I came across P-Square’s Invasion album from a friend of mine who bought it to
please the comparatively younger girls he usually carry in his car. I decided
to carry the album to review it and post it on this blog. My attentions drifted
to other things before I could play the album enough to enable me have a good
grasp which is imperative for a good review. About seven months later, I heard
another version of the song, Chop My
Money featuring
American’s superstar, Akon. At about the same time, I watched a video of Beautiful Onyinye,another joint from the
same album, featuring
the sturdy and heavily bearded American rapper, Rick Ross. Collaborating with
the Americans called my attention to the fact that Nigerian artistes are,
indeed, travelling. My interest in Invasion was again
reawakened.
Invasion is a fourteen-track album that includes Beautiful Onyinye, Chop My Money, Asamkokoto, Do as I Do,
Forever, Me and My Brother, Jeje, Buneha Enu, Ole Buruku, Player, She’s Hot,
Fire, Anything and Shake it Down. Jeje is a
Tecno song while Me and
My Brother is
Reggae.
The singing language is
the traditional vernacular, pidgin and Standard English language mixes that is
common to Nigerian artistes.
From Invasion, one
could see that the twins from Busa Buji Street, Jos, have become remarkably
professional in their mastery of music instrumentation.
The successes of P-Square
over the years have, in part, been an outcome of their realization that the
youths in Africa love danceable music more than anything else. It is however
not new that the older one gets, the more his interest in party music
diminishes. Invasion demonstrated
that P-Square has found a way of defying the rule in order to remain in
business. Going by the astronomical airplay the album has received and which is
still receiving, one understands that the album like the others before it has
sold as high. The popularity of P-Square’s songs is usually seen from the way
school children mime the songs along the streets. Invasion is not different, revealing how wealthy the duo must be. The
album has worked to, again, confirm the leading position of P-Square among
contemporary African artistes and perhaps beyond, going by the prominence of
the artistes with whom they collaborated.
The number of artistes
featured in the original versions of the songs includes Naeto-C, Waje, Muna and
Eva. Muna and Eva where featured in the song Shake
it Down. The
instrumentation of the song is reserved. I figure out that it was deliberately
made so to enable fans to appreciate the lyrical wizardry of the two
girls. Despite
their lyrical elegance, Muna and Eva were previously unknown to me. The duo
rapped in Jamaican Patois such that one is tempted to think they are Jamaicans
until he listens to Nigerian vocabularies in between. The depth of poetry of
the girls left me wondering which schools they attended. I could only compare
them to M-I and Fresh Prince, as far as Nigeria is concerned. If I were Peter
and Paul, I would not have featured the two girls as they only worked to play
up the poetic diffidence of the twins despite many years in the industry. The
message in P-Square’s music are, at times weak, just
to enable rhymes to be made. Also there are times P-Square makes wide of the
mark choices of words, making a song to appear unprofessional. For instance,
referring to a woman that has stolen your heart as Ole buruku, meaning
a thief sounds too harsh for a love song. A love song is supposed to be mellow
and soothing. The contrary only makes the song funny, making everything to
appear unserious. Some lines read thus: you are
just like a thief in the middle of the night; you broke into my heart just like
a dagger knife, etc.
Nigerian music has no
doubt grown remarkably in the last decade. It is however not the best on the
planet. There is thus room for more progress. As said above, the language is
usually a mix of Nigerian languages, pidgin and conventional English. My
opinion is that rather than use two or three languages in one verse, it is more
professional to use a single language in the verses and use the second in the
chorus. A verse conveys a particular message. If one starts a verse in English
and ends it in Ibo, Yoruba or Hausa, the person listening will be lost if it
happens that he lacks an understanding of any of the languages. One can also
sing verses in English and perform the chorus in Pidgin English or vice versa.
By-and-large however, the
album is marvelous and again confirms that P-Square is not just a big name but
one of Nigeria’s biggest of all times. Peter
and Paul have made a lot of Nigerians very proud but we in Jos consider
ourselves the proudest.
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