'B4 B4' Is The Davido Record That Reminds You What He Is For
Amid an album about lineage and legacy, the Mayorkun and FOLA collaboration is the track doing the least thinking and the most work.
'Oriadé' is an album that spends a lot of its running time being thoughtful. 'B4 B4' is not, and it is better for it.
The track pairs Davido with Mayorkun and FOLA, and it does the thing Davido has always done more reliably than any of his contemporaries: it produces something a crowd will sing back at the first hearing.
The Mayorkun relationship
Mayorkun's career and Davido's are deeply intertwined. He came up through DMW, and the professional relationship between them has outlasted the label arrangement that started it.
That history is audible. There is a particular ease to how they trade on a record, the sort that comes from people who have made a lot of music in the same rooms and do not need to negotiate space.
Why the light track matters on a heavy album
An album framed around an oriki, around lineage and name and inheritance, carries a risk. Sustained seriousness from an artist whose gift is joy can tip into something airless.
'B4 B4' is the release valve. It gives the record a centre of gravity that is recognisably Davido, and it gives the more inward material something to push against.
This is a structural point about album-making that Nigerian pop sometimes underweights. A record needs dynamic range. A collection of twelve reflective tracks is not more artistically serious than a collection with peaks and troughs; it is usually just less well sequenced.
The wider album
The other tracks that have travelled furthest since release include 'Julie' and 'Tell Everybody' with Leon Thomas, the latter reaching for a more soul-inflected register than Davido typically occupies.
Together they describe an artist testing the edges of his range on a record explicitly about where he comes from, which is a reasonable thing for a sixth album to be doing.
Sources: DavidoVEVO; Notjustok.
There is a long-running Nigerian argument about whether Davido is technically the weakest singer among the big three. It is not an unreasonable argument and it entirely misses what he does.
Davido's gift is architectural. He has an extraordinarily reliable instinct for what a crowd will sing back, how long to make them wait for it, and which collaborator will supply the thing he cannot.
That is why the features on his records are so consistently well chosen. Mayorkun for familiarity and flow. Leon Thomas for a soul register Davido does not have. FOLA for currency. Each one covers a gap, and the result is albums that work better than the sum of their vocal performances.
It is a producer's skill housed in a frontman, and it is significantly rarer than a good voice.
Plenty of technically superior singers have had much shorter careers. Knowing what a record needs, and being secure enough to bring in somebody better at it than you, is the harder thing.
