Obongjayar Keeps it Pushing
Founded in a similar gospel, Some Nights I Dream of Doors is a vulnerable, hyper-personal manifesto, rife with the kinds of intimate messages that you either get, or don’t. “Message in a Hammer,” a militant, rhythm section-heavy anthem written in light of injustices at the hands of Nigerian law enforcement, is perhaps most explicitly rooted in OB’s regional worldview — “You can beat me, shoot me, kill me (...) we won’t take it kindly,” he flits, a jungle-esque drum-driven soundscape carrying his croon — but as much as it’s bound not to hit as hard for someone lacking the lived experience, his agenda is more about saying what he has to say, and less about making sure it’s broadly palatable. “I don’t care. If I feel a certain way, I’m going to make the music,” he tells me. “Linton Kwesi Johnson said this thing, one time. He was doing an interview, and the person was like ‘Why are you writing your poetry in Patois? Don’t you want us, the West, to understand it?’ And he said, if you want to understand it, you fucking figure it out. It’s not on me to pertain to you. If you really care about what it is that I’m saying, go figure it out, boy. I’m not gonna rework my shit because I want to fucking sell to you.”
Born in Nigeria, Obongjayar’s start in music came at the hands of disparate American hip-hop albums, melded together with the regional soundscapes that populated his at-home life. At 17, he and his mother moved to the UK, where he remains based today. Since being discovered by Richard Russell, the inventive XL Recordings CEO, in 2017, his music has grown to chart a path just as winding as its geographical footprint: his sharply-accented voice floats between spoken word, soul, reggae and afrobeat, bypassing genre lines with a fluidity that makes it impossible to place him into one box.
Today, it’s been about two weeks since he touched down in the United States for the first time in his life, and he’s quite infatuated with New York City. Though he likely wouldn’t say so himself, the entire matter registers to some extent as a hard-earned victory lap of sorts — Some Nights I Dream of Doors comes at the tail end of six years spent navigating the music industry’s highs and lows on his own. And if the success of this LP indicates anything, it’s that his time being a student of the game has led him to ace the biggest exam of his career. His studious ethos transcends just music, though, and manifests in a restless curiosity about humanity, one that goes on to inform much of what he does with his craft. It’s why he’s taken to New York so well in the short time he’s been here: with an excess of fellow people comes an excess of inspiration. OB’s visit to the US, with stops in both this city and Los Angeles thus far, has highlighted for him a boundless philosophy that well contextualizes his ceilingless songs — anything can happen, and for both himself and the thousands of people he shares any location’s streets with, the same tomorrow always exists.
“Every day you wake up, it’s a new fucking day, bro,” he says, clapping for emphasis. He expresses himself with the too-good-to-be-true cadence of a motivational speaker on 5 cups of coffee, clapping, grinning, running me through it as if, every single day, he discovers it for the first time all over again. “If you fucked up yesterday — you made some bad moves and you lost a lot of money — you can start again tomorrow, bro. You can literally start again. There’s so many opportunities. It’s all there. That’s how I live my life, B. I just try to live each day better than the last. And once you do that, you’re good.”
A concept OB revisits often is that of “keeping it pushing.” In his stirring chorus to the title track of Danny Brown’s 2019 LP uknowhatimsayin¿, he speaks to the doctrine in serpentine croons, and in the office, before I know it, we’re singing his part in the song together. “You see this town wait for nobody, my guy, just hold your composure. And when you’re down it gets cold… wait, what’s the next part?” I fill him in, and we finish the final lines. “My guy, don’t stop now, keep moving,” we sing in unison. “My guy, don’t stop now, keep moving.”
It hits him as if he never knew it until today. “Facts!” he practically jumps out of his seat. “Facts, bro!”
