Why is Fireboy Stuck and How Can He Regain Momentum?

Any avid football fan would easily glimpse, in Fireboy’s current situation, an ominous but eerily familiar tale: a player of tremendous skill loses form, perhaps on account of an injury or the psychological toll of a crushing defeat, or possibly personal problems. Time passes but the player’s usual fine form continues to be supplanted by lethargy and, oftentimes, a confounding cluelessness. “It’s just a passing dry spell,” fans tend to offer in moments like these. And many times it turns out to be nothing more than one of the fleeting ebbs that dapples every player’s career. But occasionally it turns out to presage the player’s inexorable unraveling. After more time than necessary passes, fans and the coach begrudgingly face the reality that the player’s best days are behind him and ship him off to some backwater league. 

Losing one’s mojo is a phrase colloquially invoked to describe this situation. As in, the player whose performances are faltering is said to have lost their mojo. Indeed, Fireboy, in a 2022 interview with Zeze Millz, deploys that very phrase, noting that at a point in the previous year, he feared he was losing his mojo. This gets interesting because buried within the sanguine chatter that populates the conversation are moments of gentle introspection that open up a vicarious window into his anxious mental state. The only thing more difficult than clawing your way to the top is maintaining or advancing your position. In 2021, the interview reveals, Fireboy came to this realization and was seized by a foreboding sense of panic. How would he continue to churn out fresh and exciting music? What happens if or when his distinctively poetic songwriting flair starts to lose its sharpness? His anxieties ramped up to a fever pitch, and before long, he experienced what is commonly referred to as writer’s block. 

With encouragement from Olamide, his label boss and an avuncular figure in his life, he took time off from making music and began an extended vacation that found him slinking through major global cities. On a stop at San Francisco, he made a jaunty pop record titled Peru. The song would go on to become a global smash and receive a tremendous boost in the form of an Ed Sheeran remix. Recalling the song’s provenance on The Zeze Millz show, he notes that the song came together serendipitously, and nothing was planned. It’s telling that the lyrics depart from his characteristic hermetic writing style, instead finding him more playful, more amorphous, acting in service of the song’s chipper atmosphere as opposed to any coherent theme. 

Last week, Fireboy released Dopamine, a groovy Afropop number steeped in charged sensual allusions. The lyrics are simple, maybe too simple. “Dopamine, dopamine/ Give it to me, give it to me/ All over me, pour all over me,” he sings. The production is similarly stripped down, the type of music that soundtracks a movie scene set at a holiday location in Marrakech. Soft traditional drums and gentle guitar strumming blend to produce a gentle, rocking groove. The song is far from bad it’s a good song. But it lacks the coruscating vibrancy of his earlier works, and this reflects on the song’s commercial performance. While the songs like Asake’s BADMAN GANGSTER, DJ Tunez, Wizkid, and Fola’s One Condition, and Ayra Starr’s Hot Body—all of which were released last Friday, a day after Dopamine was released—have driven conversation and garnered impressive streaming numbers, Fireboy’s Dopamine has made such a tenuous cultural impact. It hovers around the no. 50 position on both Apple Music and Spotify Nigeria. Despite heavy playlisting, the song is struggling to connect to his audience.

Dopamine’s tepid performance is not an isolated case. Since his career-high with Peru and his Playboy album, he has progressively ceded his spot in the Afrobeats tapestry. And as it stands, his situation looks precarious. The question then becomes what things, if any, he is getting wrong and how he can regain his footing?

The first clues to understanding how he got here lie in that Zeze Millz interview, in which he broaches the subject of his creative exhaustion. The next place to look, however, is his first single after his Playboy album, Someone, and the events that led up to its release. Fireboy has always fancied himself as an elite songwriter with a far-reaching sonic palette. He never intended for Afrobeats to be his final destination. Instead, he saw it as a springboard to a career as a global artist.

Listen to his Apollo album, released in 2020, and the lines will start to connect for you. The album is Afrobeats, but only nominally. In reality, it is composed of a gorgeous array of fusion songs, with Afrobeats mostly acting as a base. 24, the album’s interlude, captures the spirit of the album. Not only does the song defy easy categorization genre-wise, but it also opens with an elegiac melody played on a bagpipe. Which Afrobeats artist had summoned a bagpipe melody on an album song before him? This goes to show how expansive he wants his sound to be. And with Peru’s success, the stars had aligned for him to unabashedly embrace his global aspirations. 

Not long after Playboy was released, Fireboy was spotted making music with foreign, mostly white, producers. And so, it came as no surprise, at least to me, that his first single after Playboy—Someone—leans strongly into the Dance music genre. The song was produced by P.Prime and four other foreign producers, including Preme, a frequent Drake collaborator. The video features an Italian model—his muse—who peppers the dialogue with fiery Italian phrases. It also finds him in a slew of European cities, all of which are boldly named, as if to erase any doubt in the viewer as to his location.  The song, for all its iconoclasm, neither connected with his Nigerian audience nor garnered sufficient momentum on the international front. A significant portion of his home-based audience felt somewhat slighted and accused him of trying to jettison them for a global audience. The conversation is nuanced, but the backlash left Fireboy ruffled, and he immediately followed with Yawa, a song so thoroughly steeped in his Afrobeats roots that it almost seemed parodic. 

Since then, he has alternated between different styles and approaches without much success. Crucially, even though he has tried his hand at different styles, he hasn’t exactly been experimenting. If anything, he’s been playing it too safe. His new material has been so derivative of his old work that it no longer inspires excitement in his audience, or anyone at all. His last album exemplifies this in earnest. In a year when Afrobeats was embroiled in an intense search for new sounds to replace the then-waning Amapiano formula, Adedamola stood out for being dispiritingly tame. 

To draw momentous conclusions from a handful of events might seem like a bit of a reach. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to observe the pattern, not to see that since Fireboy’s unsuccessful attempt at iconoclasm with Someone, he has progressively turned inwards, electing to recycle hackneyed ideas as opposed to leaping into the great unknown. 

When music enthusiasts discuss Fireboy’s increasing loss of form, the scapegoat is typically his management—a term used colloquially to describe his label and his team.  But this criticism ignores the fact that an artist’s team is largely beholden to their ideas and vision. This is especially true for an artist of Fireboy’s stature. Also, it’s a bit hilarious that people blame his label for his slump, given that his career highs were recorded under the aegis of the label and that Asake, who has become one of Afrobeats’ most formidable artists, was discovered and fostered by the label. As far as support goes, his team looks to be doing, at the very least, a good enough job. He gets maximal visibility on playlists, he gets to release music frequently—admittedly, this is the barest minimum—there’s also the fact that he recently sold out the Royal Albert Hall. 

A marketing expert could probably offer PowerPoint slides that outline a strategy to get people talking about him. And while that would be most welcome, at the core of his dilemma is the fact that he has gotten so boring. It’s been ages since any Fireboy song felt remotely fresh. And it’s not for lack of talent. He’s still capable of fitting the contours of a beat with perfectly matching lyrics replete with the lyrical heft we know him for. We see this in his verse on Gabzy’s So Much Sense. He’s still technically proficient. Where he falters is in his ideas and execution, which have in the past few years been bereft of even the slightest bit of innovation. 

When pop artists start to lose momentum, conventional thinking holds that they should make more populist music, music that appeals to everyone. That makes sense, right? Giving everyone what they want. Except it doesn’t. Making music for everyone implies flattening one’s sound, watering it down. What then happens is that it becomes too tame for core fans and too conformist to stand out in today’s hyper-saturated pop scene. And so, ironically, making music for everyone often results in music that exists for no one. The career trajectory of acts like Lil Kesh, Reekado Banks, P Square (in their twilight years), and Roddy Ricch confirms this. What Fireboy needs to do is fix his gaze on his core audience—thankfully, he still has a teeming crowd awaiting his return to form—and focus on making music that excites them. 

Which is what acts like Asake and Rema have done through their evolution in the past year. They understand their core fan bases so intricately and are unperturbed by side chatter as long as their core bases are receptive to their new offerings. The irony is that the wider audience, despite their haste to critique unfamiliar music, inevitably, albeit gradually, comes around. Fireboy needs to embrace this attitude: an unflinching commitment to making music that his core fanbase finds interesting.