Why Davolee’s Festival Bar is a masterpiece of rap storytelling

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On a night that witnessed the usual up-and-coming artists perform before the stars, newcomer Davolee, Lil Kesh’s replacement in the YBNL camp, performed alongside his label boss Olamide. They performed their rap duet Pepper Dem Gang. Davolee’s solo song Festival Bar followed, with Olamide providing back up. This was perhaps Davolee’s first performance at an event of such magnitude, but he performed like he was already famous.

Word for word, the crowd followed the relatively unknown artist as he performed the three minutes and fifty-two seconds song about happenings at the eponymous bar where the rapper probably worked before fame came along. Davolee (real name Segun Shokoya) was making fans sing along with greater intensity than they did and would later do with the likes of Ice Prince.

Davolee grew up in Mushin and Ebute Metta in Lagos but started rapping in Ikotun. He begins Festival Bar like a good short story writer: with a catchy line in the opening few seconds the way a writer would start a story with a great first sentence or paragraph. He admonishes a barber, “60 watts lo fi ta’na aye mi, give me a good bob.” (You’ve lit my life with the (inferior) 60 watts bulb—at least give me a good bulb.)

He then sets the scene by giving a vivid description of the location of the bar and how to get there before introducing the main characters: himself (bearing his real name Segun); the pseudonymous Mama G, a hot-tempered Edo woman married to the white man owner of the bar; and a female employee Shalewa, who is employed to assist Segun. He tells the story from the first person point of view, presenting conflict midway through the song, and then climax. The song ends with Shalewa’s sack and Segun’s departure after the female employee is reported by a customer (who happens to be Segun’s neighbour) for hiking the price of Don Simon by 400 naira. Before leaving, Segun gives Mama G who runs the bar, a piece of his mind.

Davolee succeeds in making a rhythmic rap story laced with few punchlines. In the second half of the song he berates Shalewa for selling drinks at inflated prices. “Se owun o ni jeun ni? » Shalewa replies. « T’owo owun o ba ti e le se shuku, se owun o ni ge run ni?” (Won’t I feed? Even if the money (I’m getting here) can’t get me shuku (a popular hairstyle), shouldn’t it afford me a haircut?)

Shalewa’s response supports the maxim: If you’ve not lived it, you can’t tell it. Suku is a luxury to Shalewa not the infamous Brazilian hair worn by many women of a different social class. She needs the stolen funds for feeding and suku not pizza and human hair. It is why a Banky W or an MI Abaga will not make successful rags to riches songs the way Timaya did with Plantain boy and Olamide Anifowose. It’s also why MI’s attempt at famzing the streets on Shekpe with Reminisce on the Chairman album will not make it beyond his corridor, but when Olamide calls the streets on Bobo, saying, “Eyin omo wobe” he gets a response.

To identify with the streets, you have to have lived it. Davolee has lived it, as Olamide and Lil Kesh have, and that’s why a song like Sere in which both rappers aptly capture the reality of growing up in the streets, connects their numerous followers. But to the listeners of « elite » Nigerian music, it’s gibberish.

Reminisce has lived that life, so his El-Hadj album is filled with such references. On Where I come From, he talks about how hot the neighborhood is during elections and how young fine girls in the area have become commercial sex workers. Imagination isn’t enough to weave the experience of the streets into pleasant rhyme. And where imagination trumps experience, there’s also the question of identity and acceptance. At the Reminisce Street concert, MI would have been lost, where Small Doctor found his peers.
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Seven years after Olamide’s Eni Duro, Festival Bar is that song’s successor in the Yoruba debut-rap canon. Eni Duro, a canvas of different scenarios segueing into each other to form a coherent whole, differs from the newer single in tempo and the manner in which Davolee guides the story from beginning to end in the way US rapper Eminem did on Stan—only, in Stan, Eminem splits his story with a chorus.

Rather than use choruses, Davolee softens the tempo of the the song at intervals and uses certain phrasings the way a writer uses paragraph or chapter breaks. Davolee uses “OK” where ordinarily a verse would have ended and “To cut the long story short” (which he says in Yoruba) where a verse would have begun. It’s an unusual technique that works. At another point, he hisses to emphasize Shalewa’s repudiation of his goody two shoes behaviour when he cautions her of the illegality of her dealings of hiking prices of drinks to customers. Davolee is a stylist.

Festival Bar is the first of its kind and might give Davolee a special status of some sorts: he is torchbearer of the next generation of “local rappers”.