Rage as a Brand: What Odumodu and Blaqbonez’s Beef Tells Us About Nigerian Pop Masculinity

When Blaqbonez released ACL, most people expected another round of clever wordplay and ego flexing. Instead, they got something closer to an exposé. At the end of the song’s visualizer, a series of messages appeared on screen – a stream of unhinged texts from OdumoduBlvck, sent over months, filled with violent threats and invasive commentary. It was the kind of thing that, in another context, might have prompted genuine concern. But in Nigeria’s rap ecosystem, it became entertainment – proof that the beef had become “real.”

Odumodu and Blaqbonez had been circling each other since February, when Odumodu appeared on The Afrobeats Podcast and claimed no other rapper had made an album on the level of his 2023 project EZIOKWU. “Bring their albums together,” he said. “Pick the best hits from each one – it’s still not beating EZIOKWU.” From there, the back-and-forth took on a life of its own, spilling across social media, freestyles, and interviews. Odumodu’s Industry Machine dropped first, filled with veiled disses – one of them directed at A-Q, a well-known associate and mentor of Blaqbonez. But it was 2:02 in London, his menacing freestyle, that set the tone for the showdown. “If you like gym,” he warned, “ODUMO go pull up with him pin.” The line went viral.

Ten days after Industry Machine dropped, Blaqbonez responded with his album, No Excuses and its centrepiece, ACL. The diss track had a cinematic structure, but its closing montage – those chilling messages – shifted the story from lyrical rivalry to something uglier. Odumodu’s words weren’t lyrical metaphors; they were direct threats. The question the venom laced ramblings raised wasn’t why rappers fight, it was why Nigerian pop culture now treats violent posturing as proof of authenticity.

What began as lyrical one-upmanship evolved into a performance of power. When Blaqbonez tried to redirect the feud back into the studio, Odumodu brushed him off: “You want to make it about studio. Na lie. We go meet again for street. This is not a rap beef.” It was a revealing moment – not about music, but about what masculinity looks like when the only language it trusts is confrontation. While some fans expressed concern, far more were entertained. Outrage became part of the show.

That show has a long lineage. Rap  has always fed on competition – a tradition of ego and lyrical dexterity that stretches back to the golden age of hip-hop, when rivalries like Jay-Z and Nas’s set the standard for what a rap beef should be: sharp, strategic, and culturally seismic. Beginning in the mid-’90s as a battle for New York’s hip-hop crown, their feud played out through diss tracks like Jay-Z’s Takeover and Nas’s blistering Ether, a record so definitive it turned its title into slang for artistic obliteration. More than two decades later, that same spirit resurfaced in the clash between Drake and Kendrick Lamar – two titans turning precision lyricism and coded subtext into global spectacle. The point wasn’t the realisation of any violence implied in the bars, but the wit and stamina behind them. Even when M.I and Vector took their decade-long feud to record, the aggression stayed within the music. “There seems to be a sweetness that comes with beef records,” Vector once said. “They were streamed a lot. We trended.” In that ecosystem, beef was a marketing tactic – symbolic, not literal.

Odumodu’s approach marks a departure. Nigerian rap has historically maintained an unspoken boundary between persona and reality. Its practitioners – often educated, middle-class men who found hip-hop as a creative outlet rather than a survival tool – understood that the genre’s American roots in street violence didn’t fully translate here. Nigerian Street Pop has always carried that burden more directly, channeling the urgency of working-class survival. Rap, on the other hand, leaned cerebral, clever, competitive. It was never meant to be literally cutthroat.

Masculinity sits at the heart of that shift. Within Nigerian society, manhood is often measured in emotional detachment and dominance – an insistence on image control that leaves little room for softness or self-reflection. For male artists, this becomes both an expectation and a trap. The performance of toughness turns into currency: a guarantee of credibility in a scene where vulnerability can be mistaken for weakness. Street Pop made that posture mainstream – but rappers like Odumodu now market it as identity. His persona is built on the aesthetics of aggression: song titles like Shoot and Go Home, the whiff of danger in his lyrics, the casual threats that orbit his image. It’s branding masqueraded as authenticity, which – given his sing-song delivery, highlife tendencies and lilting, whistled high notes – he may feel is necessary to validate his status as a rapper. 

Globally, hip-hop has long rewarded this performance of masculinity – from 50 Cent’s survival narrative toTupac’s martyrdom. But Nigeria’s adaptation of it is uniquely self-conscious. Here, artists perform the violence without the very specific systemic violence that birthed it. What is left is mere imitation: the style of rage, detached from the context that would otherwise make it make sense.

The audience, too, plays its part. Social media has turned conflict into an economy. Every diss, every tweet, every “clapback” becomes data – boosting streams, headlines, and relevance. In the wake of the Odumodu-Blaqbonez feud, Industry Machine climbed back to #3 on Apple Music Nigeria; the visualizer for ACL neared a million YouTube views in under two weeks. Outrage pays. Even disgust pays. The more extreme the exchange, the more engagement it generates. As Ladipoe noted years ago, “Rap in Nigeria runs on pure toxic masculinity – and the fans love it.” Six years later, little has changed.

But at some point, spectacle crosses into complicity. When Odumodu’s messages invoked sexual violence, the reaction was muted. Some fans laughed, others justified it as “part of rap culture.” Yet words like those do not exist in a vacuum. They echo through a country still reckoning with epidemic levels of sexual violence and a pop culture that too often romanticizes male rage. Burna Boy, another artist whose art and image flirt with aggression, once rapped, “If they wan f*** you for nyash make you no lie down” – a lyric that trivializes assault even as it feeds into his reputation for danger.

It raises an uncomfortable question: when art borrows the language of harm, who pays the price? Rap thrives on bravado, but the line between performance and pathology is thinner than it may appear. What begins as marketing – a bit of edge, a flex, a viral moment – can end up reinforcing the very power structures it should seek to critique. The craft of rap has never needed violence to prove itself. What it has always required is imagination and skill. If outrage is the only language through which a rapper can sell, then what they are really selling isn’t music at all. It’s the performance of masculinity – and the damage that comes with it.