Qing Madi’s Debut Album Interrogates Conflicting Versions of Love

You’d be forgiven if, without listening, going solely off the title, you assumed that Qing Madi’s debut album was about boldly asserting her hegemony. The album’s title, I Am The Blueprint, glides off the tongue like the prelude to a manifesto by a despotic leader, or a brusque boast by a young maverick on the rise. Something of the quality of Rema’s sophomore album Heis, which nimbly surfs serrated drums, rapidly mutating chord progression, grand theatrical compositions, staccatos morphing into legatos, arpeggios getting swallowed whole by operatic harmonic chords, declaring him lord over his peers and an equal to his predecessors. I am the Blueprint, however, is nothing of that nature. It is instead a beautifully sincere treatise on the often opposite manifestations of love. 

Love is often portrayed as a daydream, an endless sprawl of roses and dandelions and orchids and tulips and all the unbelievably beautiful things life has to offer. But love can also be tragic, obscure, befuddling, perverted, and sometimes terrifying. Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most popular love story ever written. But it’s simultaneously a tragedy: two lovers who have been singed countless times by their respective feuding families, choose to self-immolate, drawing the curtains on a beautiful yet tempestuous relationship. You would not be wrong if you described SZA’s performance on Kill Bill as impetuous or reckless. Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name, the song tells a tale of obsessive love turning violent. In the song, SZA sings about wanting to kill her ex and his new girlfriend because she can’t seem to move on. Her line of thinking is very clearly occluded by hurt, verging on psychotic, but in a twisted sense, it’s also a manifestation of love. 

This confounding dual-naturalness of love is at the heart of I Am the Blueprint. Across the stretch of the album, she alternates between picturesque visions of romance and vaguely ominous ones. Sometimes her wavering is so abrupt, so jarring as to leave the listener in a lurch. But the honesty and grace with which she communicates her feelings—sometimes with soft singing, other times with strident bawling—threads through these divergent ideas, holding them together like a seam. 

One of the best aspects of the album is its sequencing. The songs unspool cinematically, weaving together an undulating yet cohesive narrative. The album opens with Bucket List. As the title suggests, in the song, she’s anxious, bogged down by the weight of goals she has her eyes fixed on. Over an ambient production that feels like a church worship session—complete somber humming, poignant keys that evoke the feeling of being swaddled by a fuzzy blanket and syncopated drums—she interrogates her anxieties about living up to expectations. She wants to win a Grammy, buy her mum a mansion, and build herself an empire. These goals might be trite, countless acts have delivered these lines, but the candor with which he expresses her desires imbues the record with believability. What should otherwise be cliche becomes aspirational. 

This theme threads through the album. Over the project’s 13 tracks, she hardly says anything revolutionary. Instead, it’s her execution—exemplified by the juxtaposition of two contrasting variations of romance—that steals the show. Tracks 2 through 4—Ali Bomaye, Akanchawa, and Feeling Alright see her render sprightly odes to her lover. Ali Bomaye is particularly interesting. The title derives from the 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, entitled Rumble in the Jungle. During the fight, fans chanted “Ali Bomaye,” which means “Ali, finish him.” In the song, she deploys the phrase as a metaphor for her lover knocking her off her feet. “You dey knock me off my feet like Ali Bomaye,” she sings. 

This is one of the many moments across the album where she showcases her flair for lyricism. She’s more than capable of surfing the contours of an Afrobeats production. She frequently deploys slang and invents meaningless words and phrases to express things that would otherwise be difficult to communicate. In Ali Bombaye, which she dapples with phrases like “womboloboma” and “ogologoma,” evoking Rema’s early days when he would deploy similar expressions as well as more confounding ones, like on Woman, where he wails “Asampetetemakule.” But she also has a rapper’s disposition. She is skillful in contorting words into unique shapes, producing elegant rhyme schemes in the process. She’s adept at wielding metaphor. And she’s equally nimble in and out of cadences, lithe and graceful like a stallion cutting through a field. 

In Damn It All, which comes after three songs where she effusively dotes on and extolls her lover, she’s indignant and frustrated with a lover who has taken her love for granted. “Damn, all of the times when I dey play Mr nice guy/ Damn all of the times when I dey show you love oh,” she sings. Hurt and bitterness palpably suffuse the song. But it’s also where she delivers her most compelling performance on the album. Against the backdrop of a beat that evokes Tiwa Savage and Wizkid’s Bad, she supplies nimble, syncopated, dancehall-esque cadences. It’s a Game, the next track, sees her slump even deeper into desolation, as she exasperatedly asks her lover if their relationship is just a game to him. “How do you sleep at night now you know that everything you do affects me?” she inquires over a gentle, frothy melody. Across the album she vacillates between ecstatic and exasperated lover; her affection for her lover, however, is a constant theme. 

For all the grandeur that the title seems to suggest, the album hardly pushes any boundaries. There are moments of transcendence strewn across the album but certain portions are flat-out boring, seemingly dragging out forever. This is a bit disappointing considering the album runs for under 36 minutes. It doesn’t help that the album doesn’t feature guest artists; after you cross the halfway mark, you start waiting for something to happen, a spark even, something to dispel the monotony. It takes until the last two tracks before that moment arrives. I Am the Blueprint, however, is an impressive debut effort for a 19-year-old brimming with confidence and skillfulness beyond her years, and her future ahead of her.