Hip-Hop is synonymous with bossy swag and few rappers from Nigeria reflect this as poignantly as iLLBLISS. Tobechukwu Melvin Ejiofor, the rapper’s real name, is a walking embodiment of class and composure. All his albums have chiselled a humane figure from the rocky privacy he uses to surround himself and those he loves. But now iLLBliss is keeping the mystique at bay; he’s a father of two and, more than ever, has the need to open up his life and his stories. The result of this is Sideh Kai, the twelfth and most personal album iLLBLISS has ever put out.
When iLLBLISS got on a Zoom call with me not long ago, his signature baritone commandingly expressed his narrative. He speaks in a lucid, drawn-out way, his anecdotes elucidated through his wealth of experience in the music industry. For this album, he says, work started in October 2022 when he met Skitter, who produced all but two records on the album. He says:
I met him like two months before then through another friend of mine he had just made an EP for. So we were sitting down, reviewing the EP, and he just played some of his beats, randomly. Just beats he hadn’t used for anything in particular and I just found out there was something very soulful about his music and I connected instantly with his production style. Then we agreed to meet up and maybe do a song or two. From a song or two, we ended up creating the entire project.
Although iLLBLISS didn’t set out to make another album, the alliance with Skitter activated fresh ideas. While in the process, he began to conceptualize the body of work. ‘I’m pretty much an album artist,’ he affirms. ‘If you look at my discography carefully, I never just drop random singles. They are always part of an album.’ The rapper wanted to create an album dedicated to his two daughters and, more inclusively, feature a Gen-Z-leaning record that talks ‘about them in a satirical way,’ he says. ‘I also wanted to create a record about the spirit of Nigerians…so when these ideas started coming, I realized it was album time and I had just found the direction I needed for my next album.’
THE MAKING OF SIDEH KAI
Like most iLLBLISS albums, Sideh Kai blends multiple perspectives to create an enthralling, encompassing whole. Living through the current state of Nigeria is just one of the album’s arcs. Others include family and tradition, which, to anyone familiar with the music of iLLBLISS, knows it’s as important as the air that passes through his lungs to form his words. One half of this tradition is his Igbo heritage, and the other half is the Hip-Hop tradition, which he carries just as triumphantly. iLLBLISS is in continuous communication with the forebears whose contributions to the genre—sonically and ideologically—he follows as any dedicated student would. When I asked which albums were like totems for his own process, the responses were expected yet illuminating. Seminal albums like Nas’ Illmatic and It Was Written, JAY-Z’s Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint, The Notorious B.I.G’s Ready to Die and Life After Death, canons of the 1990s boom-bap inflected era, ‘right up to Kanye West’s The Dropout,’ he says, adding that:
An album is like a scrapbook—that’s why it’s called an album; it has a range of emotions. Sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s political, conscious; sometimes it’s just the arrogance of a rapper, conveyed through bars. And that is how I create; that’s how I fell in love with Hip-Hop. I don’t know how to just put a bunch of records together. For me, it must be storytelling; it must have thematic diversity—that is how I always approach the music.
This approach is visible in Sideh Kai, where iLLBLISS rattles off bars with beastly force. He can also put bars together with the zen of a philosopher. It’s proof of an ever-expanding musical palette, which comes from purposeful listening to what’s happening around Hip-Hop. Considering how quickly the genre’s conventions changed over the years, it’s a no-brainer that one must do this to keep themselves razor-sharp as an MC. Two records on this album have a booming drill base, a natural extension from the rapper’s maximalist Trap leanings of the mid-2010s. ‘Hip-Hop borrows a lot from various genres and it keeps changing forms,’ he says, ‘and with each generation comes a listening habit; there’s a way that the audience tends to key into you. They just want what they want at every point in time.’ Making an example with ‘Notorious Thugs’, the collaboration between B.I.G and Bone Thugs N Harmony, iLLBLISS suggests that the former flipped his signature drowsy flow to accompany his guests. ‘Biggie had to change style because he knew [Bone Thugs N Harmony] had a different style, a unique style that was from the Midwest. And that’s the dynamism in the flow; you must not go in one direction.’
A scholar of forms—this is who iLLBLISS is. Sonic decisions are considered side-by-side with demographic nuances since no musician wants to work so hard and then go unheard. This awareness works on Sideh Kai, as he tends to fit into the peculiarities of his features, which include ODUMODUBLVCK, who’s unarguably the hottest rapper in Nigeria at the moment. Assigned to their unique roles, both rappers created the scorching ‘Full Chest’, which was named by iLLBLISS’s wife, Munachi, who once told him she couldn’t stand people who do things half-heartedly. ‘Even if you are a bad person, do it with your full chest,’ she used to say, and he made a mental note of that.
A long-time fan of iLLBLISS, when ODUMODUBLVCK got the beat, he recorded and sent his verse back in about one hour. Cobhams Asuquo’s feature—he appears on two songs—comes naturally, after years of both artists being friends. Teni had wanted to be on a different song, something soulful, but the eventual result was more sun-streaked. Fave, iLLBLISS recalls, had recorded three hooks at Skitter’s studio in Surulere by the time he got there. ‘She found instant chemistry with him,’ he recalls, and the one she really liked became their collaboration. An open house of an album, the other features include Vector, Umu Obiligbo, Lade and Made Kuti, whose sax layering viscerally excites. ‘For this album, I kept it open,’ iLLBLISS says, ‘I kept the conceptual range open so I could tap into the energy of the featured artists. So, I also let them decide some of the direction.’
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