Seyi Shay x Sarkodie – Weekend Vibes remix

The song's producer Krizbeatz has decided to take a crack at it himself. He has made same beat, give or take minor elements, for Seyi Shay’s new single Weekend Vibes. (Played back to back, Weekend Vibes and Tekno's Pana and Rara form a pop music triptych.) We may frown at the reproduction, unashamed as it is, but the new song is a rather effective tune. The magic of the Pana beat is untarnished.

Seyi Shay, who has never been shy about female lust, is just the perfect singer for the sequel of Pana, a song that elected cassava as phallic substitute. “Mesmerise the girl o/come and rock my waist,” she sings, her voice approximating the breathy sensuousness of Tiwa Savage. Like Ms Savage, Seyi Shay aims her vocals towards the skin under the ear, leaving the audible equivalent of a lover’s breath.

Weekend Vibes is an undisguised sex jam; the jokey allusiveness of Pana is gone, and replaced with unconcealed bluntness. Folake has taken control of both song and sin, resulting in a coitus-soaked chorus: "And we can/kpansh, kpansh, kpansh, kpansh!/Every weekend, baby/kpansh, kpansh, kpansh, kpansh!"

An onomatopoeic slang for having sex, "Kpansh" is repeated several times; the word makes a starring return from a 2014 rap single by Yung6ix. While the rapper used repetition as a measure of conquests, Seyi Shay invites the listener to think of the word's relentless occurence as proportional to the number of carnal sessions that might take place over her fabled weekends.

Part of the appeal of Tekno’s hit songs has come from his affinity for drums, and in Krizbeats, nicknamed “the drummer boy”, he found a percussion-loving producer. But where club-loving Tekno sometimes prefers sped-up drums, Krizbeats takes the edge off his drums for the cooler Seyi Shay. The harsh sound effects on ‘Pana’ are replaced by the plosives in the repeated chants of “kpansh kpansh”. The result inspires a less vigorous kind of dance. And for some gravitas, Seyi Shay gets Sarkodie to add a verse on the remix. As always the Ghanaian gets in the mood besides Nigerian acts.

Despite the familiarity of its production, Weekend Vibes offers a major difference from Pana and its more unruly offspring, a group that includes Davido’s recent singles If and Fall, as well as Mayorkun’s Mama: It is the first time a major female act has gotten in on the action. And it is easy to see why it is Seyi Shay who has adapted the beat.

To get accepted as a major act, the UK-born Seyi Shay has had to find crafty ways to attend to the needs of the Nigerian pop audience. One way she has done this is to mould her R&B uniqueness around the familiarity of male stars so her debut album, Seyi or Shay, was chockful of testosterone. Clearly, the Seyi Shay team figured her western panache needs local footing for nationwide success. If this strategy has worked admirably, it has also led Seyi Shay to an over-reliance on established artists and trending sounds. One imagines that soon she'll need a different plan, one that emphasises her own originality.

For now, the Seyi Shay strategy is just fine. Weekend Vibes will take its place on several playlists—as “kpansh, kpansh!” finds the grateful lips of naughty listeners.