My first encounter with M.I Abaga came through an earlier song.
We were hanging out at a friend’s at Rayfield in Jos, listening to Raypower FM, no pun intended, when this fiercely energetic voice came on, with the braggadocio of a chart-topping artiste. We had seen Modenine, and we had debated why he named himself after the calculator button, but this dude, who also sounded like a “foreign” rapper with local flavours had something that set him apart. He was playful in a way that made rapping feel almost effortless, and sounded like someone who could be played at parties, at clubs, while still being a lyrical genius.
“He’s a Jos boy ai,” my friend said. “He just came back from Yankee.”
My friend, who was friends with Lawbreakers, the actual artistes we thought would be Jos’s musical exports of the 2000s alongside P-Square because they were making the biggest party hits, agreed that M.I could be the next Jos boy to become a sensation both at home and outside, with apologies to Jeremiah Gyang, who had had us all screaming our hearts out to a gospel song that year.
The irony was that, even with P-Square’s breakthrough, Lawbreakers, a group consisting of Doxy and Warchild, were more embraced in Jos, and the sentiment was probably because the latter had made the hardest tribute to the city’s youth culture, capturing the craze of that era: “J Anthem.” Along with other party songs such as “U Go Wet,” which were on rotation from Club Zero-Eleven to D’Makumba, which opened much later, you couldn’t attend a party in Jos without the crowd crying out for their songs.
But that black dude would seize the attention of even the most sceptical Jos boy and girl. It was love at first listen from that point. For everyone. The song was “Crowd Mentality.” And M.I Abaga would go on to change rap music in Nigeria, making it not only lyrically nuanced, like a poet at work, but as appealing as the most competitive pop music.
And so I join you in wishing this “microphone magician,” @MI_Abaga, as Flavour would say, a resounding happy birthday.
@mni_JJ The same people who made education so expensive that the average Nigerian now needs a loan just to get through school are the very people who enjoyed free education in their own time and even received government stipends while studying..
In all my years, I’ve never seen a politician lose an election and peacefully accept defeat without either him or his supporters shouting “rigging”.
Just wait and watch, the losers of these concluded primaries both from ADC and APC will soon begin their usual cries of rigging.😂