You Had To Be There

Twenty years since the Nigerian twin band, P-Square, released its first studio album, the beautiful thing about P-Square’s songs is how they take you back to where you were when you first heard them.

Written by Ernest Nweke

Dec 8, 2023

The Beautiful Thing About P-Square. Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, The Age of Afrobeats. Buy the issue here.

When P-Square, the singing and dancing duo made up of identical twin brothers, Peter and Paul Okoye, broke into the Nigerian music scene in 2003, no one saw their talent coming. Their music spread like wildfire. You heard their songs wherever you turned. Around street corners, on the lips of teenagers and children; in homes, shops, clubs, and even dining halls that turned into dancing halls on social nights in boarding secondary schools in different parts of the country, everywhere reverberated with their songs. Nigerians of different ages lost themselves to the music, singing along to ‘Bizzy Body’, ‘Ifunanya’, or ‘Do Me’. As this happened, they also found themselves dancing because to keep up with P-Square was to forget and find oneself in the music and the dance that were the duo’s talent. P-Square was a sensational experience that lasted us decades.

The December I first heard P-Square, I was in Aguata, Anambra State, for the Christmas holidays. It was 2006, and the road leading to Mbara Oye, the village market, and St Charles Catholic parish Achina, where we attended vigil masses on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, was still untarred. We spent most of the day holed up inside the house, away from the cloud of dust that rose into the air and over the fence when cars sped past. Over and over again, with doors and windows closed to keep out the dust and harmattan cold and heavy curtains drawn to give the high-walled sitting room a cozy feel, we watched Maid in Manhattan or played the P-Square’s Get Squared album on repeat.

The beautiful thing about P-Square’s songs is how they take you back to where you were when you first heard them. Even after years have gone by, they bring back memories of what you were doing and the sort of life you had, and they awaken all the beauties of moments you would otherwise have forgotten. For Abuja-based corporate and commercial lawyer, Dibia Epundu, P-Square still signifies a time when life was without worries. ‘They had this custom of dropping new jams around the Christmas seasons that still makes me think of Christmases when I hear or think of P-Square,’ said Epundu.

‘“Bizzy Body” was the first P-Square song I heard, and it remained one of my favourites from them.’ Michael Uzomah, a Music lecturer at the University of Nigeria, said to me. ‘It was so full of life, and it made you just want to dance. Whether or not you can dance does not matter; you would always lose yourself on the dancefloor whenever a P-Square song came on.’

The VCD plate we had on that Christmas holiday in Aguata contained songs from P-Square’s second album, Get Squared, and two songs from their first album, Last Nite. When Get Squared finished playing, ‘Senorita’ and ‘Igbedu’, the songs from P-Square’s first album, played. Before that holiday was over, I knew all the words to all the records in their sophomore album and the extra two songs from the older album.

WHAT MADE P-SQUARE DIFFERENT?

P-Square was not the first sibling band Nigeria had. For two decades, the Lijadu Sisters, a group made up of a pair of identical twin sisters, Kehinde and Taiwo Lijadu, reigned as one of Nigeria’s most popular bands. P-Square was also not the only band that debuted or sang to Nigerians in the wake of the 21st century. But their sound was like nothing we had ever heard before. Where the older sibling band, the Lijadu Sisters, had given us more psychedelic, soul, and Afrofunk sounds with reggae licks, and bands like Styl-Plus, that were contemporaries with P-Square gave us a sound that was almost too Western, P-Square found a middle ground. The duo found a way to give us a cosmopolitan sound that was both foreign and familiar. They did not make protest songs with political undertones like the records African China made...

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You Had To Be There

WHAT MADE P-SQUARE DIFFERENT?

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