‘It is just raw feeling!’: Afrobeats star Mr Eazi on how his debut album caused an art explosion
Ask any Afrobeats fan who Mr Eazi is and they’ll probably start smiling. With eyes half closed, they’ll lean back into the dialled-down sound that first brought this Nigerian superstar to global attention, and they’ll probably start singing: “It’s your boy Eazi.”
Mr Eazi is all vibes. Radio 1Xtra’s DJ Edu remembers being in the crowd the first time Eazi played London. Edu says: “It was such a spiritual connection, such a vibe between the crowd and his music and him.” Edu thought, “Wow, there’s definitely something here.”
That was 2017. This year has already seen Eazi launch a new band with Edu, ChopLife SoundSystem, and release their first mixtape, Chop Life, Vol 1: Mzansi Chronicles. And this month marks the release of The Evil Genius, which is billed as Eazi’s first album. It’s exactly not the debut that that phrase usually connotes. Eazi has, after all, done a lot since his first mixtape in 2013. Two more mixtapes; a suite of instant-classic singles (Bankulize, Hollup, Pour Me Water, Leg Over); collabs with everyone from Beyoncé to Burna Boy that have netted him a Grammy; and entrepreneurial coups that put him on Forbes Africa’s “30 under 30” list.
The first time we speak, it’s via Zoom, from the Ghanaian capital, Accra, hours before the opening of the exhibition that accompanies the album – a soft launch in paint and exuberance that came about, as things do with Eazi, by serendipitous happenstance. He had been mulling the idea of a multimedia project; an album perhaps, he wasn’t sure, but with art somehow. He was recording on the move, in studios, hotel rooms and lagoon-side houses between Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and Rwanda, with trips to the US and the UK too.
Being an A-lister, he’d initially gone about things the way A-listers do – with outside counsel. But speaking to galleries and curators wasn’t cutting it. Then, on a visit to Cotonou, he walked into the lobby of the Maison Rouge hotel and saw a painting by Patricorel. “I don’t know anything about modern art, I’m not cultured in art history. I didn’t know what style this was or where the artist was from. It was just this raw feeling and emotion that I cannot describe. I just knew that I had never seen love so beautifully described.”
From then on, he decided, if he saw an artist’s work and could relate it to something on the album, and if tracking them down and speaking with them yielded a similar level of connection, he’d commission them to make a piece.
The result is something like carnival: a restless, exhilarating cornucopia of sound and image and energy. On the album, longterm producers including E Kelly, Kel-P and Michaël Brun join forces with legends (Angélique Kidjo, Soweto Gospel Choir) and rising stars (Tekno, Joeyboy, Efya) alike, to cover a continent of styles and influences: afrobeats, afropop, hiplife, highlife, folklore, Ghanaian guitarist Joshua Nkansah’s virtuosic palmwine riffs, old-school sax and gospel keys.
In the show, which travels to London this month as one of the 1-54 art fair’s special projects, the Beninois painter Patricorel’s politically charged skeletal figuration is paired with South African Sinalo Ngcaba’s celebratory world-building, where, as she puts it, “a lot of different surreal Blackness lives”.
Eazi had found Ngcaba on Instagram. So much of the African art we see celebrated, to her mind, is serious in nature. She relished the license his commission gave her to just do her joyful thing and invite the listeners in. The resulting image, which accompanies the song Chop Life No Friend, is a portrait of Mr Eazi, hair in spikes as tall as a mountain, with lights, ribbon and a room of his own in place of facial features. She’d latched on to the standout lyric: “I’m continental / Sentimental / I’m monumental kpere [which Eazi tells me is a point of emphasis: ‘end of’; ‘full stop’].”
Nigerian painter Tammy Sinclair brings an equally expansive mirror image to the album’s opening prayer of a track, Olúwa Jʄ. Black putti surround the head of a man whose eyes are closed and head lifted high, and from whom the sun is bursting.
Woven throughout the project is this unexpected combination of braggadocio and interiority, swagger and dream. In fact, Eazi says was taken aback by quite how deep the visual art led him to dig into his feelings. “It’s been the most therapeutic journey. It’s even enabled me to accept the idea of therapy.”
Talking with Sinclair became a moment of sharing, “about the pressures of fame, of having money, that sense of responsibility as a male Nigerian kid, as a first son – pressure that nobody even puts on you, that you put on yourself, and that I didn’t even realise I was expressing in that song.”
Conversations with the other artists ended up like this too: so emotional, so vulnerable, that at times he wanted to ask his assistant to get off the call. Does it feel brave then, to go ahead and release the project to the world? “I’ve never really seen it as bravery. But I’m not going to lie to you, there were so many times I almost shelved it. There’d be moments I’d think, like, nobody cares, people just want to party.”
Partying is how Oluwatosin Oluwole Ajibade first became Mr Eazi, back in the late 2000s. As a mechanical engineering major at Kwame Tech in Kumasi, Ghana, he was first Eazi Nakamura. (Obsessed with anime, he and his mates all added “Nakamura” to their nicknames: Peter Nakamura, Osi Nakamura, Sheun Nakamura. “They called us the Nakamura boys.” )
He had no particular intention to become a recording artist but did have an indomitable entrepreneurial streak. His mother and uncle would often think he was “away with the fairies”, he says. But he was never not paying attention. This often landed him in the right place at the right time, before he’d even formulated a plan. He once spent his tuition fees on a taxi because, as he has put it, “there was no Uber in Ghana back then”. He ended up running a car service as a side hustle.
He had turned to organising parties to escape lectures, and then to recording studios – with the artists he was booking – to escape the parties. During one such session he found himself telling the artist that that wasn’t how backing vocals were done, to which the artist replied: “Well, why don’t you do it then?” And he did.
The second time Eazi and I speak, it’s in person over breakfast in central London. On multiple occasions during our hour and a quarter together, Eazi – black T, tight side fade, unflappable expression – pulls out his phone to show me messages.
Explaining how he came to work with Kidjo, the musical matriarch whom he’d grown up watching on TV but never quite dreamed he’d meet, he says he’d recorded a song in LA that, to his mind, really could only be “a Coca Cola advert, a World Cup song, or the kind of song people do at the end of their career when they’ve achieved legend status.”
A friend thought Kidjo fitted the bill, so Eazi DMd her a simple “Hello” on what was then Twitter. “Hello” came her reply four days later. When he responded with – he scrolls down through months of messages – “I’ve got a song for us”, she was on his case until he finally sent the recording, then the lyrics. She roped in Salif Keita, they did a remote music video altogether and it made it on to her 2021 album, Mother Nature. This is also how she then made it on to The Evil Genius. At first, he says, instead of a straight-up sample, he asked her: “Mama, can you just do the ‘Orokoro’ in your voice? Because I want people to know that it was you.” And Kidjo said: “No, I want to do a whole verse.” And she did.
I see what Edu means when he tells me how deceptive the artist’s chosen moniker of “easy” is. “Deep down,” Edu says, “Eazi is very intentional with everything he does. He’s a geek when it comes to taking on new knowledge and learning new things. He gets his hands dirty. He’s very proactive.” Crucially, “Eazi never forces anything. If it works, it works.”
Olúwa Jʄ and the album’s penultimate track, Mandela, speak to family and to prayer. Eazi recalls his father praying for his future when he was a child. I say that reminds me of my mother, who will still – I’m 46 – call me up saying, “I was up in the middle of the night praying for you.”
To which Eazi pulls out his phone to show me the latest text from his father (saved under “Captain Dad”). It’s a paragraph-long prayer for his son’s wellbeing. “You call your father Captain Dad?” I ask. “Yeah,” he replies. “He’s the captain.” His father was a pilot in the Nigerian air force, and his mother a serial entrepreneur and the Sunday school teacher. He says he was involved in all the meetings. “I even preached – and I like to think I was pretty good at it.”
The Togolese artist Tesprit crafted, for the track dedicated to Madiba, a bas-relief portrait of a father and son in flip flops. The man sits, broad-shouldered and comfortable, on a red stool. His head is turned attentively to the boy on his lap, who is clearly talking with his hands. It’s the very image of safety and rootedness, which the song’s title makes as much a tender statement about family as it does a civilisational, pan-African embrace.
The Nigerian-American photographer Mikael Owunna once told me about an outdoor shoot he did for his series Limitless Africans, during a New York blizzard. The magic happened in between the shots, when he and his four models hurried back inside, snowflakes on eyelashes, and danced in the kitchen. What were they vibing to? “I distinctly remember,” he said. It was Mr Eazi.
• The Evil Genius is on view from 12 to 15 October as part of the 1-54 art fair’s Special Projects, at Somerset House, London. The album of the same nameis released on 27 October on emPawa Africa records