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1 month ago | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
1. A stray tweet has haunted me all week. I do not remember the tweet verbatim, but it was something like…the music of our father stays with us forever. Like most social media maxims, this tweet demands some introspection. Naturally, it called up the music of my father—his JVC deck connected to his Kenwood amplifier routed to the wooden Akai speakers from which his favourite music spewed. We are back to our flat in Ado-Ekiti, which smells of boiling beans and locust beans.
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2 months ago | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
Late last year, Jazzhole Records, with the support of Studio Monkey Shoulder, released two LPs: Eroya and Asiko Tito. Both records are anthologies of music drawn from diverse African and Afrodiasporic genres, Jazzhole Records’ speciality. The release of both records, particularly Eroya, is timely. Eroya was released by Faaji Agba, a collective of twelve musicians. Most of these musicians were elderly and have passed on, but this does not diminish the importance of their music.
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2 months ago | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
Naming love songs after girls is the gift that keeps giving. The old timers—highlifers and Juju exponents—knew this. Mention a girl’s name on wax, sing sonorously about her geographical location, croon in the same breath that you have dispatched yourself in her direction—and you are half-way to her heart. Taxi drivers were a regular fixture in highlife love songs in the 1960s, when vehicular transport was a miracle.
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Mar 8, 2025 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
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Feb 16, 2025 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
A working man’s weekend is sacred. Every 9 to 5 man who leans too deeply into the arts learns the restraint and pragmatism of that counsel ringing from childhood: stay in school, stay off drugs. But staying in school and off drugs does not kill the affliction of the incessant earworm. There is a tune in my head every time. Sometimes, this rhythm betrays my most well-meaning intentions in the most inappropriate places. This rhythm assures me I would have been a songwriter in another life.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
It has been 14 years since his fourth album, Conquer. And if the wait for Conquer after the release of his third album, So Much Better, was long (a mere three years), CT has outdone himself with a career-defining (or defeating) hiatus. Fourteen years is an awful long time to be quiet as a singer. Such statements can be quickly taken out of context and repurposed as unfair criticism, so let us contextualise a few things. To do this appropriately, we must tell a few stories.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
Canada is a desired destination for disgruntled Nigerians. It sits in our consciousness, horse-shoed in our lofty migratory aspirations. Hordes of upwardly mobile Nigerian youth have responded to Canada’s call, including my sister and her husband, two bright lawyers who loved Lagos. At some point, they appraised their careers, read the tea leaves (or was it the sky over the lagoon one of those humid evenings stuck in Friday traffic?), and tapped out.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
Before Juju music became global in the early 1980s, becoming an interest of eccentric and exotic foreign music collectors and a source of forex for its campaigners, it was music performed exclusively at social gatherings among the Yoruba. In today’s Southwest Nigeria, Juju stays true to this purpose. Social gatherings among the Yoruba, now called Owambe, have evolved. They have become more sophisticated, more consumerist, more materialistic.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
Death is the ultimate leveler. It reminds us of our humanity. Whether you are a global pop superstar living in London or a prehensile bus conductor working the Lagos Mainland route, one fateful day, you will receive news from home that something terrible has happened. On August 18, 2023, this happened to Wizkid. His mother, Mrs Jane Morayo Balogun, passed away at age 65. No one is joyous when a parent becomes an ancestor, but we know this would happen.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
damiajayi.substack.com | Dami Ajayi
The first time I heard OdumoduBlavk’s ‘Picanto’, it felt like a transfiguration. It sounds like I am exaggerating. I am not. I did the logical thing to ground myself: examine the song’s lyrics closely. Disappointingly, the song’s lyrics pale when compared to the listening experience. In text, the lyrics appear naked. They know I came in a Picanto—And so what? Singing about arrivals in one thing. But Picanto situates this arrival in a budget Korean hatchback (a Kia Picanto).