Do Artists Have To Reinvent The Wheel With Every Release?

About a week ago Asake posted a snippet—his first since his Lungu Boy Album—to his Instagram page. In the clip, he can be seen sporting a tastefully squalid look, indicating the dawning of a new era for him. His face is strewn with a phalanx of newly inked tattoos. He’s wearing a brown distressed shirt, bobbing in his seat, his large diamond chain lolling in lockstep with his movements. Expectedly, a significant portion of the reactions online featured lighthearted jabs about his new look. But even more pronounced, more scathing, was the slew of comments criticizing his return to the sonic atmosphere of his earlier albums. His debut and sophomore albums, Mr. Money With The Vibe and Work of Art, both produced by Magic Stickz, luxuriate in a distinctive blend of Amapiano and Gospel elements, overlaid with a tapestry of Afropop, Fuji, Juju, and Traditional Yoruba Music. 

On Lungu Boy, his latest album, following mounting pressure to reinvent himself, and perhaps a personal desire to expand his creative berth, he veered away from his carefully constructed patina, opting for a wide-ranging assortment of sounds. Brazilian Funk with Ludmilla on Whine. Gospel with Wizkid on MMS. Electronic Pop on the Sarz-produced Uhhh Yeah. Alternative RnB on My Heart. A cross between Afropop and Rock on Skating. This new cocktail of sounds he heralded with Lungu Boy feels, in certain portions, rough around the edges but in the end, his gamble paid off. With a single brush stroke, he dispelled concerns over his versatility and contributed immensely to the tide of experimentation that washed over Nigeria’s music scene last year. 

Days after his comeback snippet and the accompanying flurry of critical opinions, on the 13th, his birthday, he released yet another Magic Stickz-produced snippet, consolidating his return to his sonic roots. This time, the resulting succession of criticism was even more acerbic. These events poke and needle away at a litany of age-old questions around reinvention. How frequently should artists be required to reinvent themselves? At what point do recurring themes in an artist’s work cease being leitmotifs, said artist’s signature, and become monotonous, the echoes of a mind distended by fatigue? Should we demand a radical shift from artists with every new album or project? 

The desire for experimentation and reinvention in art stems from the intrinsic human tendency for desensitization when exposed to particular stimuli over time. How often have you stepped into a new environment—an office, an apartment, a market—and perceived a distinctive scent, a scent you come to register as a marker of said place? But as you frequent the location, getting familiar with its particulars, said smell begins to ebb in intensity as the days roll by, fading ever so slightly, until one day you realize you have lost sensitivity for the place’s distinct scent. Or an even more common situation; you stumble onto a piece of music that immediately arrests you. Besotted with the song, you enlist it into your rotation, looping it ad infinitum, until you intuitively start to grasp the hidden patterns behind its magic. You start to hear subterranean layers of bass chords, muffled choral inflections, and adlibs, chopped-up samples interspersed within the production. This magic, which had until then held you mystified, unravels before you, and in a paradoxical twist, the song starts to lose its infectious quality. You become desensitized to its charm. You start to search, like an addict chasing a new high, for the peculiar feeling you used to get when you’d listen. No success. Until you allow time and its restorative powers to wash over you, and one day you listen again and recognize the familiar emotion of inchoate bliss. 

The desire for subversion in music and the arts derives from the natural human desire to stave off the inertia that is occasioned by the feeling of familiarity. But reinvention, from the perspective of the artist, is an immensely nuanced ordeal. First, there’s the practical difficulty of abandoning a sound that has served one in good stead, in favor of venturing into uncharted waters. Second, there’s the spiritual toll that comes with abruptly severing ties with a style, a pattern, that has come to form a part of one’s identity. The third difficulty is more straightforward. How many times can an artist, in pursuit of reinvention, possibly dredge up or conjure new sounds?

Some artists are preternaturally gifted at reinvention, so much so that they almost seem to delight in the constant cycle of killing off an era to usher in a new one. Kanye West. Rema. Pablo Picasso, whose life was marked by constant evolution. Other artists prefer to cultivate a distinctive style and introduce variance in other ways. Basquiat is a prime example of this group of artists. The bulk of his oeuvre is faithful to the signature style the world knows him for: strident juvenile scrawls, canvases with overt tactile flourishes, street art and graffiti influences, and an obsession with symbols. Spotting a Basquiat painting is as easy as taking candy from a baby, and yet he’s universally acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest artists. A cynic would cite Basquiat’s untimely demise as a reason for his singular style. But there are countless other examples. Vincent Van Gogh, his undulating lines and looping brush strokes are discernible even from a distance. There’s Sade Adu, whose canon, furnished by fitful drums, tender keys, and poignant singing, exists in a peculiar dreamy, slow-burn atmosphere. Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, and Tyler the Creator are contemporary examples. You can identify these artists by their distinct signatures—in the case of Tyler, Carti, and Travis when they’re tapped as guest artists, it’s not unusual for the beat to switch to accommodate their unique styles—and yet we regard these artists as some of the most talented of their generation. So why should it be any different for Asake?

There’s a gulf between regurgitating old ideas and cultivating a signature style. The latter of which is a valid creative approach. There’s often debate about where the boundaries between these two start and end. Seasoned art critics can usually tell them apart with ease; cultivating a signature style means producing something new every time using a lot of the same elements. But the reality is that in the long run, the difference becomes crystal clear to everyone, because when an artist keeps regurgitating old, worn ideas, their audience becomes desensitized, exasperated by countless iterations of the same offering, and eventually they sink into the recesses, where unimaginative artists and ideas go to die.