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.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.