Davido gets his team together for La La

30 Apr 2021 - 18:52

When Davido released his third album last year, two things were clear. One: it wasn’t quite as good an album as A Good Time from 2019. Two: It had a number of songs that would be great as singles.

A still taken from Davido’s latest video.

One of those songs was ‘FEM’, which was released before the album. Another was ‘The Best’, which has gotten its own video treatment. Yet another was the song ‘Lala’, which features the artist Ckay. That song has now been released as a single with its own video treatment.

As with a bunch of songs from Nigerian popstars, ‘La La’ is about a girl, one with whom Davido “fucks with heavy”. Never mind that word, the song’s lyrics are closer to PG 13 than you might imagine. Sex might be implied as usual with songs of this nature but ‘La La’ is a frivolous love song, encapsulating the mindless fun the title sorta nods to. One of the things Davido wants to do on the song is hug his beloved “like teddy”, which, considering how he hugs his own son on the album cover for A Better Time, suggests a deeper love. “I go dey for queue, for you,” he sings.

Appropriately, the song’s video shows a funny novelty match featuring a number of famous Nigerian male stars recognisable either from their contributions to traditional entertainment, like Mr May D, Mayorkun, and Peruzzi, and others from social media, like Sydney Talker, the Instagram skit maker.

Clips from the match were shared on social media weeks ago, with some users asking what the match was about and how it ended. The purpose for which these very famous men were gathered wasn’t widely known, although it might have been guessed in hindsight. Well, the mystery is now solved as we get a funny music video from Davido, who, one might assume would hardly miss an opportunity to burnish his own image – either as a successful musician or as a footballer. It turns out that, well, two other artists, Mayorkun and Oxlade, score and celebrate more attractively. Davido, though, gets the girl whose presence taunts him so much, his team appears to lose the match. By the end, it is clear that the girl is the prize. When he asks his teammates if she is worth the loss, they heartily agree. As the line from King Kong goes, “It’s beauty…that kills the beast.”

Underlying all of this video’s playfulness, Davido shows himself once again to be a canny conjurer of pop (or Afrobeats) hits. ‘La La’ takes advantage of the current amapiano craze and fashions it into a weapon of breezy pop. There is the guitar riff, the rolling drums near the start of the song, the “skrr” sound made popular by American acts, and the chants of the name of the popular Congolese musician Awilo Logomba for reasons unknown – but this mishmash of sounds works to produce aural pleasure. Little wonder Davido once used the word “fusion” to describe his genre of music. For a couple of minutes, the song does a decent job of keeping Davido alive on radio – and, of course, YouTube.