Larry Gaaga connects the root with Theresa, Phyno & Flavour to promote culture, peace, and love with Egedege.
This review however will focus more on Queen Theresa Onuoha because she is the highlight of the song, and Larry Gaaga did a great A&R linking both Phyno & Flavour to complement the Egedege song.
Theresa Onuorah is popularly known as Queen of the Coast and the Egedege Dance goddess of Unubi in Anambra State.
Her Ogene music and Egedege dancing troop was popular in the East during the 80s and 90s
She is also known for the highly beautiful face paintings, her amiable smile, and the dance routines that come with watching her troupe perform Egedege.
In those days, any event she was invited or paid to perform was always filled to the brim. Her presence, in any event, was always revered.
The titled red-cap Chiefs and women used to occupy special positions in the event just to have a full view of her as she performed.
- RELATED: Zlatan demonstrates his consistency once more with ‘Resan’ [Album Review]
- RELATED: Top Collaborations between Nigerian Music Producers and artists
She was famous in her time that it was rumoured that the highly revered ‘Osinamili’ of Orjiezeka Amichi, a very wealthy man sought her hand in marriage and she turned him down.
That being said, now let’s talk about her recent collaboration with Larry Gaaga, Flavour, and Phyno.
The song depicts more of the traditional highlife of the Igbo tribe and it will lead us to discuss more on the Highlife genre and the brief history of the genre.
Origin of Highlife
While Highlife also has a Ghanaian father, Nigerian Highlife is heavily influenced by traditional Igbo music, by way of percussion, sonics, and chord progression.
It is then tailored to soundtrack all forms of life. For this reason, a lot of people tend to pigeonhole all genres of music, emanating from the South East, into the ‘Highlife conversation’ when they’re not.
While these other genres share striking similarities with Highlife, they’re not all Highlife. It’s just like when historians lazily pigeonhole South-Western genres of music, like Fuji, Juju, Apala, Sakara, Bata, and more into the ‘Folk’ conversation.
Although there is a baseline identity that validates the ‘folk’ description, all these genres have unique identifiers.
In the South East, some of these traditional genres are Ekpili, Bongo, and more importantly for this conversation, Egedege.
While there is a baseline percussive identifier to all these sounds, due to certain uniform drums that they share, each of those genres is defined by particular instruments.
How Larry Gaaga connects the root with Theresa, Phyno & Flavour
Nigerian producer, A&R, and label Executive, Larry Gaaga released a video for ‘Egedege’ featuring Phyno, Flavour, Theresa Onuorah, and Pete Edochie.
Larry Gaaga has been in the music scene for a while and has been consistent throughout the years. He’s known for songs like; This Life, Abeg, How To Love, Rattle Snake, Story, among others.
The song is actually blowing up and people are talking about it. What does this mean for the industry? It means we’ve reached a point where it doesn’t matter where the music is from, or what language the music is. As long as it’s good, people will vibe.