Davido’s hugely anticipated second LP and third body of work, “A Good Time”, has been assigned full marks by a cohort of fans and ardent listeners.
Lasting exactly one hour and seventeen songs, it attempts to present an omnibus of his last seven years. It has been seven years since David lurched onto the scene with a shield of braggadocio and some of his father’s money.
He left us a memorable hit, Dami Duro, which hinted at his future trajectory and left us dazzled with a warren of sirens and hard-hitting percussion. Since then, he has pitched himself as a worthy counterpoint of Wizkid. But where Wizkid is the talent in terms of making music, Davido is clearly the more hardworking one, with the business acumen.
Davido Music Worldwide has already established itself as a movement in Nigerian music with a clutch of new voices like Dremo, Peruzzi and Mayorkun, with hands out-stretched out for the coveted baton.
After releasing his first album, Omo Baba Olowo, a competent foot forward, his sophomore, Son of Mercy, was adjudged a flop, even by his own standards.
Rather than admit defeat, Davido blamed his evolving sound on his record label at the time, and practically abandoned tbhe pursuit of an international audience for the rave of that moment in Nigeria, the Pon Pon sound, which was the onomatopoeia for the thumping sound enmeshed in the Tekno produced and written, If.
A Good Time” is in summary how Davido got his “groove back. If there was a lesson to be learnt from Wizkid’s international album, “Sounds from the Other Side, “it is that you must lay claim to the sound that you are pushing to showcase to the world.
This is what Davido hopes to achieve on this album.
There is a deliberate attempt to court the international audience, but this time Davido appears to have broken in a good number of singles.
In that sense, “A Good Time” becomes his retrospective and report card. To this end, the music hardly coheres to a deliberate trope except to the things that thrill Davido.
Davido, like every young man in his 20s, is excited about the female body and other good things of life. Hence, every song is a love song of sort, a tribute to affection, to bodies and to materialism. Drugs also make a cameo too. Cannabis and Codeine , in his reckoning, are necessary ingredients in the pursuit of a good time.
Risky, the height of insouciance and drug-induced playfulness, may as well be the poster song of “A Good Time”
Conceived as a freestyle, Davido took his below par freestyle and mined it for melody, with the help of songwriters, and made a hit out of it.
Then add a decent music video to boot.
Every musician worth his or her salt at the moment is on the project. And there are strategic international stars to give the album that flair. To think of “A Good Time” outside the realms of music made to become popular will be to lose the plot.
Every single action plus the timing of this album release is to retain Davido at the height of his powers as a major stakeholder of Afrobeats.
Is this is a successful attempt? Well the answer will be a retrospective diagnosis.