With “Auracle” Benin City’s Street Pop King Once Again Attempts To Consolidate His Bona Fides

“Why is he obsessed with churning out albums?” This is one question out of many that you might find yourself pondering over if you manage to trudge through Shallipopi’s latest album—Auracle—which, with 22 tracks that add up to a runtime exceeding one hour, is his most maximalist album yet. Dispensing with his usual tendency for concise and propulsive projects featuring songs that exist in a similar sonic style, Auracle rapidly shuffles between styles and genres. The project, however, explores the same predictable themes: sex, partying, and money. The result is an album that manages to feel painfully monotonous in spite of its pointed attempts at affecting iconoclasm. Auracle, however, is less of a grueling listen than last year’s Shakespopi, his tragic attempt at moving past the heady blend of Street Pop and Amapiano that vaulted him to stardom. What’s new is that in Auracle, Shallipopi puts up a more convincing effort at displaying versatility, and occasionally, in this project, we glimpse moments of brilliance. 

As for the question of why the poster boy of Benin Street Pop maintains a near-obsessive proclivity for albums, there are several possible answers. One is that, like many others, releasing projects is his preferred method for insuring himself against irrelevance. It could also be just a quirk. In about two years, he has released three albums, continuing in a tradition set by others like Asake. What’s more likely is that Shallipopi is indignant about the unremitting flurry of criticism about the quality of his artistry and views every album as an attempt at silencing his critics. His X page is awash with tweets in which he parries his critics. “Na every year they dey talk say I fall off, they say I nor get fanbase, they say Evian don finish, they say to bless people dey give giveaway fans, Agenda nor let B*tvh boys see road, Only me Pluto na full community,” he writes in one. “lol cry more for me,” he writes in another, directly responding to a critic. 

More telling is the fact that on every project finds Shallipopi tinkering with a new approach, however hapless the end product might wind up. Mixed with the effervescent excitement that trailed Planet Pluto, his wildly successful debut EP, were criticisms of the monotony of the beats on the project. In response to critics, he affected gleeful indifference, occasionally breaking character to hurl back ripostes. If you, however, listen to his debut album, President La Pluto, released months after Planet Pluto, you’ll find a concerted effort at moving away from the plasticky beats of his debut album. With gentle drums that evoke the measured cadence of Highlife and melodies that feel beamed in from one of the Caribbean islands, So What, is easily his most cosmopolitan song. Oscroh and Evil Receive spurn his characteristic whimsy in favor of a more austere sound. And the Focalistic-assisted Over The Seas finds him exploring Traditional  Amapiano. And yet, even that project would surface new criticism. His style of delivery which is neither singing nor rapping but something close to talking glibly over a beat came under intense criticism. As did his penchant for nursery rhymes—in Oscroh he interpolates a popular Nigerian children’s rhyme. 

True to form, in last year’s Shakespopi, there are no children’s rhymes. He also makes a deliberate attempt at making serious music. His pallid attempts at interrogating more serious topics, coupled with his ghastly singing, however, undermine his efforts at establishing himself as a serious artist. In Auracle he’s still concerned with proving his bona fides but he takes a more careful approach. As I predicted in an earlier article for Culture Custodian, the packed tracklist of Auracle signals his intention to maximize his chances of scoring hits. The album is essentially three EPs forcefully bundled into a single offering. Songs like Ant, Turner, Eyo, and Gbegun—clustered at the top of the project—attempt to channel Laho’s seductive cool. They all fail terribly. And the main reason they all sound so lethargic is that while he mostly delivers talks over the beat in Laho, these other songs find him singing, which he’s terrible at.

HIM featuring Gunna, the Swae Lee-assisted Stay and Chokehold, find him living out his fantasy of being a rapper—for the uninitiated Shallipopi is an inveterate Trap fan and is regularly seen with American Trap heavyweights such as Travis Scott and Gunna. His trap experiment is however another failure. His verses prioritize puerile and often strident rhymes over a coherent narrative or impactful bars. 

The final third of the project, deliciously festooned with hits tailored for a wild night of partying, is where the project attains its peak form. Here there’s no pretense of affecting depth or eclecticism, Shallipopi simply wants to make you dance and he mostly does a fine job at it. In Like That, featuring Wizkid, which blends whimsy and insouciance in equal measure, he’s so efficient and effective that he leaves Wizkid, who has had an impressive feature run this year, looking a little rusty. In Rockstar, where he sings “Ask of me, in the streets I’m a rockstar/ All this money has got me feeling like a popstar,” you get the sense that he’s having a good time. Ruger, who is featured on the track, is similarly ebullient, delivering lines that alternate between pomp and prurience. In the end, Auracle manages to spawn a handful of potential hits, which will no doubt sustain his momentum—at least till his next project. But at its core, it’s just another Shallipopi album whose ambitions are undercut by slapdash execution.