The night 2Baba played Beijing

The event was put together by Peter Eze of Peterson Entertainment, partly to help with the Nigerian image in China, but its headliner was running late.

Onstage, a tall dude rapped to the inconsequential delight of, perhaps, the rented few who moved forward to provide him support. Earlier, some half-clad women had done half-incredible things with poles and giant rings but mostly the crowd was bored.

When 2Baba did appear some 45 minutes later, there was no accompanying smoke or fake fire. Not even balloons or some glitzy bits in the air.

It was a slow transition, almost inconspicuous if not for the temperature change—heat filtered in, spread through the hall and waited, suspended in the air above. When 2Baba, sporting a white T-shirt over stripped blue jeans and white sneakers, pointed to the crowd and blurted ‘I see you’, the heat broke and washed over us like rain. 

A great concert is a collection of stories. Perhaps this is more difficult for a solo concert to achieve, where an artist is tasked with entertaining a crowd with his body of work without the variety that numbers often offer. Such an artist will have to be dynamic.

There are crowds, of course, who prefer—and even pine—for a certain kind of monotony, stability, but as humans, we want to laugh and maybe feel a niggling need to find tears. 2Baba excels because of his ability to move between two extremes without sacrificing panache.

When 2Baba (then Tuface) released his first solo album in 2004, he was most popular for ‘African Queen’, a slow, soulful song about the majesty of the African woman. But refusing to be defined by it, he recorded faster songs, what some might describe as “shallow, club bangers” about sex and booze. That, too, never defined him. I have never met a lover of Nigerian music who describes 2Baba/Tuface as shallow—whatever that means. “Complete” might be the one word summarising a poll on what kind of artist 2Baba is.

It was that word that lingered in my mind as I danced with the Chocolate Club crowd that morning while Tuface told us not a story but several stories. The first one was about Nigeria. At a point, he stopped the music and started rapping into the microphone. “Very soon, our dead body go soon dey walk,” he said, referencing Nigeria’s Protest Society, an abstract organisation his music gives him access to.

He did that—stopping the music to speak—often, working the crowd like a radical politician, like a frenzied prophet. Twice, he stretched out his hands and blessed us.

“Receive,” he cried. 

When he sang ‘See Me So’, a song about brotherly love from his Grass to Grace album, I was reminded of the two Koreas who, the day before, had signed an agreement to end war between the North and South and denuclearise the Korean Peninsula. But those thoughts soon changed as, during another monologue, 2Baba called out for someone, a beautiful lady, to be his African Queen. The crowd squealed back in delight, reminding him he had one back home, in Nigeria.

“Make we pretend like sey Annie no dey here,” he replied, grinning. 

And thus the night went, sifting through heavy topics like government corruption (‘For Instance’) and tolerance (‘Only Me’), as we “Gaga-shuffled” and “implicated” ourselves. In the end, he gave one advice. “Let somebody hold you,” he said to the ladies.