All My Life: MI Abaga has the trick to staying young

5 Jun 2021 - 14:26

Published under the Creative Commons Licence

MI Abaga’s long career has had him go through several personas. Among them: the cocky upstart, the successful rapper, the rapper-executive, the insecure king. Sometime over the past half-decade, he became an entity somewhere between rapper emeritus and eager collaborator.

MI Abaga.

As the former, he released a scathing diss track targeting fellow rapper Vector a couple of years ago; as the latter, he jumped on a track with the same rapper this year.

As a collaborator, the record is mixed. The lowest point artistically came with his third studio album, The Chairman, which had him feature a colleague on every song. The album was so successful, it stayed on the Apple Chart for years, but it was deemed his weakest. Looking back, that judgment holds up mostly: people still speak of his first two records with the sort of reverence nobody really pays The Chairman.

Years later, MI reached the peak of his collaborative instincts with the album Rendezvous. As these things sometimes go, from a culture watching perspective, Rendezvous achieved the opposite of The Chairman: it was a very good album that didn’t seem to do well commercially. (How much of this stems from Chocolate City’s weird decision to never shoot enough music videos would never be known.)

Rendezvous’s artistic success was connected to MI’s decision to work with younger artists mostly from the so-called alte scene, which was quite popular at the time. As he told me in an interview, he was curious to understand what made them tick. That understanding filtered into his music and made Rendezvous a much better record than The Chairman.

His new song, ‘All My Life’ seems to be drawn from a similar impulse as what led to Rendezvous, as it features the young crooner Oxlade. The inspiration is just as likely to have come from MI’s childhood friend and fellow Chocolate City alumnus Ice Prince, whose song with Oxlade, ‘Kolo’, was released two months ago. As with the Ice Prince song, ‘All My Life’ is a love song that has MI in his romantic bag:

I don dey for these streets like old shoe
dey try find your number – sudoku

He adds some banal ones – “when you meet your soulmate, the sky will be so blue” – but ‘All My Life’ will not be judged by his lyrical power. Not anymore. Nigerian music is squarely in its vibe phase, and the vibe here is pleasant, even as it is not really nationwide hit material – at least not in the way that his most famous love song ‘ One Naira’ was.

In terms of song design, ‘All My Life’’s adopts the verse-by-rapper and chorus-by-singer form, which used to be quite popular – until Drake made the singing rapper a super-successful figure worthy of emulation. This format has led to hits for MI in the past: along with ‘One Naira’, which featured the singer Waje, the songs ‘Action Film’ featuring Brymo and ‘Number One’ featuring Flavour are some of the most recognisable songs in MI’s catalogue. Will ‘All My Life’ join their illustrious ranks? Well, those are also some of the most recognisable Nigerian pop songs ever so that doesn’t seem likely.

Nonetheless, there are other ways in which ‘All My Life’ proves its value: It is yet another single that demonstrates MI’s flexibility and work ethic. In 2008, MI released an album that inspired a generation of rappers. Thirteen incredible years later, he is still here, having outlasted most of a younger generation of rappers.