Ify is that most ineffectual thing: a mobster with a conscience. He robs and maims, but also genuinely feels pity for his victims. As he would learn, a sensitive spirit is a handicap when you are a gangster in Isale Eko. A character in Jade Osiberu’s Gangs of Lagos, Ify is played by Nigerian singer and songwriter Chike Ezekpeazu Osebuka. Or simply Chike. In essential ways, Chike doesn’t just play Ify, he is Ify, as the two share a sensitivity. Though it kills the fictional character, it is why Chike has carved up a unique and instantly recognizable niche for himself in Nigeria’s music scene, even as he champions none of the qualities typical of the country’s popular jams.
Although born in Onitsha, Anambra, and an Enugu native, Chike grew up miles away from his ancestral home. In his family’s adopted home in Abuja, he lived a privileged life with his parents and three brothers. That privilege is prominently exemplified by his having attended Covenant University, the Ogun-based school deemed the preserve of the Nigerian rich. There he studied computer engineering. And there his music career had its first real pump of blood, as he sang in the school’s choir, if only for two months. More crucially, he met artist Ric Hassani, who, years later, would offer elder-brotherly support as Chike sought a sure footing as an independent artist.
The Ezekpeazu home helped steer Chike towards music. Its open door policy ensured a steady traffic of kin and kith, and with it a steady supply of music influences. Chike was often surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles. Like his brothers, his aunts performed music regularly. So even though he did not take music seriously until he turned twenty-two in 2014, Chike was always surrounded by people who did. One can only speculate about the extent to which his uncles nudged him toward music. Years later, however, one of them would partially inspire Nothing More, Nothing Less, a track in Chike’s sophomore album. While composing a section of the song, Chike mined memories of a deceased uncle to conjure a mood of tearful sobriety.
His then-best friend, Mojisola Awotibe, also inspired him by rousing him to action. Heeding her, in 2015, Chike auditioned for Project Fame, then West Africa’s most prestigious reality TV music competition. Deeming audition centers in Abuja as having sterner competition, Chike made the long trip to Ibadan to audition in the south-western city. His calculations were spot on: he aced his audition, and then went on to finish the competition as among the top ten contestants. Like Iyanya, Omawumi and Timi Dakolo, Chike’s first brush with fame would come through reality TV. But Nigerians tend to forget such talent show stars after a while. Wanting to delay that collective amnesia, Chike participated the next year in yet another reality TV music show, The Voice Nigeria. During his audition, his performance of James Arthur’s Roses impressed the judges visibly. Timi Dakolo smiled with glowing adoration. And, in awe of Chike’s gifts, 2Face pranced about on stage. Though finishing as runner-up, Chike left the competition with a twofold gift: more fame and a record deal with Universal Music Group Nigeria. His career was set to sail into the bronze-rimmed horizon.
So he thought at least, but it was not to be. His record deal yielded only one record, Fancy U, released in December 2016. Produced by Gospelondebeatz and bearing a faint whisper of the then-popular Pon Pon sound, the song was made in the style of Nigerian pop songs. Which means it is danceable, and also has the customary line dedicated to a female body part. “See your leg as it fit in that shoe,” Chike sings, his voice at ease in the sprightly soundscape.
Hearing that song, one is inclined to disagree with Chike when he said, in an interview, that “the type of voice I have cannot be used on Afrobeats.” In truth, it probably can. It’s his sensibility, and not his voice, that sets him at odds with the drums-driven genre. Afrobeats artists want to get with a girl pronto. Chike wants that, too; but he wants to buy you a drink first. In that way, he shares a lineage with Nigerian artists like Styl Plus, Paul Play, Asa, Fave, Omah Lay to a degree, Simi and Adekunle Gold, all of them connoisseurs of the softer emotions. Although if you asked Chike for artists from whose spring of influence he has drunk, he will mention Dolly Parton, Wande Coal, Style Plus again, and Tracy Chapman. He has cited them as model storytellers. His idea that story drives a song is why he christened his music style “Afro-stories.” While most of his songs are not wound round a narrative, some are, although usually loosely. Out of Love, for example, foregrounds a conversation between two lovers to show that love is blind, in the sense that people in love can be blind to all the telling signs of a dying love affair.
Unable to resolve creative differences, Chike reached an agreement with Universal Music, in 2017, to terminate his contract. As he quickly learned, the industry shows tough love to independent artists.
Unshackled from label strictures, Chike released songs which leaned into the sensitivity for which he is now known. He pairs that sensitivity with stripped-down production in Beautiful People, Out of Love, and Amen. With his singles building him a small reputation, Chike decided an album was due. The only problem was money, a hurdle that would stall the project’s release by three years. He eventually found a solution in Nollywood. In 2017, he landed his debut acting role, in the popular Africa Magic telenovela Battleground. Using earnings from his acting gig, he funded the making of his debut album, Boo of the Booless. Sensibly released on Valentine’s Day in 2020, the album is intended as a cantata for lovers, and, as its title implies, the loveless.
A fourteen-track juggernaut of an effort, the album was initially titled African Prince. That title would be scrapped—perhaps because it seemed too self-referential—but the album’s cover art retains the theme of royalty. A serious-faced Chike wears a diadem and a black dress lined with gold. A harmonious marriage of RnB, Highlife, Alt-pop and Igbo-inflected lyrics, Boo of the Booless theorises about love and how lovers should behave. Love can be self-destructively selfless, it says in Running. Featuring Chike’s former schoolmate Hassani, Nakupenda casts coyness as anathema to sensual passion. Its message of carpe diem, and its coy female subject, recalls the titular heroine in To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem. Roju reveals a more direct reference to English literature. You can be forgiven for thinking it’s a Yoruba word, but it is a portmanteau of Romeo and Juliet. Prone to Pollyannaish optimism, Chike somehow evokes two of literature’s most tragic figures without dampening the mood.
Even without a label’s backing, Boo of the Booless shot Chike into superstardom. It was released around the time that the world started to negotiate its way around lockdowns meant to staunch the spread of Coronavirus. In Nigeria and elsewhere, music consumption swelled considerably in this period of general inactivity, with people turning to songs as reprieve from pandemic-inspired malaise. According to one report, music consumption in 2020 (measured by album sales) increased by 8.2% from the previous year. Its aesthetic merits aside, Boo of the Booless’ virality may also be attributed to that insidious virus.
The album also enjoyed critical acclaim. It was nominated for Best RnB Album and Album of the Year at the 2020 Headies. And it won Album of the Year at the 2020 City People Music Awards.
“I have a thing for extending the lifespan of my works,” said Chike. Extend, he did. Three months after releasing his debut, he released Dance of the Booless Vol. 1, a mixtape which transplants six songs from his album into EDM terrain. He also collaborated with Simi on Running’s remix, which was released in February 2021. Directed by Pink, the song’s music video was named Nigeria’s most viewed YouTube clip in 2021.
Though his debut was released under a smog of uncertainty, the skies had since cleared by the time Chike floated his sophomore album, The Brother’s Keeper, which was released last August. Confidence had replaced uncertainty, and perhaps the album’s outsized scale is proof. With its sixteen tracks, it scarcely gives a hoot about dwindling attention spans, certain its predecessor’s success will give it a right of passage.
Thematically, not much changed in the thirty months between his first and second album. Chike is still a philosopher of amorous desire. In Flavor-flavored Hard to Find, he rehashes an insight from Beautiful People: only a few, perhaps only one person in the world, can love us the way we deserve. Winner establishes a causal link between love and self-actualization: because you have fallen in love, you want to become a better person. The album sometimes strays away from romantic affection, as in God Only Knows, where Chike highlights the pain of betrayal, his fervid voice implying it might be a personal experience. Though mostly retaining the pared-down production heard in his debut, he shows some openness to new material: the album’s lead, On the Moon, riffs on rave of the moment Amapiano. The album was favorably received by many, and critics praised it highly, one of them noting its “pristine vocals” and “superb songwriting.” With the album, Chike’s lightening of brilliance strikes the same spot twice, showing his first outing’s success was hardly beginner’s luck.
He may not think his voice is apt for Afrobeats, but it hasn’t stopped him from collaborating with some of the genre’s finest stewards. From Oxlade (Spell) to Mayorkun (If You No Love) to Kizz Daniel (Easy to Love). Perhaps his most shocking collaboration has come during his excursions into Hip Hop, as in Breaking the Yoke of Love, where he teams up with Blaqbonez, a foremost anti-love activist with markedly different ideas about romance. “There ain’t one person out there that’s for you,” Blaqbonez raps in the song which was released this February. Meanwhile, Chike’s Beautiful People and Finders Keepers are helmed by a fatalist belief in the existence of soulmates. Chike has shown a willingness to work outside of his worldview, to venture even into the adventurous realms of polygyny.
He is, however, still a champion of monogamous desire, and one proof is his latest offering, the mid-tempo Ego Oyibo. Only now Chike seems to have adopted a certain worldliness not seen in his albums, where the financial aspects of a relationship are usually footnotes in his love manifestos. “For January I give you money,” the thirty-year-old sings in the new song, betraying a new-found sense of materialism. Perhaps his music has always avoided broaching the subject of money because Chike’s vision of the ideal love affair forbids it. Perhaps now he deems a moneyless affair as impractical. Whichever it is, Chike has shown that in a pop music market where sex sells best, sensitivity too, can sell.