Wizkid’s Promise is Pleasure

A significant portion of Wizkid’s imminent HBO documentary Wizkid: Long Live Lagos is devoted to excavating the suffocating grief that arrived in the wake of his mother’s passing. As the documentary reveals, on the day of his historic show at the 60,000-capacity Tottenham Stadium, his mother, Morayo Balogun, was undergoing an emergency surgery. In clips from the concert, many of which can be found on scrappy stan accounts on YouTube, we see Wizkid emanating his characteristic debonair aura. In the opening minutes of the concert, he shuffles down the capacious stage festooned with flaming pyrotechnics, dressed in a flamboyant red two-piece suit. He pauses, flashes a smile, and intones “London make some noise,” The crowd erupts in a frenzied roar and the party officially begins. As he thrills fans with sumptuous renditions of classics from his oeuvre in the intervening hour or so, there’s no sign of the emotional morass he’s steeped in. All we see is a rakish star treating his fans to his mostly titillating arsenal of songs. 

The documentary, however, reveals that beneath his calm demeanor was a bubbling cauldron of anxiety—as he performed to his roving army of fans, his mother, who he so dearly loved, was floating in the interstice between life and death. On the 18th of August 2023, mere weeks after his performance at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, his mother passed on. What followed was an excruciating unraveling of the man who arguably held the title of Nigeria’s most insouciant celebrity. He canceled his tour, withdrew entirely from public engagements, and disappeared from social media. While Wizkid had for a long time cultivated an air of mystery by remaining scarce on social media and in person, this time his absence was freighted with a certain finality, sodden with overtures of grief. Figures close to the artist repeatedly called for fans and well-wishers to put him in their prayers. Online trolls, in that period, even initiated a temporary ceasefire from skewering the artist and would routinely gripe about how the singer’s absence had called their raison d’être into question. After all, what’s a fanbase without its nemesis?

By the time December rolled around that year Wizkid would tease, and in quick succession release, a four-track EP he called S2, a sequel to his 2019 SoundMan Vol. 1 EP. Given the apparent toll his mother’s passing took on him, many—myself included—at the time he announced the EP, expected that project, his first musical offering since her passing, would find him plumbing the depths of his grief, excavating his pain much like an archeologist seized by the weight of his inquiry. The project however finds him characteristically insouciant, prying at prurient themes and reveling in self-adulation against the backdrop of a cache of beautifully slippery beats. The closest he comes to exploring his grief is on IDK, whose beat unfurls like a grand orchestral performance: across the sprawl of the song are fitful choral inflections and emotion-sodden melodies. Throughout the song, he takes a stab at opening a vicarious window to his grief, deploying punchy aphorisms to that end. “E bad or e good we dey pray more/ Tough times don’t last but tough people do, we go stand tall.” But he dances around his pain, skirts around its edges, never really venturing into its loins: he hints at a nebulous pain but not once does he address the source of his pain or its material impacts on him. 

Sandwiched within the pleasure-addled atmosphere of the project, however, is his philosophy around pain. In Diamonds, an almost conceited ode to his opulence, he sings “So many things I take for the pain/ My man I’ve seen better days/ I fit tell you why I live so dangerously/ Men dey go through things for real.” Here we get a glimpse into the dialectics of his relationship with pain, unsavory situations in general. Instead of sitting with his grief and wending through the infamous seven stages, his preferred course of action is simpler, more crude: pain, by his reading, is something to be neutered, if numbed, with pleasure, especially the reckless kind, as opposed to being excavated and dealt with. In Energy, the penultimate track on the project, this motif takes a sharper form. “Sometimes I dey feel down, sometime I dey amazing/ And I steady dey my lane, I spark my J up daily/ Ikebe bad, I no fit leave am wan dey rock am dey go/ Yeah, mo gbo’mo robo meji and two lepa dey go.” Here, he, in vivid detail, offers pleasure as the ultimate foil to his pain. He’s adrift, drowning in a morass of pain, but instead of turning to a shrink or speaking to friends as popular opinion seems to dictate, he turns to intoxicants and women for repose. 

When, early in 2024, Wizkid announced that his sixth studio album would be named after his late mother, Morayo, many—again, myself included—resurrected their hopes that, even if only in a handful of songs, he would offer a panoramic view of his grief. But again, he would subvert expectations. The album, whose cover features a cropped, zoomed-in photo of his mother, hardly touches on his grief, instead finding the singer surfing a soundscape that is in-turns party-thumping and sensual, while exploring themes of prurience and decadence. In the sparse moments where he appears to lightly touch on his grief, he does it with an insouciance and briskness that seems to neuter any possible emotional effect on the listener. 

In Pray, the album’s closer,  he fondly reminisces of a moment with his mother, “Mommy call me Ayo Balogun, they can never find another you.” In the chorus he invokes the Yoruba proverb “Aigbo’fa la n w’oke,” which loosely suggests a lack of knowledge, confusion. He then follows with “I know my mama pray for me.” Taken together, these lyrics conjure a picture of his mother nestled in the heavens, still looking out for her son who’s befuddled by her sudden demise but still confident in the ability of her maternal powers to streak through from wherever she is. The opening track however finds Wizkid in a different register. Buoyed by stately drums and sinuous melodies, he paints a somewhat nebulous portrait of his grief. “Say the blood for my eye, and the pain for my mind, mo le salaye/ Yeah, I dey choko, I dey nice, omo, me, l just dey maintain/ Life of a troubled mind.” 

Very interestingly, just after supplying this pain-sodden tableau, he follows with a lurid picture of decadence. “Every day, every night, yeah, we ever blazing/ Make you call two, Omotena, ka ma se ke/ Me no need love, no need laws, yeah, the paper chasing/ And if you no dey talk money, ain’t no communicating, yeah/ Real love, yeah, that’s what we used to/ Diamonds on my wrist and my leg too.”  Here we once again see him evoke the motif of numbing pain with pleasure. He’s wreathed in a haze of intoxicants and flanked by women as he regales himself with thoughts of his riches. As if to leave no room for doubt as to his philosophy around pain and pleasure, he later sings “One shot for mama, I miss you.”  

Pleasure, the untrammeled kind, has always featured generously in Wizkid’s oeuvre. With Superstar, his historic debut, by way of songs like Pakurumo, Don’t Dull, Gidi Girl, and not least Holla at Your Boy, he established himself as a harbinger of good vibes. However, pleasure in his music was incidental, beholden to other themes like his aspirations and his desire to transcend his modest beginnings. Even in the moments where he directly takes a stab at evoking pleasure, like in Gidi Girl, he struggles to evoke the visceral quality of his more recent work. Which is to say, he seems to me to have approached the topic from a vicarious perspective as opposed to lived experience. As he progressed in his career, pleasure progressively occupied a much more central position in his work, and by the time he released Sounds From The Other Sounds, he was hardly exploring other themes. 

Made in Lagos, his magnum opus, finds him knee-deep in this concept of pleasure and freedom from the tediums of everyday life. In No Stress, with a focus that borders on monomaniacal, he conjures a fantasia in which he’s shielded from life’s more gritty aspects by beautiful women. In the deceptively titled True Love, he, alongside a coterie of co-stars, pushes the limits of aural pleasure with lyrics, vocal inflections, and a soundscape that together evoke a night of passionately sultry sex. It’s almost uncanny how these days, featured artists on his projects, seem to intuitively understand that their role is to accent his intractable quest for pleasure. In Mood, from Wizkid’s Made in Lagos, BNXN sings “Hmm, make we go dey sempe pour some liquor, dey do me jeje/ Get some things wey dey bother my head, I swear/ Na you dey coolu my stress, oh yeah.” Similarly, in 2 Sugar from Wizkid’s More Love Less Ego, Ayra Starr casually sings “If you get problem, ma gbe sunmomi.” 

What’s most fascinating about Wizkid’s current relationship with pleasure—as we can observe in his most recent works, S2 and Morayo—is that he deploys it as both a means to an end and an end in itself, which is to say that in certain moments pleasure functions as an antidote to his pain, in others, however, he indulges in pleasure simply for his gratification. It’s rare in the Afrobeats’ varied milieu to find another artist so wholly devoured to the exploration of the myriad expressions of pleasure. Lojay and Victony, both of whom are great auteurs of pleasure, come close but their purviews extend vastly beyond the exploration of pleasure. Wizkid in contrast, has, for what seems like forever, devoted a singular focus on the subject, without fear of being tagged monotonous or creatively hemmed in. 

While it would certainly be great to see the artist take a stab at other subjects. Perhaps the erasure or effacement of African culture that accompanied colonialism—a topic he passionately explores in his coming documentary Wizkid: Long Live Lagos—or how, over the years he has had to deal with racist stereotypes and regressive beliefs about Africa— another topic he carefully unpacks in the documentary, it’s astonishing that he’s managed to build a career as one of the greatest Nigerian artists of all time by assiduously plumbing this singular topic. How does he manage to keep listeners spellbound? You might ask, especially considering that pleasure feels somewhat at odds with the zeitgeist in which major wars and conflicts loom large, and celebrities are increasingly viewed as insensitive. The answer seems to me to lie in his textured exploration of pleasure. There are of course times when he focuses on banalities—his diamonds, his many cars. But for the most part, in his hands, pleasure becomes a useful tool—a bulwark against life’s tediums or an antidote to pain.