Ycee was lying on Zoro’s “Ogene” Remix when he said he didn’t need hype to blow. Everything in this industry needs hype. Maybe it’s the social media buzz or a back story, or controversy, or a combination of all, somehow the music that ends up becoming hits were the product of real hype.
But, we’re human, Sometimes, we over hype. Especially when what we are publicizing is ours. We tend to think our work is superb and amazing and all that shit. So, we flood everywhere with artwork and snippets, and teasers like we’re about to drop “Avengers: Endgame.” And most times, it’s just the fans, not the artist. Many times, we’re wrong.
Naira Marley’s “Soapy” is definitely going to make the list of the top 10 Nigerian songs of 2019, and with this rate, one of the hottest street jams of all time. How it came to garner that hype isn’t a strange story. Naira Marley got into stuff involving Simi and Yahoo boys, and he ended up doing a song with Zlatan Ibile, “Am I a Yahoo Boy?”
Not long after, EFCC picked them up, released Zlatan and arraigned Naira Marley in court. At last, he walked And you know what he did next? “Soapy.” A song that kinda detailed his struggle behind bars, in a fun way, and also introduced a new dance, the soapy dance. It became big and everyone on the streets was doing it, and on Instagram, too.
The whole dance started off Instagram actually, with Naira Marley doing the dance in a video he did not long after he released the song. The only thing that was missing, therefore, was an official video, that will most likely showcase professional dancers doing the Soapy dance.
Instead, we got a posh looking video, shot by the same guy who did Tekno’s “Agege.” And it didn’t have enough of a meaningful concept that could at the very least justify why they didn’t really demonstrate the soapy dance explicitly. No one can learn the dance just by watching this official video because the clips have been adulterated, making it hard to even capture ten seconds of where they actually did the dance.
Remind me of the time fans criticized Olamide of shying away from portraying what his song “Science Student” meant. But that’s not even like this, because drugs in the video would probably be illegal, yeah? The soapy dance, however, why shy away from it now? Now that the whole world is crazy, why is Naira Marley doing it less?
For what it’s worth, the video of “Soapy” isn’t at all worth the hype it’s got so far, and the hype it will still get. Nice jail costumes, anyway.
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