getting signed by an American label was a Midas Touch. But he’d lose his titles, nearly all of them, to what turned out to be a Trojan gift, except the fact that he remained A Musician. And for over a decade, he tried reclaiming a lost position after he finally left GOOD Music in 2016.
No need stating how hard this trial was for the artist. The Nigerian music industry had not forgiven DʹBanj, and his attempts at re-entry into it were trailed by a series of comic theatre. He wasn’t making music that was unique; rather, his songs felt like affectational gambles to reclaim his lost seat. There was the album DʹKings Men (2013) that lacks any replay value. Then there was King Don Come (2017)—a title with a facile pun; its memorable songs including “Emergency,” “It’s Not A Lie,” and “El Chapo.” These songs, not the album, helped in bolstering DʹBanj’s image, however grimly. “Emergency,” which is trademark Afrobeats DʹBanj, was in sync with the tempo of the day. “El Chapo” was a worthy Trap adventure. But what the hell was “It’s Not A Lie”? The hook done by Harrysong was an imploratio: “The world is feeling DʹBanj, abi I lie? It’s not a lie / He make the people to dance, abi I lie? It’s not a lie,” ending with the salve, “Everybody Google DʹBanj.”
No one was feeling DʹBanj. The song was comedy. What wasn’t a lie was that the singer, engrossed in former glory, had lost appeal to his home fan-base, and like intelligent rappers with niche audiences who only brag about their lyricism, DʹBanj could only proclaim that he was still the Koko Master, thus the plea to us to Google him. Featuring Wande Coal, who by this time had lost star power, and Harrysong, whose fan-base, more or less, is domiciled in eastern Nigeria, was counterintuitive. So came the song “Issa Banger” a year after, featuring one-hit-single-wonder, Mr Real (“Legbegbe”), and then-popular Lagos street-pop artist and hypeman, Slimcase (who’d been featured on the hit, “Diet,” by DJ Enimoney). Apparently, DʹBanj had already made enough bad songs up till this time, and “Issa Banger” wasn’t excluded: the three artists on the song lacked synergy, with DʹBanj obviously trying to fit into the song’s guerrilla composition, but dwarfed by Slimcase. It was a descent. And the question any good, day-one fan of the artist asked was: is this the DʹBanj, “The Bangalee,” of “Why Me” and “Gbono Feli Feli”? It was curious because four months later in the same year, he was back in his element with the song “Action,” an ablution to the crime of “Issa Banger.”
When DʹBanj was Nigeria’s beloved superstar and had songs like “Loke,” “Tongolo,” and “Why Me” from the 2006 album Rundown (Funk U P), he had a funky and psychedelic pageantry to his character; with sinewed abs, he always fly his often tight-fitting silk shirts, and would go bare-chest on stage sporting slim pants in his bony frame like a mini Fela, which he’d partly branded himself into. His sound was a fusion of the early 2000s Afrobeat bop—which artists like Alariwo Of Africa (“Yawa Go Gas” [1998]) had fashioned so well as a 1990s-Lagos-themed rendition in the preceding decade—Fuji and highlife influences, American disco, and funk; nearly accomplished as a genred template. The songs “Loke,” and “Tongolo” are good examples, but not as “Jasi,” from the 2007 Curriculum Vitae album, which was almost a realisation of it.
It could be argued that another singer, Durella, may have already accomplished this sound: “In The Zanga,” “Wiskolowiska,” and “Shayo” (one of Nigeria’s best rap songs) from the 2008 album King of the Zanga, are stand-in witnesses. It remains contestable for the right day for the debate, because in the same year DʹBanj released The Entertainer album,which presented a complete mastering of the style. Released among other landmark albums in Nigeria’s pop history circa 2005-08—Asa’s Asa, 2Face’s Grass to Grace, Timaya’s True Story, P-Square’s Game Over, Naeto C’s U Know My P, 9ice’s Gongo Aso, and M.I’s Talk About It—The Entertainer was so remarkable that it sealed DʹBanj’s name, winning him Artist Of The Year, both at Headies and the MTV Africa Music Awards. Songs from it like “Fall In Love,” “Suddenly,” “Olorun Maje,” and “Igwe” are still resonant blasts from that era. From this leap, finer songs like “Mr Endowed” (2010) and “Oliver Twist” (2011) followed, bagging the singer a BET award for Best International Act Africa 2011.
The awards are many and cannot all be listed here. They number up to 29 from that era, from a swole 87 nominations. At this peak, DʹBanj was what no Nigerian pop star was at the time. He was the ultimate star boy and prolific entertainer, travelling and performing on international stages, claiming the centre with back-to-back hits and features (memorably Naeto C’s “Toni Montana Remix”). And in 2013, he performed his motivational “Top Of The World” to an audience of over 90,000 football fans at the closing ceremony of the African Cup of Nations in South Africa. It is no surprise then that the project which DʹBanj will fashion to correct his mistake of exiting the Nigerian music scene, which had given him the springboard for global recognition, when he had it but gave it up, will be grounded in this nostalgia, a return to a formula that spun yarns of musical gold. If you Google DʹBanj now, you will see it: it’s the album The Entertainer: DʹSequel (2024) recalling The Entertainer album of yore.
Verdict was out after its release. Mostly positive, and I agree; though consensus was of the singer’s late arrival. But Dami Ajayi, who has written on Nigerian music for close to two decades, known to not withhold displeasure, as he did in this review of Asake’s third LP Lungu Boy, wrote that DʹSequel album “hoists DʹBanj against his inevitable decline,” and asked, “What kind of desperation makes an artist refurbish their legacy?” Talk about self-plagiarism, huh? For Ajayi, it’s probably a needless effort, as nostalgia doesn’t travel well. DʹBanj’s charm, or talisman, was the duo effect of Don Jazzy, whose producing credits are missing on the album, he says. Ajayi insists that DʹBanj’s success was, and perhaps will forever remain intertwined with the Don Jazzy Effect, evident in the fact that the artist’s post-Don-Jazzy releases—as I have decried above—were let-downs, which The Entertainer sequel isn’t exempted. For Afrobeats Intelligence Joey Akan, DʹBanj’s mining of nostalgia is, in fact, “compelling.” His reflection on the album was less critical, personal, and romanticised. But what we get from his judgement is that the sequel album is “the good old days made anew.” And, by this, he means DʹBanj bringing “back the sounds of Nigerian music’s golden days” (sic).
Surely, this veneration of Nigerian music golden days is conflated. Except Joey Akan means the Amapiano remake of the song “Tongolo” from the 2006 Rundown album, now “Koko” (with a remix featuring Akon, and Eskeez), or the rediscovery or repurposing of the old DʹBanj on this album; it is hard to place. What comes close is the sample of 2Shotz’s “Delicious” (2004) in the ninth track “Serious.” But this is hardly from a time we can tag the golden days of Nigerian music. There are interpolations of sounds from the past, as well as a few popular lyrics, as retro as Dr. Alban’s “Hello Afrika” (1990), for example. Or from the appearance of artists like Awilo Longomba on the track “Kala,” Youssou N’Dour on “Worthy,” and Wyclef Jean on “I Am Legend” (a surprise Trap song channelling DJ Khaled’s “I Got The Keys”), which further demystifies Akan’s claim.
On the album’s monochrome cover art is the figure of DʹBanj in his former signature pose as Koko Master, a moniker glamourising phallic majesty (his, of course). As Dami Ajayi rightly noted, it is a refurbishing of legacy—but does this play out well? Ajayi is too critical, as I was before listening to the album; in fact, pessimistic, owing to the slew of bad songs and last two albums the artist had almost perished in. But my scepticism was easily dismantled after engaging DʹSequel. And this is because—besides my familiarity with many of its musical references—the songs in it do not essentially revive nostalgia or rely helplessly on DʹBanj’s legacy from the album’s ancestor. If anything, it is a testament of DʹBanj’s resilience to insist on his talent, on his ability to do it again no matter how late it has taken to get it right one last time. There were earlier signs of this before the album, even though it meant DʹBanj imitating Asake, in appropriating the latter’s fusion of Amapiano and the choral-anthemic style—as exposited by Emmanuel Esomnofu—in the single “Since ’04.” This showed flexibility and adaptation.
But DʹBanj is more than flexible in The Entertainer DʹSequel; he is elastic. His elasticity, in that Hooke’s Law analogy, is directly proportional to his ability to fuse styles. One song progresses to the next. You expect a slump, some lethargy from triteness. But the energy keeps up. Although largely taking the Amapiano trail, the album’s soundscape is beaten to a DʹBanj signature, especially with a fusion of funk and his harmonica on several songs. There’s the smoothness of sound in tracks “Peaky Blinders,” and “Healer.” Harmonica picks up in “Worthy” with N’Dour’s angelic adlibs, accompanied by Cheche Sarai. The testosterone-boppiness of “I Am Legend.” It continues with the playground, beer-parlour ballad of “Melody” with an atilogwu bop. The album closes with an encore, typical DʹBanj, rediscovered, in “World Famous,” recalling Fuse ODG’s “Azonto,” only perhaps missing a verse by Shallipopi to make it complete. It is what an album should be, with lyrics bearing no fatigue.
Yet lingering over this win, perhaps one of the reasons why DʹBanj lost admirers, is the spectre of the 2020 sexual assault accusation, for which he was cancelled. Looking at the album art for The Entertainer: DʹSequel and its testosterone-charged tracklist, one wonders if sticking to the brand of the Koko Master was a wise choice at all. Dami Ajayi had written, “DʹBanj’s music relies heavily on his charismatic delivery of signature grunts, catchphrases, buzzwords, and myth-making, particularly of libidinal hypermasculinity. It does not help that he was accused of rape. . . . It is in poor taste that his music continues to mark this hypersexual murk.” The album opens with a song titled “Koko.” And on the last song, whose rather gospel-themed sound betrays its content, brags in its first lines, “I’m the world famous koko master / Live in the flesh with a monster . . .” Of course, no one denies libidinal masculinity—or lewdness, in whatever gender spectrum—is a constant theme in pop, and singling out Bangalee is unfair. But within this song, which is mostly repetitive lines compensated with a rather ironic harmonica filler before it ends, DʹBanj plays the tune of the rhyme “Home My Home”—a curious, unconscious moment of denouement? This artist was all the while longing for home, his lost object, amidst the gra-gra. Freud be praised. Art indeed has its beauties.
I left out a line when I quoted the hook of the song “It’s Not A Lie” earlier. It says, “Oba no dey go court, abi I lie, it’s not a lie.” It’s supposed to mean DʹBanj was above his mistake of leaving home when he did and was still an Oba (a king). But obviously, this is a lie, even if we Googled DʹBanj then or now. The king eventually came to a court of his comeuppance. In the DʹSequel’s trailer video, we see the obeisance of a returned-prodigal DʹBanj to the goodwill of Don Jazzy, whom his severance from was fatal, even though we still feel an amazing dose of braggadocio in his character in the album. DʹSequel is surprisingly a good record, one of the best Afrobeats albums from 2024. There was a bit of Grammys calculation in its making, no doubt, with all the obvious features enunciating that abused African exotic. But that didn’t work out. In the end, however, The Ósi Na Nwata Bụrụ Ọgaranya did it at last, nearly reclaiming his title. But it was late, as his time seemed gone. It’s the case of the repeated lesson learnt the hard way—that it is perhaps best to stay where the grass is green and master the greenness. Our apathy and indifference are granted, as the angst to cancel DʹBanj; it however can’t take away the fact that DʹSequel is a fuccin’ good album.♦
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Carl Terver has an arts degree from BSU Makurdi, and was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024. He is the author of the photobook Glory to the Sky. He has been published in The Republic, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, LEAN, The Stockholm Review, and Konya Shamsrumi, among others, and is the founding editor of Afapinen.