Osagie Alonge

Empowering Podcasters at @globalvillageTM |
Podding at @loosetalkgiants & @amusicintime

[Eazee @Eazee]

Years ago I pitched a YG cover to Complex. Months later it leaked online (blame a fellow blogger)…viral moment. YG retweeted, more viral. I was “called into the office” told it wasn’t a good look for the brand lol. Now years later, in time for today’s Verzuz…

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

@shakezbaba @LadiPoe 🔥

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

Dear [Insert-Igbo-Name-Dont-Worry-If-You-Dont-Have-One-We-Will-Provide-You-One],

[Olúṣeun Onìgbìndé @seunonigbinde]

I drove around Olusosun yesterday and it seemed the stench went 10x. Where in the world does that happen right in a city?

That’s apart from random trash all over the city as well as grown weeds. How can this be the standard of governance?

[Sam Szuchan @szuchans]

We cannot say how many people were in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, this morning. But we are told, to one decimal place, that it will hold 88 million by 2100. Estimates of Lagos today run from about 11 to 21 million. A gap of 10 million human beings, and both numbers come from the same offices.

Nigeria last counted itself in 2006. The 1991 census was disputed when the total came in roughly a third lower than expected. In 1963, a recount conveniently surfaced an additional 8.5 million northerners after the first count threatened the wrong political balance.

Niger, routinely called the most fertile country on earth, last held a census in 2012. Its fertility rate is given as somewhere between six and seven children per woman, depending on which agency you ask. The number you read in headlines is a model's output, not the headcount you assumed it was.

Strip the figures away and most people are left holding a verb: overwhelm. It takes a projection, straightens it into a line, and calls the line a population wall moving toward the rest of the world. But the most-cited projections have already bent. When the UN revised its numbers in 2024, it moved the expected peak down, partly because fertility in parts of sub-Saharan Africa had fallen faster than the modelers expected.

As the Hoover Institution put it: no general statement about African demography is true. Fertility is rising in parts of North Africa, holding steady across the Sahel, and falling fast in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Kenya.

The number that will shape the next century, how many people, what they believe, the language they argue in, is being set right now by people whose births are not being recorded, in a city no one can count.

[Bass Grana @BassGrana]

@QueenzFlip He’s the truth Flip

[Andy Mitten @AndyMitten]

Manchester United’s greatest players: No 14, Ruud van Nistelrooy

For @TheAthleticFC

https://t.co/Wtt77DVQq3

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

The Drake curse continues...

[Complex @Complex]

Drake Is Betting $1.5M on Argentina to Win the World Cup Final

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

He's saying goodbye to all of them.

[EuroFoot @eurofootcom]

🇵🇹🤝 Milan manager Ruben Amorim meeting the u18 and u20 team! ❤️🖤

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

@ibrahimygana I enjoyed it.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

Congratulations @LadiPoe! I enjoyed listening to this.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

Vol. 1 is a top 5 HOV album for me.

[Jdab @JDabz87]

Y’all got me on a Vol, 1 mood this morning fr lol. Streets Is Watching is just classic BARS and real rap from #hov

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

These two will face eachother at the final of a World Cup. You couldn't write a more fascinating script.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

What's the difference between a 4.0 and a 4.6?

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

@Iam_smeezy Don't mind Tunde.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

@FAMEMAKER_ I'm glad he was able to share in the glory. He gave everything to Arsenal.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

I'm taking about a rap discography. I'm talking about rappers who don't need ghostwriters. Bar-for-bar, there is nothing Kanye has written that is greater than what HOV did on Reasonable Doubt.

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

2 letters YE!

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

Again, for over two decades, the Nigerian government left the shaping of its citizens' minds in the hands of crude businessmen. With the surge of YouTube "home videos" (which have some of the most ridiculous storylines), we are doing the same thing all over again.

[Sam Szuchan @szuchans]

In 2023, South Korea's fertility rate hit 0.72. Seoul alone hit 0.64. The government spent more than 270 billion dollars over sixteen years on pronatalist incentives. Negligible effect.

China watched this happen and tried something different. Starting in 2021, regulators banned an entire genre: the overbearing CEO romance. These were dramas where a young woman working a low-paid job drops something in a lobby and a billionaire catches it. He's twenty-eight, runs a company worth fifteen billion yuan, and drives a Maybach. She never earns her way out. She gets rescued.

The audience for these dramas was women eighteen to thirty-five, mostly in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. By June 2023, urban youth unemployment hit 21.3 percent before the government suspended publication of the figure entirely. Home prices in tier-1 cities ran fifteen to twenty-five times median salary. The path their parents used, migrate, save, buy, marry, had closed.

So China's bet was this: remove the visible alternative. If people stop seeing fifteen-billion-yuan penthouses on their phones every night, maybe they experience their own one-bedroom rentals differently. If they stop watching Cinderella stories, maybe they're more willing to consider matches with partners of their own income level. The theory is that adjusting the fiction adjusts what the economy feels like.

But South Korea never banned its CEO dramas. Boys Over Flowers, The Heirs, and Crash Landing on You still dominate streaming charts across Asia. And Korea's demographic collapse hasn't slowed at all. Whatever is driving young women out of this system is operating below the level that drama regulation can reach.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

HOV with his discography is light years ahead of everyone. The greatest to ever do it.

[•UP•NORTH•TRIPS• @evboogie]

This run of Hov shows doesn’t settle the GOAT debate or the album comparisons.

It just reminds me how much daylight there is between Jay and the rest of the conversation.

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

This is too smooth. Rapping "'O3 Bonnie & Clyde" over "Girls, Girls, Girls" instrumental, then the instrumental flips to Destiny's Child's "Girls" instrumental 💎

[Complex Music @ComplexMusic]

Too smooth with it 🌬️

[Osagie Alonge @OsaGz]

https://t.co/lShmKKN8iW