Lady Donli has become the name everyone wants to drop in the Alté scene.
Alternative used to be the opposite of mainstream but that was until a squad of new-school bourgeois cats with international exposure and swag came by. They took Alternative, contracted it and revolutionised it with a diacritic on the alphabet, Alté.
For them, taking charge of the name and the narrative did not require any kind of violence, just some assertiveness and you could say, a drab wardrobe.
Given the niche market they embraced and their internet savvy, the music was decidedly underground, becoming popular on SoundCloud solely by word of mouth and serendipity.
This implied that you had to seek out this kind of music for yourself when you tire of the pangolo on radio. The downside of this music is that it hasn’t crossed to the Mainland and its suburbia.
Lady Donli is, however, not complicit in this kind of class snobbery; she is from Abuja, that capital city with rocks and hills and the cool ambience reflects even in her music. Trained as a lawyer (check) in the United Kingdom (check), Lady Donli has always pursued music as a side hustle (check).
This, for the most part, is the reality of the Alté squad. They embrace that tendency of double lives that Carl Thomas aptly describes in his song, ‘Dreamer’; “My nights are famous/but my day’s the same”.
Lady Donli’s foray into music did not begin with her mint LP album—it started way before, but she has consistently turned heads with her music and refreshingly positive vibes. In essence, positive vibes is what she dredges up again on this amazing project called Enjoy Your Life.
This is Donli’s injunction and it reeks of insouciance and youthful exuberance. This album immerses you in your youth if you are young and if you are one of those old woke kinds, it will steep you in nostalgia by reminding you of how you once felt.
The music is mostly mid to low-tempo and primarily in hip-hop mode. Think Erykah Badu meets Lauryn Hill somewhere around Afrika Shrine.
This music retains Northern Nigerian music aesthetics as well as a measured recourse to Hausa language, replete with tinny and tessitura vocal inflexions. So, check, influence and also, check, tradition.
The magic of these songs is that they are stitched together by the worldview of this album: the necessity of living on one’s own pleasurable terms. What is striking, however, is that Lady Donli carefully curates and characterises what it means to enjoy life. This is definitely not about glorying lifestyle vices—far from it—enjoyment here is about immersion into cool sounds and positive tendencies.
This is self-care music, which is definitely needed in this era of post-dictatorial democratic decadence.
Here is where the philosophy propelling mainstream and alternative music intertwines like double helices: the place of music as some worthy distraction from the quagmire we call living in Nigeria.
But besides living, Lady Donli is also asking us to live on our own terms, to embrace spirituality.
On ‘Flava’ (which samples guitar riffs off Monica & Brandy’s ‘The Boy is Mine’) where she identifies her God as female, and generally asks that we be good to others, as per Jerry Springer’s famous last words.
If the charge against Alté music is that it is syrupy and self-absorbed, Lady Donli is definitely giving us a new way of looking at it – masterful and cool production, well-paced music, competent lyrics and relaxing ambience. This is done in the manner of Show Dem Camp’s Palmwine music series. Easily, one of the best alternative albums since Aramide’s Suitcase.
Lady Donli may have already outdone herself but, hey, it may be too early to judge.