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Alade recently won the best African female at the just held MTV Mama Africa awards.But this album review is very unkind to her.I think we should not necessarily take contents in albums or songs as the absolute character of the artist.
Afterall Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt plays kidnappers and terrorists and that does not mean they are.So why is Yemi being portrayed as if her songs are 1005 of whom she is?Unless she says so,we should not assume that.Anyway,so i don't get you biased,read the review below...
The singer is re-enforcing this idea of the Nigerian woman — or African woman — as a cash grabbing machine This is the difference between a Nigerian girl and a western girl: Yemi Alade: If you like me you buy me Ferrari Sia: I don’t need your money. I love cheap thrills That was a joke I wrote on Twitter weeks ago. As expected, many boys retweeted. Girls ignored, or voiced dissent. Some females agreed — if retweeting is endorsement. Ms. Alade may seem like an undeserving scapegoat of my joke but she isn’t. If anything in recent times, she has enforced this idea of the Nigerian woman — or African woman — as a cash grabbing machine whose sole purpose is to look good enough to attract a man. The supreme example of her materialism is ‘Ferrari’ in which her love and body come at the price of a Ferrari. She’s above your league clearly. Carry your Toyota out of the road and make way for a corrupt politician.
This self-acclaimed Mama Africa is not here for your lyrics. She doesn’t care for her own lyrics either. Her second album is a model of repetition saved occasionally by the brilliance of producer Masterkraft. Shortly after reviewing her album, I stayed up to catch reports of the MAMAs. She was triumphant. As a Nigerian, I am quite happy to cheer my compatriots doing great things in other countries. But her Mama Africa album still is fraudulent, as I wrote: ‘…the geography is as dodgy as the {Yemi Alade} image is a fraud. While the album is high-mindedly subtitled, “Diary of an African woman,” a number of songs carry the specifically vapid materialism of the stereotypical Lagos girl. The flesh may scream selfless-Africa but the spirit is greedy-Lagos. There’s the luxury car required for love on ‘Ferrari’. There’s the thirst for cash on ‘Ego’: “See my baby, e name na ego” (My baby’s name is money).’
‘These are songs having words with meanings. Other times, the album goes through the motions, employing all kinds of sounds (tumbum-tumbum, kom-kom, toronto-toronto) perhaps to avoid the trouble of actual words.’ Yemi Alade had quite a career before the success of ‘Johnny’. But that success ruined her. To be sure, Ms. Alade has never been a great lyricist but at the time, she seemed committed to those weak lyrics and her spunky naive honesty was endearing. Her previous promoted singles suggested her yearning for love was untouched by ‘unbridled materialism’, as a friend put it. Today that materialism is mostly all there is to her music.
In some ways, she has become the female P-Square, the guys who have encouraged women to ‘chop their money’—except that where they were telling men to make enough money so that clubbing may be easier. Ms Alade is building a country of female dependents. Irrespective of where a person lies on the feminist debate, it is quite the case that many people prefer a working woman over the leech that the music of Ms Alade seems intent on encouraging. And she hasn’t just started on her cash crusade this year. ‘I like your money o,’ she sang on her debut album Kings of Queens on one of the songs without a video. ‘I want your money o. You will buy me motor. You will buy me Gucci. You will buy me Prada.’ The question is this: Is Ms. Alade representing the Nigerian woman as she is or is she endorsing the parasitic tendencies of a certain kind of woman? The relentlessness of her vision suggests the latter.
What is frustrating with Ms. Alade is that these statements of materialistic purpose aren’t backed by witty lines or any knowledge that a woman should bring something, anything to either the boardroom, the studio or the bedroom. The Alade type of woman is nothing more than a demanding dumb pretty chick. Unlike her colleague Tiwa Savage, Alade doesn’t even suggest any agency in sexual concerns. All she has is a body—no brain, no initiative, and no carnal skill. Her new song continues the material theme from its title, ‘Gucci Ferragamo’. A better song than her recent efforts, it gets good production work from Maleek Berry. This time there is a variation on her eternal pursuit for designer clothing and such things. On the surface, it is just as bad as she is basing the worth of women on accessories. Yet there is something of a lyrical depth on this one that is absent from her recent work.
As with her most uncreative choruses, this song features a phrase repeated till it needs saving by the song’s beat. Fortunately, her subject hasn’t been covered by contemporary Nigerian pop. And this is where the new song works. It has a novel theme. Ms. Alade has tapped into a common story in many a neighbourhood gist. You have probably heard the neighbourhood gist about a young girl who has discovered her sexuality and thus attracts gifts from men. The new situation gives her enough confidence to believe she is superior to older girls in the ‘hood, ‘the big girl’ referred to elsewhere on the song. The song itself is relayed by one of these big girls who is either speaking out of bitterness or out of knowing how it is to be flavour-of-the-week for a while. It is a bit of a bullying song in how aggressive bits of it sounds.
It is a feel-good song but it does have something extra in the way Ms Alade’s voice goes from jolly to threatening. You can almost see the scene in which the big girl talks to the curvy usurper. ‘Gucci Ferragamo’ will be an average song for a better artist — if only because it is marred by the repetitive part of the chorus that can cause a headache. But the bar for Yemi Alade is so low that ‘Gucci Ferragamo’ can be considered a great Yemi Alade song. This low pass-mark perhaps tells the tragic story of much of the recent music released by Ms Alade.
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo tweets @catchoris. In 2015, he won the All Africa Music Award for Music/Entertainment Journalism.