BY EMMANUEL ESOMNOFU
There’s something about music that sticks. It grabs the listener, refuses to let go. That is the quality one finds in Flavour N’abania’s music, so simplistic in purpose that its sonic dexterity has been glossed over. And yet, Flavour’s consistent craftsmanship demands we recast the merits of his acclaim, so that, once more, we can properly appraise a musician who’s been one of Africa’s greatest in the past three decades. Doing this returns us to 2005, which was when the artist, born Chinedu Okoli, released ‘N’abania’, an instant classic, which set him solidly on the path of musical immortality.
Allied with the saying ‘Uwa mgbede ka mma’—nightlife is good—the song revelled in the vibrancy of social gatherings. The chorus literally goes, ‘Ife niile ga-eme,’ which means everything will happen; and carrying the heat of that ethos was the production, urgent and sprightly, with sharp echoes of Highlife while nodding to the pop direction of its time. In the 2000s, Nigerian music was quite hedonist (it still is) and given Highlife’s historical alliance with depicting risqué profiles, Flavour’s entry into the scene was timely—he offered variance from the mainstream sound while touching on those well-liked themes. A distribution deal with Obaino Records saw the N’abania album become a smash in the South East but its influence also reverberated across Nigeria, peculiarly due to the wide settlement of Igbo people elsewhere.
On his 2010 Uplifted sophomore, the artist had matured; in place of flamboyance was sustained rigour: you heard it in ‘Ashawo’, a reworking of ‘Nwa Baby’, with more imagery and technical structuring coming into the former. It would become one of the most penetrating hit songs of the 2010s, coinciding, at the time, with Flavour’s also-developing imagery. Beginning the album with ‘Oyi (I Dey Catch Cold)’ proved to be a masterstroke. Its vulnerability, humour, and the song’s sensuous blend of Igbo and English is quite memorable and brings to mind Chinua Achebe’s perspective that pairing the two languages can be artistically powerful, but challenging technically since each has its own history and cultural touchstones.
A technique Flavour would use over the years was also crystallized here; that of translating himself into English although the nuances of Igbo undoubtedly form the linguistic base of his songwriting—thus the simple chorus ‘Oyi na-tụm o’ is followed with ‘Baby, I dey catch cold,’ the framing of that admission perfected on the remix which featured Tiwa Savage. Everywhere else, the album glittered with standouts.