How “ACL” Rescued Blaqbonez’s Career

On the night of November, 6, 2025, Blaqbonez returned to his alma mater, the Obafemi Awolowo University, taking the stage of the university’s 8000-seater Amphitheater. He had left the school as an obscure battle rapper, whose proclivity for whimsy and gaunt affect seemed at odds with his chosen career path. Now he was returning arguably as the eminent rapper in the country, having recently landed top spots on Apple Music NG’s Top Songs and Top albums charts respectively, and utterly decimated his industry nemesis Odumodublvck by way of a scathing diss song titled ACL, and sordid revelations about the rapper/singer. 

Right from the start, the theater throbbed with unbridled excitement. A minute could hardly pass without the audience breaking out in celebratory howls. Minutes after bounding up the stage, Blaqbonez, garbed in a bepearled checkered shirt, dark pants, and a long scarf hanging down his head, prostrated before the audience—an OAU tradition—sending them into ecstatic fits. The night, however, reached its climax when Blaqbonez performed ACL, the clear most impactful Nigerian Hip Hop record this year. The audience, which had already been loud, was now deafening. Eight times after performing the song that night, the audience was still clamoring for more. A similar dynamic had occurred days before at BlaqBonez’s Riot show in Lagos. ACL wasn’t just an online sensation, it had triggered an industry-wide reckoning and created a soft landing for his eighth studio album, No Excuses.

The outsized success of ACL, particularly how it managed to hamstring Odumodublvck, and the attendant success of his No Excuses album, however, belies the fact that before the song was released, Blaqbonez had been seriously struggling. Of the many singles he released last year—including Fire on Me, Haibo Freestyle, Emeka Dance, and 60/40—none quite stuck the landing. Not for lack of quality or commercial ambitions, it simply seemed as though the world had moved past Blaqbonez. His unique blend of Hip Hop, R&B, and Afrobeats, fastened together by distinctive whimsy, had become obsolete, and he was the only one ignorant of this new development. It took a remix with Bella Shmurda and Ayo Maff for his 2024 single, Louder, to start earning streams befitting an artist of his stature. 

This poor run of form trailed him into 2025. Despite their pointed commercial bent, his singles leading up to the album—W For Wetego, Follow Her, and Go Crazy—all experienced tepid commercial success. It’s telling that he shifted the release date for No Excuses from August 22, 2025, to October 17, 2025. Had he dropped according to the original schedule, it’s very likely the project would have flopped like the singles that preceded it. 

To fully grasp this story, it’s important that we first understand Blaqbonez’ shifting position with the Nigerian music scene and the recent moment of transformation that prefigured his ascendancy. In 2019, he broke out with  Shut Up, a single whose pomp presaged Blaqbonez’ flair for drama. With a darkly moody production and lyrics that drip with palpable machismo, Shut Up could pass as a soundtrack to a movie about the drug business or a biopic about a dictator. Ideally, it would foreshadow moments in the movie when the linchpin is prepared for a major move. Given the song’s heavy tenor, one would expect a similarly staid video. The T.G. Omori-directed video, however, brings to light Blaqbonez’ proclivity for subversion and absurdist humor. 

In the video’s overture, we see Blaqbonez surrounded by a formation of menacing guards, their faces contorted in menacing expressions. In their hands, they wield machine guns and leashes, keeping fearsome dogs at bay.  The gag? These vicious-looking guards are garbed in wedding gowns. Later in the video, when they zip through Lagos Island in Okadas, trailing Blaqbonez, who is atop a yellow antiquated Mercedes-Benz car, their wedding garb flailing in the gusting breeze, you almost feel like you’re in a surreal avant-garde film where Blaqbonez is a villainous tyrant who somehow has rewritten the rules of the universe according to his whims. 

Indeed, he’d go on to rewrite the rules of the Nigerian rap scene, vaulting atop the pecking order with a variety of Hip Hop inflected with a mesmerizing comedic beat. Consider TGF P***y, a track from his 2021 album Sex Over Love. He starts somber and introspective, invoking teachings from his pastor, most of which extol the virtues of thankfulness. Even though many of the songs on Sex Over Love are bawdy, for a minute, you think this one is different. Wrapped up in the celestial melodies of the track and lyrics like: “My philosophy: you get more when your heart is thankful/ This is the secret of my greatness, you should hold me highly,” you open your heart up for whatever profundity lies in tow. But just when you let your guard down, bracing for a heartfelt revelation. He subverts your expectation, offering up the most lewd lines in the project: “Thank you for the p***y that you gave to me/ When I’m in that p***y, eat it gratefully.” 

His comedic gambits also extended to countless humorous skits, an irreverent sense of style, hilarious interviews, and quip-laden tweets. As time wore on, his distinct offering became less potent. Blame it on diminishing marginal returns or the ascendancy of Odumodublvck, whose blistering rise in 2023 wholly reshaped the Nigerian Hip Hop landscape, but Blaqbonez’s claim of being Africa’s best rapper started to feel less like an ambitious yet perfectly plausible boast and more like hollow bluster. In response, Blaqbonez increasingly leaned into hyper-commercial music—Emeka Dance presents a perfect example. Paradoxically, this had the effect of accelerating his decline. 

Cue up ACL, the culmination of heated online exchanges and subliminal disses between Blaqbonez and his friend-turned-enemy Odumodublvck. The track is replete with witty bars and double entendres but it especially shines for its pettiness, mirroring the whimsy with which Kendrick Lamar bludgeoned Drake in Not Like Us. “Old man, all you really want is greeting,” he raps, referencing a video from months ago in which  Odumodublvck chastises upcoming rapper Wave$tar for not greeting him (The exchange happened at a show where both artists were booked to perform.) The Antiworld Gangsters, a rap group spearheaded by  Odumodublvck, are also caught in the crossfire. “Failed rappers turned into internet gangsters/ Antiworld more like anti-success/ Dem no get motion maybe they need a wheelchair/ No fit tell their guy the truth, they gats suck d*ck for lil stipend,” he raps. 

The coup de grâce comes in the song’s coda when he raps: “He sending DMs before 8 in the morning, it’s giving obsessed/ He loves me hates me, wanna kill me, it’s giving unstable/ Remember the addy I sent? Was Yaba Left, I was trying to help you.” In the song’s visualizer, this part is synchronized with reams of frantic and vicious texts from Odumodublvck, some of which threaten Blaqbonez with rape. 

The genius in ACL goes beyond clever bars and besmirching his rival’s reputation, which, to be fair, was barely hanging on a thread. The song is particularly pivotal in Blaqbonez’s career because it provided a path for Blaqbonez to reinvent himself. These days, he no longer positions himself as a prankster. Everything—from his dress sense to his tone in interviews—now seems to furnish a more cavalier persona for the 29-year-old rapper. With a single shiny bullet, he managed to bolster his reputation in Nigerian Hip Hop, party his nemesis, and find a way out of a creative slump that had blighted him for over a year. It’s for this reason that ACL is perhaps the single most important moment in Blaqbonez’ career.