Wizkid’s Piece of My Heart Brings The Effectiveness of Controversy Into Question

On the 18th of August, after months of effecting a relentless campaign against Davido, Wizkid finally released the lead single to his imminent album, a characteristically sensual track entitled Piece of My Heart. In true Wizkid fashion, the reactions were swift. Barely moments after the song’s release, his doting army of fans began championing it as a classic in the making. Conversely, his detractors fired denigrations from every angle. The following morning, the song emerged with the biggest first-day streaming numbers in Spotify Nigeria’s history, tallying about one million first-day streams. Expectedly, his teeming slew of fans, entitled Wizkid FC, emerged reinvigorated—after a long-drawn fallow period from his More Love Less Ego era—as they proclaimed their demagogue once again ascendant. 

In many ways, the historic, mammoth-sized first-day numbers felt like a pointed riposte to the critiques and consternation Wizkid had received for turning Davido into fodder for a brazen, attention-seeking campaign. It worked. Months of impenitent attention-seeking and mudslinging fixed the spotlight on him once again and perhaps affirmed his hegemony. But beneath the surface reveals a different, surprising story. 

After the second day of tracking, the song tallied approximately four hundred thousand streams, representing a 60% decline. On the third and fourth days, it tallied somewhere in the range of three hundred thousand streams. In the past few days, it has settled into the two hundred and fifty thousand range. Plotting this on a graph would depict a steep decline. Admittedly, two hundred and fifty thousand is not abysmal. It’s still enough to keep him atop the Spotify weekly chart in Nigeria. He’s also atop other digital charts in the country. However, Piece of My Heart’s steep decline raises the question of the validity of controversy as a marketing play in this era. 

On the surface, Wizkid’s scattershot denigration of his longtime counterpart Davido may seem desultory, if not entirely asinine, but it has been the central element of his comeback strategy. Contriving a polarizing rhetoric has forever been potent for energizing one’s base or audience. This is as true in the world of music as it is in politics, the military, or corporate spheres. It’s a known fact that war helps foster a stronger sense of national unity. It’s also why persecuted groups—queer people, minority ethnicities, niche communities—tend to move in close clusters. 

Conjuring a clear, embodied entity—a person or a group—as opposed to prosecuting an ideological battle, is a way to turbocharge this stratagem. When a group has a tangible target, it’s easier to rally them together with a we-versus-them narrative. For Donald Trump, this has meant besmirching immigrants and the liberal left. For Hitler, his target was the Jews. For Kanye West, this has meant conducting unrelenting attacks on a chimeral agglomeration composed of Jews, Drake, corporate heads at Adidas, and not least Lucian Grainge. For Kendrick Lamar, who recently prosecuted one of the most scathing character assassinations in hip-hop’s history, portraying Drake as a rapacious outsider to the culture helped him consolidate not just his supporters but the full extent of the Black American community. 

For Wizkid, the antagonist in this new chapter of his story is Davido. His rhetoric pales in comparison to more adept users of this strategy. It’s directionless, lacks tenable motivation, and is without the faintest inkling of a plot, but it has successfully generated hype around his imminent release. This undoubtedly contributed to Piece of My Heart’s hectoring first-day streaming numbers. The steep decline of Piece of My Heart’s numbers, however, reveals the limitations of this strategy. 

Controversy is effective at corralling fleeting attention. Sustained interest in a song or a project, however, is a product of two things. How much the offering in question resonates with its intended audience. And the robustness and the quality of the marketing process. The most successful albums, and movies, have hewed steadfastly along to these simple principles. For Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, it involved the standard fare of media runs, but also a powerful narrative of reclaiming a stolen part of Black American culture. Barbie, the crown jewel of global pop culture in 2023, resonated not just because of splendid marketing strategy but because of its cultural resonance. In a world increasingly blighted by increasing income inequality, its whimsical but hard-hitting riff on contemporary capitalism struck a chord. Also, its multilayered and nuanced portrayal of feminism dovetailed the zeitgeist of the time. It’s this same dappled, less glossy feminist ethos that undergirds Brat, the Charlie XCX album which has dominated global pop culture for the greater part of this year. 

In contrast, Wizkid has spurned the tried-and-tested strategy of creating art that resonates, in favor of the evanescent attention that comes with a viral moment. The numbers, of his latest single, are proof of the unsustainability of this approach. What’s more appalling is that fact that Wizkid who has consistently led the line since his debut in 2012 felt so threatened, so at risk of slipping into the recesses, the chasm where obsolete pop stars are ushered to, so much that he felt justified in sullying his carefully built reputation.

In a sense his desperation is as poetic and ghoulish as a Hans Memling painting. It’s a portrait of a fading artist self-immolating to excite his insouciant audience. It also evokes Kafka’s morbid novel A Hunger Artist. In the novel, the protagonist discovers he can earn a living at a circus by going on hunger strikes. Initially, his audience is regaled by his interesting performance art, but with time they get bored. He embarks on longer hunger strikes to excite them, without success. Eventually, he dies of starvation. Barely a few weeks out from the release of his sixth album Morayo, Wizkid’s story hangs in the balance, poised to swivel in any direction. In many ways this feels like an existential moment for him. Fortunately, it’s familiar terrain for him. And only his actions and inactions in the coming weeks have the power to decide how this story unfolds.