Reminisce – Ponmile

Reminisce, renowned for sexual virility boasts and slut shaming, has come up with a song that merges pleas and mild threats. In 2014’s ‘Tesojue’ from Baba Hafusa , his lover was to “ku laleyi” (die tonight); in ‘Ponmile’, he asks for reverence from his partner.

Unlike ‘Bisi My Lover’ off his debut album where a lady is condemned because she has dated other persons in the music industry, on ‘Ponmile’ he is willing to swim the ocean and climb electric poles for his lover—a deviation from the Reminisce of Alaga Ibile who sang about cockblocking on ‘Sunkere’ and dedicated an ode to commercial sex workers on ‘Agidigbo’.

The song’s male character tries to reason with his lover. “Ife o gb’agidi (love isn’t by force), » he says. “Beni ki n se ABD” (Neither is it A B C). He pleads further: “Baby, ja mi tan, ki ba le gba kamu” (Baby, be completely frank with me, so I may be resigned to my fate). The Reminisce narrator, it seems, has met his match. In the chorus, he begs his lover not to go the way of married women who have left their husbands to live with their parents.

In the song’s video, Nollywood actor Odunlade Adekola assumes the role of an angry lover. In one scene, his woman (Lota Chukwu) nags, and Adekola, after rendering facial expressions fit for memes, resorts to violence. He stops short of attacking her with a cleaver. Nonethless, Chukwu’s character has the video’s last word. In calling her partner impotent, she says perhaps the most scathing thing a woman can hurl at a man.

During the course of a career, music artists may record one or more important songs either addressing the politics of the day or confronting a societal ill. In this regard and as social media has given voice to victims of violence, rape and molestation, the ‘Ponmile’ video is especially timely. Perhaps Reminisce is thinking about posterity.

Years from now, when history asks what role hip-hop played in the Black Lives Matter movement, music archivists would unearth Kendrick Lamar’s ‘The Blacker the Berry’ and his 2016 Grammy performance. When in, say, 2067, historians revisit 2017, the year when rape, violence against women and sexual molestation were major topics on social media, and ask what role hip hop played, Reminisce wants the ‘Ponmile’ video to stand head and shoulders above the music videos for Wande Coal’s Iskaba and Davido‘s Fall. He succeeds.