With “Protect Sarz At All Costs” Sarz Argues For His Hegemony

To grasp the significance and stakes of Sarz’ recently released debut album Protect Sarz At All Costs, one has to first situate it within its historical context. The 36-year-old producer, mixing engineer, occasional DJ, and all-round music virtuoso arrived in the Nigerian music scene circa 2007—a period when the stylistic form, style, and structures of the genre now known as Afrobeats were still largely amorphous. To put it simply: he arrived at a time when Afrobeats was still defining its identity, everything was up for grabs and he seized upon his chance with the ferocity of a predator on the prowl, claiming a seat at the table. 

In an era where eccentricity and inventiveness seemed to be the domain of a small group of musicians, he quickly established himself as not just edgy and quick-witted but also preternaturally versatile. It’s incredible that the same person who produced 2010 Street Pop hall-of-famers like Reminisce’s Kako Bi Chicken and Jah Bless’ effervescent hit Jor Oh—songs so brilliantly off-kilter that they held the nation spellbound for months—also produced mainstream bangers like Wizkid’s Jaiye Jaiye and Wande Coal’s Ashimapeyin. 

Wizkid’s Beat of Life (Samba), which bundles together the best qualities of Electronic Music and Afrobeats and smelts them into a firecracker of a song, is perhaps the perfect exemplar of Sarz’ aptitude for subversion. A chintzy vlog-style video on YouTube—posted 12 years ago—documents the making of the song. The pair had been vibing to a beat that sounds like a callback to Wizkid’s Superstar days when Sarz stops the beat and, staring at the sprawling mixing board before him, says: “There’s this beat I want to play now, I’ve played it for a lot of people. Everybody is just saying ‘alright,’ but they don’t know what to do with it.” “Let me listen to it,” Wizkid says and the heavy foreboding melody that opens the song fills the room. Upon release, the song immediately became a hit. 12 years later, its charms are still as potent as ever. It’s a regular on Wizkid’s set lists and still sends the audience into a frenzy anytime it comes up. 

This effervescence still pulses through his music. Listen to Getting Paid featuring frequent collaborators Wizkid and Asake, and Jamaican rapper Skillibeng. Given the staggering level of talent wielded by this trio, the song’s brilliance seems a given. And yet, listening through, one is spellbound by how under Sarz’s production, their disparate styles coalesce into a seamless flow—it almost feels like they could be a band. The song’s opening sequence is a direct callback to the 2000s/early 2010s, when songs, especially those optimized for maximum impact on the dance floor, would open with grandiose flourishes. 

Think of the sublime melody that precedes the beat drop which opens Gongo Aso; or how D’banj’s monologue at the start of Fall in Love—“Don’t get it twisted, love is a beautiful thing, it’s Don Jazzy again”—used to send dance floors into an uproar. Wizkid’s Jaiye Jaiye, produced by Sarz, also belongs to this family. Once the beat drops and Wizkid begins his adlibs, you know you’re in for a good time. 

A similar effect is at play in Getting Paid: Asake opens it with a strikingly potent turn of words: “E lo je ki ori yin pe,” he sings. After which Wizkid follows with what is arguably his most compelling feature verse in the last five years. Turning away from his characteristic languid delivery, he delivers a verse streaked with a mesmerizing mix of machismo and debonair. “You messing with a lion/ Big shot bigger than a titan,” he scowls over the glowering production. Skillibeng is also mesmerizing; it’s hard to put in words how seamless his chemistry with Sarz is but an apt metaphor would be the relationship between a talented deep-lying playmaker and a clinical striker. Sarz opens up spaces of pause within the beat—creating tension—which Skillibeng cleverly outfits with syncopated flows. 

These moments of sublime chemistry between Sarz and the featured artists get a great deal of play in Protect Sarz At All Costs. In BMF, we get a version of Fireboy that increasingly seems a nostalgic relic of a long-past era. The song is by turns gentle and sensual, a callback to the flavor of R&B that dominated the ’80s. Here, Fireboy is lovelorn and exasperated; his lover appears to be slipping grasp, but he still leaves the door of romance ajar. Across the song, we hear flickers of the brilliance that spangle Fireboy’s early albums—LTG and Apollo, which makes one wonder if a collaborative EP with Sarz might be just what he needs to rekindle his spark. 

Joeboy is equally brilliant on Body, as is Qing Madi on In A Mustang, and the duo of Teni and Libianca on African Barbie. Lojay is perhaps the best collaborator on the project; it’s telling that he’s featured twice: in Billions and Loved Me Then, arguably the best track. The beat is evocative and the lyrics confessional, in a way that can catch one off guard, given that Afrobeats songs rarely ever lean so strongly into vulnerability. 

Where Protect Sarz At All Costs falters is that, for all the individually brilliant songs it contains, it possesses neither a thematic nor a sonic anchor. As such, it feels more like a mixtape than the album it’s promoted as. It’s almost as if on a whim Sarz decided to put together a bunch of unreleased music with his collaborators and market it as an album. The album’s title, Protect Sarz At All Costs, comes as a cheeky brag. “I’m the most influential producer of my generation, so treat me as the prized asset that I am,” it seems to say. But the grandiosity of its title paradoxically seems incongruous with the cursory nature of the album. Some might argue that creating a cohesive album with such a large cast of collaborators is a difficult task. This analysis is correct, but it’s certainly a doable task—cases in point, Spinall’s Eko Groove and Juls’ Peace and Love from last year. And if it’s within anyone’s powers to corral the best and brightest acts in Afrobeats and fashion a sonically and thematically coherent album, it’s definitely Sarz’s.