What It Means to Grow Up with Timaya: From “Dem Mama” to “Kontrol”

by 

Dennis Ade-Peters

It takes a certain level of steely resolve to pursue a path in music. Especially when it’s in Nigerian music, at a time when the barrier to entry was higher than it is in our current post-digital reality. Timaya had his conviction set from the beginning, it was music or nothing. Music wasn’t a gambit or a gamble or a gimmick, it was all the Bayelsa native had, a passion that burned bright immediately we all heard him and that still smolders till today.

“I say this na my life/no be about fame,” Timaya pointedly proclaimed on the self-titled song, the centerpiece of his debut album, True Story. By the time “Timaya” was saturating the airwaves, that declaration already had its evidence in the form of his official debut single, “Dem Mama,” a dirge for one of the most heinous crimes in modern Nigerian history. 

In 2006, Nigerian music was more political than it is now, but not to the point where it was common for a singer to make their first national impression with an explicitly tilted towards socially conscious affairs. If fame was the target for Timaya from the jump, “Dem Mama” would have been tucked in as a project deep cut. Instead, he saw music as the medium to share his life in vivid detail, and that inevitably meant speaking not just his truth, but also sharing a collective story.

So, by the time he told us that music is his life, there was no choice but to believe him and, even beyond that, believe in him. Timaya wasn’t selling us dreams then, and he’s never had to sell listeners on anything even now. His music is a marker for wherever he is at every point in life, that’s why growing up on and with Timaya is an exercise in consistent authenticity.

True Story and his sophomore album, Gift and Grace, were the rambunctious expressions of a young artist finding his feet through honest overconfidence and fierce fealty to God. Long before Asake would make divine providence a core tenet of his music, Timaya was showing that popstars could embrace their faith, while also rubbing up on the secular. By the time “Kokoroko,” his collaboration with the late, great gospel singer Kefee, was arguably the biggest song in Nigeria, Timaya was in the rare space where he could be veritably booked for a Saturday night club appearance and Sunday morning church performance.

If his entry into Nigerian music was frenzied in the mid to late 2000s, the turn of the decade saw Timaya settle into a rhythm as one of the most consistent hitmakers in Nigerian music. And he did that by organically evolving his identity, both in style and substance. In the first half of the 2010s, Timaya rattled off four albums, each one an essential entry into the serialized progression of a consistent superstar.

This was the era of big, booming bangers dominating Nigerian pop. If a pop song didn’t have melodic, effervescent, catchy one-liners and a big personality behind it, rest assured that it would be bounced out of rotation in the clubs and on the radio. You either had it or you didn’t, and Timaya had it in abundance. The best part, in hindsight, is that he never chased trends, listeners knew a Timaya song the second they heard his gruff swagger.

An underdiscussed part of Timaya’s greatly underrated legacy is his integral role in the continued localization of Caribbean pop influences into Nigerian music. Some of that was informed by his frequent transits between Port Harcourt, where he was based as an aspiring artist, and Lagos, the country’s commercial capital and central hub for mainstream music. His first releases were no doubt related to the Ragga-informed Konto music that gushed out of Ajegunle and other Lagos mainland hoods in the early 2000s. Timaya was distinctly south-south in his own iteration, embodying the unmissable self-assuredness that has come to define the music from his region.

The early to mid 2010s were undoubtedly Timaya’s peak commercial years, unloading a barrage of hit songs that are still club staples, from “Sexy Ladies” and “Sanko” to “Ukwu” and “Malonogede.” They established him as Nigeria’s premier connoisseur of Dancehall, Soca and everything in between.

In more recent years, as his music has slowed from its formerly whiplash tempo, both adapting to the times and also a reflection of his cooler persona, there’s still a vivid connection to his earlier, established roots as an artist. That authenticity no doubt contributes to his hitmaking longevity, from the breezy honesty of “I Can’t Kill Myself” and “Cold Outside” to the groovy energy of “Sweet Us.”

Listening to Timaya on his latest single, “Kontrol,” alongside veteran south-south pop hitmaker Duncan Mighty, what you hear is effortless mastery. His ear for robust melodies is retooled into buttery croons of romantic devotion. Gentle, smooth love songs weren’t a fixture in the Timaya repertoire one or two decades ago, but isn’t seamless, organic evolution what we’ve come to expect from the singer? From Egberi Papa 1 of Bayelsa to Papi Chulo, Timaya has never been a parody of anyone or anything, the reflection of an artist that’s always in line with his convictions.