Saturday evening. I'm going through the motions with my repertoire of Nigerian music; and that means a cycle of chest-thumping and allusions to fibrillating feminine hind; a vicious cycle now orchestrated by, well, Young John The Wicked Produzer. What's in a name! But make no mistakes, whether you like it or not, it is Nigerian music, and you will dance. Today my playlist mirrors the streets, owo ni koko, and Davido is King. Sometimes, there is an element of the distant past rearing its head; Remedies' Sakomo, hauntingly nostalgic, the rhyming was impeccable but that's because Eedris Abdulkareem, and his friends, were mostly making stuff up - laying the gauntlet for Konga to later run with from Ebute-Metta to Ilesa.
But the problem with talking sweepingly about Nigerian music, like the debate about what is African writing, is that a definition, or even a description, leaves so much behind; in part because one readily confuses narrowness for singularity. But, no, not everytime Shoki, sometimes Iyawo Mi, sometimes things less distinct, as the music mirrors a pot of egusi soup: sweet. Just. But then there is something else. See, Asa we all know is a witch, and little known Jeremiah is quite good, too; but when the two got together on My Heart Is On Fire, they recorded the best duet in Nigerian music since Tuface sang a hook for Remedies - except that isn't a duet, and this isn't technically Nigerian music.
Listening to Asa and Jeremiah Gyang mournfully profess love to each other on this song lends one a keen sense of otherness, love, oneness, beauty, pain, and a wordless wonder. It is a lamentation that deserves, as all pain does, only empathy and silence. The requests in the lyrics are slavish;
