Flowers for Wande Coal?

Wande Coal has had a mixed music career and while his latter projects may not have the same rave, there is no doubt about his legendary status, or is there?

Afrobeats, now strangely reduced to describe the recent Nigerian music boom, is in stasis; or its movement—Afrobeats to the world—has ‘hit a new conundrum,’ as Joey Akan, music journalist and Afrobeats Intelligence podcast host, puts it. Afrobeats’ explosion, circa 2019 till the dusk of 2023, was, after all, a result of an age’s restless demand for new things; in music, it was for a new sound, bored by what had come before and segued into triteness. But this appetite emerged, unfortunately, in a time where data, short attention spans, and the constant need to refresh the newsfeed dictated taste. Running on this machinery of speed, Afrobeats, it appears, lacked re-invention: Asake extended its lifeline with the Amapiano style, which could also be seen as the cause of its slump because, after him, nothing bangs better. But Afrobeats’ recurring sound and energy have remained monotonous.

In 2023, Davido held the frontier firmly with Timeless (a highlight in his career), while Burna Boy, in his continuous nostalgia for reliving 1990s American hip-hop and RnB sound, through sampling and fusions, veered off totally on his LP I Told Them… Some of the sonically best songs of 2023 in the mainstream include Odumodublvck’s ‘Declan Rice’, CKay’s ‘Hallelujah’, Kizz Daniel’s ‘Too Busy To Be Bae’, Bnxn’s ‘Gwagwalada’, Burna Boy’s ‘Big 7’, Asake’s ‘Lonely At The Top’, Tems’ ‘Not An Angel’, Lojay’s ‘Yahweh’, Ayra Starr’s ‘Rhythm & Blues’, Olamide’s ‘Jinja’, and Wande Coal’s ‘E Choke’, from his latest album Legend Or No Legend. Not many listeners may know the last song...