Rema
At Rema’s Lagos album listening party for Rave and Roses, you’ll be forgiven to think you were at a mid-sized, romantic-horror hybrid event in April. A gigantic inflated brown and black bear seats at the entrance, welcoming everyone with its symbolism and size. Teddy’s are great lovable huggy tuggies, right? Except Rema’s.
The installation takes a morbid turn on closer inspection, with its eyes sealed shut with an ‘X.’ It’s dark. It’s lovely. It fills you with part-wonder, part-trepidation. To access the venue, you had to have a bat imprinted on the back of your palms to signify your belonging to this noir space. That same bat comes to life on the walls of the entrance at the Terra Kulture, where superfans and music industry professionals gather to hear his new album. A gleeful skater zooms past early guests, high on Gen Z recreational energy. Youtube reps smile and lead you into a photo session, and a drink is placed in your hands. Inside, two skeletons trap roses in their jaws, and Rema has a blood-stained shirt dripping under his jacket.
It’s all in keeping with how he’s strived to impose his creative will on the world. Since Divine Okubor broke through pop music’s consciousness in 2018, the 21-year-old Nigerian singer has kept his music and brand in flux, pursuing dynamism by introducing and flipping elements of his sound and visual identity. Rema is on a journey to self-actualization, a public travel through time and places, powered by his music and its impact on the world. Every year comes with a gradual unfurling of himself and his chaotic mind undergoing metamorphosis in front of the camera.
He first showed up as a wide-eyed 18 year old 4 years ago, recording explainer promo videos on a set propped by bright boxes of Fruity Loops, Coco Pop, Cornflakes and milk. The aesthetic played support for a fresh fusion sound (which he christened Afrorave) and lyrics exploring love, lust and the entropy of our collective human condition. Gradually, we all followed him as the brightness of that teenage smile gave way to a sweet and successful darkness.
Rema never misses an opportunity to communicate his pain. Whether in intense bursts of eloquence on Twitter, or emotional references to his personal losses in his music, his hurt is real and documented. Today, personalized hidden messages are coded and obscured by repurposed mundane elements. Like a burning inverted church, a playground swing hanging by the clouds, an impaled bear, and a gravestone. Fans are always invited to solve some of these messages, and the bat image has grown from a brand infusion to his communal spirit animal. Each music release isn’t simply a record looking to run up the charts and improve streaming playlists. Yes, the increasing bottomline commercially validates these choices, but the records also tell some story, or welcomes everyone into his current mental space.
His latest project, Rave & Roses feels like a coming of age. A debut full-length release to soundtrack his transformation, Rema contorts himself and his abilities through 16 tracks. His ambitions have never been in question. “Yes, everybody has their own vision,” he tells me via a Zoom call from his holiday in Ghana. “I feel like everybody is too deep, abeg. Everybody is too serious. Coming from the mountain vibe, I had one revelation…bla bla bla…abeg! All I want to do is influence the sound. I’m going to put out a project that depicts my inner self. That depicts my level of creativity and how I see sound and how sound should be projected.”
Rave and Roses doesn’t fully give into his sentiments. There’s depth in moments where you can find it. Like a drive through his origins on sprawling opener, ‘Divine.’ Listeners get to start from his defiance, and follow a thread through the peculiar circumstances of Rema’s delayed birth, and into today’s dominance. Before his arrival on earth, Rema’s birthday was delayed past due date, and his mother named him Divine, to memorialize her struggle with his unborn form.
You can also extract subterranean lessons if you peer under the rage in ‘Are you there.’ A current focus track that has him co-opting the endemic chaos of Nigerian society. A swashbuckling song about everyday commotion, Rema moves between his preferred brand of escapism (girls and money), through political arenas where he’s yet to receive his cut of Buhari’s largess, and his decision to thrive through living unapologetically, regardless. We’ve seen him squeeze, and consume plain bread and soda, commandeer a danfo bus, and menacingly run through a field with Agberos. All these to to connect audio with visual storytelling.
But that’s all the consciousness you get. It’s paltry, appears early and feel peripheral. Love, lust and hedonism own Rave & Roses. You can conjure lucid images of sloppy fellatios and sexual energies on ‘Dirty.’ This boy loves to fuck. And if you do too, you’ll never be far from a pleasant horny experience. Rema’s description of sex is vivid and sensual. (This one no be matter wey I go chop you clean mouth, How many, many, many, many round, round, round, round? She dey bounce on my thing with my song for background. I dey give her new new style, she say wow, wow, wow, wow. When I start to go too deep, she say ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch)
Sex aside, if your preferred branch of the man-woman interaction lies in the pursuit of romance and the uncertainty of feelings, you’ll find yourself more at home. Loving is complex, it takes effort to unfurl the knots of human connection into its barest form. Mutual desire might sustain it, but only if both parties embrace vulnerability, or see finish, as Nigerians love to call it. On Rave & Roses, Rema goes seeking for human connection holding his heart in his hand. US rapper 6LACK comes in clutch on Hold me, a sappy duet from two men held down by love, and completely lost in a lady’s sauce. French singer, Yseult guests on R&B number, ‘Wine,’ improving everything with her famed vocals. And then there’s Chris Brown, extending his involvement with Nigerian music via another stellar collaboration on ‘Time N Affection.” ‘Runaway,’ a song about embattled lovebirds eloping into the sunset, and arguably Rema’s best work here, is given closing duties. Rema’s Trap iterations are absolutely absent here, but a deluxe version has been teased, with his compatriots probably getting a run on a follow-up. Rave & Roses provides an abundance of his skillset, taking you into the life of a young man in the grips of a colorful existence.
In the buildup to the album release, last year, I spoke with Rema. I found him on the brink of Soundgasm release, with lofty plans and honest intentions about his first time out with an album.
Full Interview tomorrow
