How long can an artist in today’s industry go without releasing an album? Two, maybe three years? Clearly, Afrobeats star Mr. Eazi is playing a different, much longer game.
After releasing multinational hits and collaborations with everyone from Davido and Tiwa Savage to Major Lazer and Bad Bunny, Eazi unveiled his first full-length album. The record comes 10 years into his career.
The Evil Genius — which took two years to make in a production process that spanned multiple continents — is the album Eazi never planned to make. It’s a personal, heartfelt departure for a musician that until now was content to make pop music. But there’s more to the record than music: Every song is accompanied by artwork from a different African artist.
Eazi sourced artists for the project from art he would see at fairs, on social media, in books or through friends, then commission those artists to create work based on a song from the record. At art fairs in Accra, Ghana, Lagos, Nigeria, and in London, Eazi has previewed the record as a hybrid art exhibition/listening experience. Visitors could listen to the album on headphones while looking at the artworks inspired by each song.
He considers the two elements inseparable – you can’t have the art without the music, and vice versa. It’s also a way for the musician to share an intimate experience with his fans, who, like him, are discovering a love of contemporary art through an accessible, African lens.
"Art is uniting us, in the sense of collaboration, in the sense of knowing who we are," Eazi tells GRAMMY.com. "We're discovering ourselves through the lens of art, which is beautiful because there's no judgment in art."
GRAMMY.com spoke with Mr. Eazi over Zoom about The Evil Genius, why the art and music are inseparable, and why his full-length debut took so long to come to fruition.
Plenty of musicians have sophisticated visuals nowadays that go with their albums. You've gone a step further and commissioned fine art. Why was it important for you to take that step?
To be honest, it just felt like the natural thing to do. Art is the reason why I'm putting out this album. This album was very personal to me, I might have recorded it and never put it out because of how personal it is for me, it was like therapy for me. It was a record of two and a half years of my life.
When I saw the first art piece by Patricorel, it was the first time I had appreciated art in that way. It was the first time I was seeing the similarities between music and fine art. And it became the B-side of this album. It's me painting, telling the stories with instrumentals as my canvas and it’s the artists telling the same story, but with that form of expression.
Had you ever heard of artists and music coming together in this way? I can think of, for instance, Jean Michel Basquiat, who did some album covers in his day.
I mean, album covers, definitely. I think fine art has been used across the years for album covers. I'd seen Marina Abramovich with Jay-Z, in that video "Picasso Baby," around the time she did "The Artist is Present." But the difference between all of that and this one is that this album is not complete without the art. If you consume the album without the art, you've only consumed half of it.
And this is the first time ever — and I stand to be corrected — that you have this form of expression with African music and contemporary African arts, where everything is happening all at once. So each work of art that was commissioned is born out of the music.
Marina Abramovich was at the [Evil Genius] exhibition in London. And I was trying to take her through the exhibition, but she's like, "No Eazi, I know what I'm doing." And she took the headphones and she put on the song, and as she interacted with the art, she started telling me things that I hadn't told her about the art, and the music, and the connection. And she said, this is the first time she's seen this. Fela [Kuti] worked with the artist Lemi [Ghariokwu] in creating album covers. But this is different in that it’s track by track, coming together and presented as a multisensory exhibition.
You're in London right now, and there's a big exhibition at Tate Modern of sculptor El Anatsui. And there are many, many newer contemporary artists from Africa going into museums throughout the English-speaking world. Do you think that there's still progress to be made in the perception of African art?
There's definitely so much more, as much as there is for the music there is for the art. And that's one of the things this album seeks to do: show you different ways in which African art is evolving. And not just in the way you see it like when you go to the museum, but actually in pop culture, in its intersection with the music, and its intersection with fashion, for instance, which is something that's part of this album rollout.
I think what is happening right now is there's African soft power on the rise and African culture being exported — "Made in Africa," you know? And consumption is increasing locally. And for people like myself, who used to think fine arts was very gated, this [album and exhibition are] sort of democratizing the interaction with art by putting it in this form.
"Legalize" by Patricorel
Something that gets discussed a lot in the context of this album, is pan-Africanism, an idea that's existed since the end of colonialism. How do you think pan-Africanism exists in the context of 2023, and how is it being expressed in your music in particular?
It’s, first, the awareness of Africa and the awareness of ourselves. And the awareness of our differences, our uniqueness, and the awareness of the need to collaborate. And the need to collaborate is not being forceful, it's not driven by liberation. It's driven by the natural order of things.
Back in the day, even, like, 10 years ago, you would have people like me who have traveled more to Europe than they've gone to their neighboring African country. And you know, by going to Kwame Nkrumah University [in Kumasi, Ghana] – and of course [former Ghanaian President] Kwame Nkrumah was very big on pan-Africanism – I got to experience Africa, not through the news or through the history books, but through people that were in my class. I got to meet people from Gabon, from Equatorial Guinea; my roommate was Togolese in my first year. We are naturally connecting with ourselves, and not being stopped by borders.
Think of Benin, where I recorded most of this project. Some parts of Benin used to be Nigeria. And then one day, colonial powers just drew the line, and suddenly some people, families were broken into two by borders. But those borders are ceasing to exist. We, as young Africans, are traveling across; we're making music and collaborating with ourselves. We're making film. We're buying art from Ghana, to Nigeria, to Senegal. We're going to Senegal for fashion shows. We're going to Ghana for Detty Rave, my festival. Art is uniting us, in the sense of collaboration, in the sense of knowing who we are. And we're discovering ourselves through the lens of art, which is beautiful, because there's no judgment in art.
I don't care about the politics of Nigeria and South Africa. I know about it, but I don't care because in the club, there is no politics when I hear those amapiano records. Or when I'm in the studio with Soweto Gospel Choir recording "Exit," there's no politics, it's just pure music. And it's pan-Africanism, in that sense.
You know, you raise an interesting point. Amapiano is a style that has definitely penetrated into Afrobeats music, especially in this year. But listening to your album, I don't really get much of that influence. You are blending a lot of different styles and sounds on this album. How did you make them fit together cohesively, and how did you decide what directions you wanted to go into?
I didn't write any of the songs pre-instrumental, I would just hear the instrumental, I would connect with the instrumental and I'll start to sing on them. And as a fun fact, earlier in the year I put out with ChopLife Sound System, my group, I put out an album called Mzansi Chronicles, which is 100 percent amapiano influence. I recorded that whole thing from Jo’burg to Cape Town.
I went to shoot the video for "Exit," the song with Soweto Gospel Choir, and it was after shooting the video that night that I go into the studio. The producer just randomly plays this amapiano beat, and I end up recording the song that became "Patek," a smash hit from last year. And that's my first time jumping on amapiano.
On this record, it wasn't me chasing pop, because it's a record of my life. It's like a journal over instrumentals. So I was only divinely drawn to instrumentals that went along with the topics that were in my subconscious, because I didn't even know the topics I wanted to sing about until I had the beats. You don't hear amapiano on this album, not because there was a purpose [or] an intention to stay away from amapiano. No, it was because it just didn't naturally fit with what I was trying to express on this project.
Obviously, you waited quite a while to finally put out an album. What kind of story did you want to tell, and why did you feel that this is the right time to finally put out an album?
I've never wanted to make an album. I wanted to quit music. Coming out of 2020, I was sure I wasn't gonna make music professionally anymore. I was just gonna do it as a hobby — which is how I started music — and I was gonna focus more on the business side of the music. But one of my producers, E Kelly, who made one of my biggest songs, "Leg Over," and Kel-P, who made Burna’s international breakout album, had been chasing me for two years to record an album. Every time they would come, I would find a way to run away from recording. But in 2021, on Feb. 16 — and it's so funny, because this album has 16 tracks — I started recording it.
Kel-P had rented a place in Accra, and asked me to come around, just to catch a vibe and chill. So he tricked me, because I ended up going there just to play video games, and he started to play different instrumentals on loop. And as we were chit-chatting, before we started doing anything else, I just started to hear this song, this instrumental that became "Exit." I start mumbling things, and he's like "Just record." I started speaking about very personal things. I never wanted to speak about personal things in music; I felt my music should just be for entertainment and to take you away from all the real stuff happening in the world. But here I was, speaking my truth, telling my stories.
Before this album started I had never done therapy and never spoken to anybody about my issues. I just internalized. But this is me speaking about it on the record. The first track, "Olúwa Jọ̀" features my mom; my mom has never seen me perform. I say that "I swear to God, I feel lonely with people around me." This is something I've never even said to myself. But it was my truth at the moment, because with fame, I always seem to have so many people around, but I still feel lonely. It was just me using the music as therapy. The decision to make this, to call it an album, has come rather naturally, especially once art came into the picture.
I ended up recording for two and a half years and recording three albums. And the other two are ready, but I couldn't start recording them until I was done with this one, because I needed to put them down to sort of free myself. I needed to ask myself all these questions of who I am. I don't feel the pressures that I felt when I was dropping previous mixtapes, bodies of work. Because to me, this is my project and I'm just sharing it with the world. Because I believe that's the divine purpose.
You talk about your mental health struggles on the album, is that something that you want to see more of in Afrobeats and African music? More openness?
Some people think of African music and they think of Afrobeats, and they just want to talk about Afrobeat, and they want to say, "oh, all African music should be talking about politics." In African gospel music, we talk about God a lot, you know? In African folk we talk, we talk about proverbs that speak about life. Even if you think about records, like "Gaou" [by Ivorian artists Magic System] from back in the day, you know, that he's talking about being jilted by somebody, it’s a sad song.
So African music has always been used for different purposes to speak about proverbs, life. If you listen to songs from Sunny Ade, Victor Uwaifo, Ebenezer Obey, you'll see different topics, including mental health being spoken of in the music. So this is not the first time it's happening. It's just that there's not a lot of education, or those might not be the popular songs that hit the charts in the U.S., but it doesn't mean they're not popular locally.
In terms of Afrobeats, and how we talk of African soft power coming into places like the U.S., are you thinking of how your music is going to be perceived in these countries that don't have the context that you might find in Africa? Are you afraid people might not know the words to your songs, or they might not understand?
No, because I think music is spiritual. Music is a soul language. For instance, I performed once in Goma [in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] to 10,000 people. And in between my performances, I like to drop jokes. And I was dropping these jokes, and no one was laughing. And then I thought to myself, "Wow, I thought I was funny," only for me to remember that in Goma, they speak French and Lingala. So most of the people there didn't even understand what I was saying, but they were singing all the songs.
I've performed in Ukraine, in Kharkov, in Kyiv, in places where nobody understands what I'm saying. But what they understand is the emotion and the spirit behind it. That's the beautiful thing about art, there's no judgment in art. When I hear "Gangnam Style," I don't even know what the song is about, but I just feel it. It's a vibe. And it's the spirit in the music that I think gets to people.
I've been in the hinterlands in Ghana, back in the day when I was mining, and found people playing country music, found people playing music like Kenny Rogers, singing it word for word. How do you explain that? I think that's the beautiful thing about art and music, in that there's no language. Bob Marley said, "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."
What was the selection process like for these artworks and these artists? You said you just saw stuff you liked and reached out to the artists – can you go into a little more detail?
So I’ll start from the very first one. For most of the album creation process, I was living in the Republic of Benin, a small country of 12 million people next to Nigeria — 250 million — and they speak French. I came back from a business trip, and I was walking into the hotel where I stayed. And every month, a new African artist would be showing in the hotel. And I never paid attention to any of the art in the hotel, but I remember walking in and seeing this piece by Patricorel. He ended up painting three pieces on this project.
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It was a male and female skeleton sitting on a bench and holding this flower. And the only thing that would seem to be alive was the flower, it was the only thing that was colorful. And for me, I just saw that as speaking about the finality of love. And it was around the time I was about to propose to my fiancée. So immediately, I was spellbound. And I just thought to myself, This artist will paint the cover for "Legalize," because, again, it’s the finality of love. And I reached out to Patricorel, sent him the music, and we chit-chatted after he heard the music to see that we're on the same page. And he asked me one question, he said, "Do you have any guidelines for me?" And I said, "No, you need to express yourself because it's a collaboration."
"We-Day" by Kufa
And so this was the process for every song. I would either go to an art fair and see an artist's work like Kufa [Makwavarara] from Zimbabwe, who painted the song "We Dey." I was recording in Cape Town, I was recording the ChopLife Sound System album, and I went out to an art fair in Cape Town. I'm just walking through the fair, and immediately I saw his work. I just knew it. I just said to my friend, Hannah, "This is the guy who paints the piece for ‘We Dey.’" And divinely, this Zimbabwean artist happened to be in Cape Town at the same time I was in Cape Town.
Either I will see the artists in an art fair, or I will see the artists on Instagram, or I will see the artists’ work in a book, or somebody somewhere would send me a group of artists and say, "Hey, I see that you're really getting into art. Look at this thing." One of the pieces, "Jamboree," was painted by an artist from Cotonou [in Benin]. And it was [sent to me by] my lawyer…[who]was in a fair in Senegal.The artist as it ended up was living in Benin. He was right there beside me all the while, his studio was like 15 minutes from where I was recording.
You're showing these artworks in Accra, Lagos and also at Somerset House in London.
It would be a disservice to anybody to just listen to the album, or just look at the art pieces, it must be done in unison, ideally. That exhibition was showing people exactly how I wanted this album to be consumed: You come in, you have the headphones, just you, you listen to the music, and you interact with the art, because that's how you get the full experience.
So you saw a lot of first timers like me who had never ever been to an exhibition, or never going to see art in a museum or a gallery. But because of the music, or because of this project, they were interacting with it for the first time. And it was just so beautiful, that now they get to discover art through the lens of contemporary African artists.
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