Review: Töme is Simultaneously Loving and Vain in ‘Löv’

A critic is tasked with deducing which parts of an artist’s work are intentional, and which parts are merely accidental, among other things. Töme has you sleuthing the ceiling for answers, unprepared schoolboy in exam hall style, as you listen to Love Over Vanity, her new studio album. The album’s title itself has you wondering if it’s been selected because its abbreviated form, LOV, looks and sounds like love. You also can’t help but wonder if it’s deliberate that Töme talks about love from track one to seven, only to contradict herself from track eight to ten, where she typifies all that is vainglorious. Although the love-vanity ratio is 7:3, there is a case to be made that the album ought to have been titled “Love and Vanity.” Perhaps Töme ditched this title because it did not rhyme with or orthographically resemble love. Or perhaps it’s because the ratio tilts heavily towards love. What I am sure of, though the album’s title suggests otherwise, is that Töme is convinced that vanity, or self-interest, best counterbalances love.

If truly Töme thinks that self-interest must coexist with love, then it recalls the Hedgehog Dilemma, conceived by Schopenhauer in his book Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). These hedgehogs, jittery and forlorn in the cold, seek to huddle together for warmth. But they mustn’t come too close to each other, lest they harm themselves, their skins a perilous road of spikes. The lesson is clear: self-preservation, sometimes, must prevail over longings for intimacy. This prescribed physical distance can also be the difference between a lover staying interested in or falling out of love with one. If the heart grows in fonder in absence, then presence, when as cheap as beer, blunts one’s mystique in the eyes of one’s lover.

While Schopenhauer cloaks this insight in aureate philosophical verbiage, it is a wisdom that ordinary folks carry about in their heart pouches as they decide on whom to date and on how geographically remote they should be from their lovers. That is why that UNILAG girl wouldn’t date a guy from her department. And why that bachelor wants nothing to do with the girl living in the next street. Schopenhauer calls it the Hedgehog Dilemma; Nigerians call it “Avoiding See Finish.” Töme is all over her male lover for the most part of this album, breaking many laws in certain feminist superwoman manifestos, singing sweet nothings that you have probably heard in a million love songs. All these end in the song Dangerous, where, as certain Nigerians would say, she switches off her mumu button. First, she acknowledges the insecurities that shadow amorous love. Then in the last three songs, she keeps mum about her lover, turning the gaze instead towards herself. For the first time, we discover what she really wants, when her lover isn’t within kissing reach: she wants the good life in Good Life, and wealth and respect in both Wait and Mad?

Of all the virtuous things to be said about this album, lyricism isn’t among them. In Wait, Töme rehashes the most clichéd trope in Nigerian songwriting: citing Dangote and Otedola as metaphors of wealth, joining the multitude who have done so. Töme’s superpower is in how she sings, not the words she uses in singing. Though unable to concoct the finest arrangements of words, her singing voice works as an effective telegram for her feelings. In no place is this more prominent than Please. As she pleads to her lover in the song, even you with nothing to gain or lose will be moved to interceding on her behalf.

LOV, and Töme’s music, isn’t fated for popularity. The album’s several melodies will fail to find a home in the ears of listeners used to more rapid-tempo mainstream joints. It’s known that when people can find no appreciation for a piece of music, they either call it trash or elitist. No one will call LOV trash. But to call it an elitist-sounding album with so-so instrumentation? Maybe. In which case – the elitist bit – Töme prepares a rejoinder in Mad? She shows off her knowledge of pop music-inspired street lingo, when, baffled by the effrontery of an unnamed person, she asks, “Are you mad or something?” That catchphrase originates from a Portable video that upended social media last year’s December, where the singer Portable sends some colorful words the way of the dancer Poco Lee. Those who followed the events know money was behind the Portable and Poco Lee skirmish. So when Töme sings in Mad? that “I love money,” it not only brings her vanity to its acme but gives critics a head-scratcher: is it a coincidence that she confesses her love for mammon in a song that traces its lineage to Portable, a man whose love of money is as imposing as his wish to not be robbed of his fortune? Knowing how subtly deliberate the singer has been in contradicting herself, this critic doesn’t think it to be an accident.