Davolee was in the news recently for jumping the YBNL wagon for a new record label, New Nation Music, after a two-year stint at the stables of Olamide Baddo. This exit, of course, was expected, if the track list of the YBNL Mafia album released last year is anything to go by.
What is heart-breaking about Davolee’s exit is that he has no album to his name and his career seems to have been repositioned since his spell with Olamide.
One would have expected at least one album from his tenure, yet what is available are a clutch of singles that hardly match the originality of his breakout single, “Festival Bar”.
“Festival Bar” tells a story passionately. Done entirely in Yoruba, this song does not own a chorus; it is, in its entirety, a drawn-out tale narrated by Davolee, whose real name is Segun David Shokoya, about the experiences of an eponymous Segun.
From the beginning, Davolee already hints at the listener about how his stint as a barman in Festival Bar will end. Festival Bar is at Ikotun, and Davolee gives an exact description of the location. The bar is owned and run by a certain Mama Gee, a sobriquet Davolee lends to this character’s real name to ensure her anonymity.
Mama Gee employs a salesgirl called Shalewa to assist Davolee when her bar became short-staffed. Shalewa comes to work with a full-blown hustler’s mentality. Shalewa’s intention is to score extra profits for personal gain by hiking the price of products. Davolee counsels her on her need to be careful, but, in crisp retorts delivered in Yoruba rhetoric, Shalewa shuts him down.
Shalewa’s luck runs out when she tries to sell a pack of Don Simon at almost double its original price to a regular customer who calls her out. She is reported to Mama Gee who intervenes and decides that Shalewa’s behaviour could only have been in connivance with Davolee. Davolee already established how Mama Gee delivers justice in her chambers: she slaps. But when she asked Davolee to come forth for his slap, he dropped the hottest lines of the song and stopped the song exactly where it began: how he lost his barman job at Festival Bar.
“Festival Bar” is a compelling song, perhaps the first of its kind in recent history. Davolee, in telling an autobiographical story drawn out into song, is reinstating some respect for the culture. The last time I heard a cohesive and structured story delivered in a song without a chorus in Nigeria music was… never.
Of course, we can’t discountenance the mid-career Juju songs of Ebenezer Obey which re-imagined Yoruba fables, anecdotes and vignettes for didactic reasons. Neither can we unlearn the witty lyrics of Junior and Pretty in songs like “Bolanle”. Mode Nine on his E Pluribus Unum album delivered “Cry”, which had several story scenarios. We also can’t forget “Anifowoshe” from Olamide’s magnum opus, Baddest Guy Ever Liveth.
In the absence of these few micro-narratives, Nigerian music has not had a story told with caution and craft like Jay-Z’s “Meet the Parents” off his Blueprints II double album.
Like “Festival Bar”, “Meet the Parents” is a drawn narrative about a troubled son having psychological disturbances that align with the Black American stereotype of an absent father. When he comes of age, he resorts to crime and the story finds its denouement when the son is killed by his father. Hear Jay-Z, “Six shots into his kin out of the gun, Niggas, be a father, you killing your sons.”
“Festival Bar” is a story couched in our Nigerian experience of poverty and hardship. Davolee, who doesn’t hide his humble background, has done menial jobs to make ends meet. He has even sold “Pure Water”. “Festival Bar” beyond telling his story and that of his peers at the bar, reflects on vices like deceit and avarice, while still instructing us that life, in itself, is not fair. Segun still takes the fall for Shalewa’s misdemeanor and this may also be as a result of his own human flaw: his impatience.
Listening to “Festival Bar” made me reflect on the art of the short story and especially how “Festival Bar” works with acute observation, colourful characterisation and witty dialogue. It reminds me specifically of John Updike’s most anthologised story, “A & P”, which follows a young man of Davolee’s age through his last hour as a supermarket attendant. The impulsive nature of the quitting action cannot be far removed from his interaction with a number of barely clad ladies who saunter into the supermarket earlier. Perhaps this is where the similarities end with Updike’s story but “Festival Bar” tells a story with craft similar to a writer’s—and we may as well call it a classic in its own right.
One can only hope that Davolee repositions himself now that he has left the bad company of YBNL Nation and resumes mining quality material instead of fronting Lamba music.