MI Abaga is a brilliant and paranoid king on ‘Everything’

Two pieces came from that session. I wrote one of those pieces, where going over the review now I see a note of disappointment running through the over one-thousand words. The other piece that came from that listening session called The Chairman ‘a manual’, presumably for up and coming rappers. It is a view I disagree with. But it is a remark that was prescient. The new song 'Everything', meant to bring on the third Illegal Music mixtape, is MI’s manual for the rap game as it is played in his country.

Because of rap’s insistence on ‘realness’, the genre is perhaps the most autobiographical of modern pop music forms. Directly, obliquely and in spots throughout his career, MI has given us bits of his autobiography. His rise to rap relevance is chronicled on ‘Unstoppable’ from the celebratory MI2. Doubts about that relevance irrupt all over the low-on-confidence The Chairman.

His love for the troubled town of his childhood Jos produced ‘Wild Wild West’ from MI2. His struggle with the exposure of social media shows up on ‘Human Being’ from The Chairman. His attempts at reconciling with his brother Jesse Jagz is on ‘Brother’ from the same album.

On the chorus of 'Everything', he relays his method to autobiography: “Everything I have learned in my life I can try to sing you in songs.”

Starting firmly, slowly, like the rapper is seething, the syllables tumble out impetuously until sobriety becomes anger. Within the first of the song’s two verses, the emotions pour out in different directions. There is a response to doubters: “Niggers think I’m toast but no, my bread is always buttered.” Then there is something more pointed: “If a nigger’s tripping, I can do without their luggage.” By the verse’s last line the anger has sublimated into frustration: “Genius is so lonely because nobody understands us.” The troubled ending of this verse recurs at in the last verse.

MI is, of course, open to accusations of inventing enemies when the true culprit is the man in the mirror. He was the one who recorded The Chairman without a single song featuring just himself, so that the album sounded like a various artists’ collection. He was the one who became CEO of a record label, like Jay-Z one of his influences, carrying everyone else, when he could focus on his own art. He was the one who took years between studio albums in a time when the pop scene favours a new flavour every week. And now he carps?

These are valid comments on the man’s career over the last few years. There has always been a sense that MI has a softer core than you’d expect from a rapper. See, he was raised by a pastor father.

His soft core produced perhaps the most celebrated love song by a Nigerian rapper, ‘One Naira’ and the less known gem ‘God Bless You’. But it also produced the tolerable but rather saccharine ‘Imperfect Me’ where he records a slew of his associates telling listeners what they consider MI’s flaws. On ‘Everything’ he admits his tenderness, rapping about being, “always sentimental in my fucking mental.”

By the second verse, MI the angry young man is MI the Messiah. “I earned the crown,” he says, “and then returned to sit among the peasants. How should they be saved unless I bring to them a message? How should they improve unless they sit and hear my lessons?”

That line is of course a reference to criticism of the middling banquet that was The Chairman. Artists may publicly denounce critics but the best ones care, maybe a little too deeply, about what that presumably sour group of practitioners, says. Case in point, Burna Boy.

For watchers, the MI blueprint is tripartite: connect with listeners, impress critics, and mentor younger rappers. It is the kind of plan that can only be dreamed up by a rapper pampered by early success, who, quickly addicted to a warm reception by radio, phones and ipods, is poised to re-enact and possibly amplify that initial reception. So when MI says, “Your highness, are you low enough to one day face rejection?” he could be talking to himself. The highs of Talk About It and MI2 were not recreated with The Chairman. He takes the semi-rejection of that album calmly and offers the lesson philosophically to younger rappers in the most compelling manner: “Man must pay to gravity the price for his ascension.” Also: “If you think I am talking to you—nigga this is an intervention.”

What makes ‘Everything' so compelling, other than the picture it paints of the mind of a brilliant rapper who on occasion in the near-5 minutes of the song appears to be a paranoid monarch, is its delivery and production. Set on a whispery beat featuring subdued screams at intervals, the song’s atmosphere enforces the rapper-as-neurotic-king scenario painted by the lyrics. Sometimes the lines are literally about royalty: “I have seen kings not aware of their successors waiting in the wings, they are blinded by their successes.”

By the end of the song’s last verse, the paranoia seems to have won over: “Grab myself a pencil and then I wrote my name in history. Why they try to erase it … is just a mystery to me.”

MI need not worry. If everything else on his forthcoming projects are as good as 'Everything' the rapper would have earned an entry into that history book—before the first word is written.