Nigerian street-pop savant Asake’s new album Lungu Boy finds him as spiritually grounded as ever and expanding beyond his center ((the title essentially means “boy in the hood” per Nigerian culture mag The Native). He’s already sung of God, good, evil, and purpose across his discography and through several languages, religions, and cultures. A prime example is 2023’s “Yoga,” a meditative track he wrote after two women were killed in a crowd crush outside a highly anticipated London show of his in 2022. His third album is simultaneously a look inward after ascending some of the highest heights an Afropop star has ever known as well as an embrace of the vast world around him from those vantage points. Lungu Boy keeps the faith but explores new sounds, becoming Asake’s most rhythmically and emotionally diverse album yet, with some experiments more successful than others.
“I found a sound among all the sounds,” Asake says as he narrates his come-up on “MMS” with Wizkid, sung predominately in Yoruba and Pidgin. Ironically, “MMS,” named for an acronym for Asake’s unique approach, actually feels like a Wizkid concession, with Asake showing reverence for Wiz’s legacy. The Afrobeats vet has his own distinct style, cool and jazzy, where Asake’s is often deep and urgent. Asake’s fame was built upon fusions of South African amapiano that he and producer Magicsticks helped shepherd into the Afrobeats mainstream. He also leans heavily into fuji, a style of music beginning in Southwestern Nigeria and evolving from heavy, rapid percussion to keep Yoruba Muslims up for their pre-dawn meal during the holy month of Ramadan. However, Asake sounds right at home on Wizkid’s turf.
“MMS” is filled with godly reverence in the Yoruba language, and much of Lungu Boy is performed in that native tongue. While this has risen the ire of some listeners who can’t understand it, his sense of melody, pacing, and attitude transcends language. In fact, the album is often at its best when Asake doesn’t have to worry about translating himself to English. The basic hook of “Skating is a lifestyle, skating skating skating, skating is a part of me,” dilutes a potent feat of production on “Skating,” whereas Asake’s chants of “O ye’loun/Gbogbo nka malo ye Olohun” (“God understands every situation”) on “MMS” give a subdued song a sense of spunk.
Lungu Boy’s experimentation with new genres is most successful when it’s explosive, like the New Orleans bounce and hip-house inflection of the Travis Scott collab “Active.” Scott and Asake are impressive bedfellows, with the Houston rage-master cunningly working the song’s incessant sample of fuji classic “Raise The Roof” by Jazzman Olofin and Adewale Ayuba into his verse. Asake goes full fuji on “Fuji Vibe,” perhaps his rawest engagement with the genre on wax – at over five minutes, it culminates in nearly three minutes of pure hand drumming and band jamming, punctuated by clips of fervent applause. Another standout is the dancehall flip of the Mary J. Blige classic “Real Love” for “Whine,” with Brazilian funk star Ludmilla. Songs like “My Heart” and “Uhh Yeah” are a bit heavy-handed in new territory, the former almost stereotypically employing Latin sensuality and the latter sounding like Tron-core computer music, but they each have their charms as well. Yet on the more subtle “Ligali,” “I Swear,” and “Suru,” Asake smoothly treads a middle ground between Afrobeats for a Saturday night and Sunday sermon, marrying the musicality of praise music with the grit of the streets.
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.