FIA is the song of Davido’s career

He pursues incoherence with such single-minded focus one begins to wonder if it isn’t deliberate. Aren’t these artists genius? Really, wait, isn’t this incoherence a studied response to Nigeria’s intractable malaise? Is this not dada without the protest?

Take Davido. His ‘FIA’ has claims to song of the year last year—such was its popular acclaim. (It helps that it was one of the last—and therefore one of the most current—big songs too.) In the song’s first verse, we’re treated to boilerplate male trauma: she wants them all, this girl, the Ferraris and designer outfits and whatever good life a share of that famed 30 billion can buy. The means, though, are out of the reach of the song’s male protagonist. An impasse ensues. Better to hide away, he thinks, let someone else run his race.

One October day in 2017, news broke of a death. What might have otherwise been an unremarkable death soon gained national significance when Nigerians learnt that Davido was a friend to Tagbo Umeike, the dead man, and had been present as the latter drank so much alcohol he was delivered dead on arrival at the Lagos Island General Hospital, to which he’d been rushed from The Shisha Room, a club in Lekki Phase 1. Davido denied the claim, first made on Instagram by Caroline Danjuma, Umeike’s presumably distraught actress girlfriend, before investigators unravelled his alibi.

Davido, as only Davido can, memorializes these events in the second verse. “Caroline save your drama,” he sings, “you don’t need me in your soap opera.” Fiction—“when the boy dey hunger”—meets autobiography. In the process, he leaves a souvenir—“Shuku Shaker”—in the Nigerian consciousness.

It’s a headscratcher, this nuclear escalation of hostilities from one verse to the next. Plus, the male protagonist of the first verse is clearly not the male protagonist of the second verse. The galvanometric critic will recognize the common theme of trauma that binds these verses, but the glue is counterfeit: these individual dramas of existence, these individual traumas, are not in any way analogous; they inhabit disparate galaxies.

Somehow, this does not detract from ‘FIA’’s incendiary value—such is the force of the song’s bridge and 'FIA' is not the worst of Nigeria’s neo-dadaism.

We’re years from the first verse now, the bridge posits. The boy done made good, and the girl, naturally, is penitent. It’s pulling him in different directions, tearing him apart, simultaneous impulses to dismiss and embrace his beloved prodigal. His (male) ego has been bruised—“if you no get money hide your face/I hide my face/make another man pikin run my race”.

Yet, this is love: “since feeling is first,” the poet ee cummings once wrote, “who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you.” When Davido screams “you for dey for me”, we have reached peak anguish, anguish made all the more poignant for Davido’s impassioned vocal performance of it.

Perhaps Reminisce gets the gong for love song of 2017 because it is tough beating the put-togetherness and menacing melancholia of ‘Ponmile’. Still, ‘FIA’, on account of that bridge (and its performance), pushes ‘Ponmile’ all the way.

Davido has done love songs before: ‘If’ and ‘Fall’ are paeans to a conspicuous materialism bludgeoning to submission any resistance to romance. ‘Ekuro’ and ‘Aye’ belong in ‘FIA’’s fluffy firmament, but they are smarmy odes to love, having nothing like the existential conflict ‘FIA’ offers. ‘FIA’ might be a strong contender for 2017’s song of the year, but it is undoubtedly the song of Davido’s career—at least till he outdoes himself.

Buy FIA on iTunes

Artist: Davido
Song: FIA
Label, Year: Sony Music Entertainment International Limited, 2017