Nigerian rapper, Blaqbonez joins Nandi Madida on Apple Music’s African Now Radio to discuss his forthcoming project, ‘Emeka Must Shine’, merging his different personas and more.
‘Emeka Must Shine’ will be dropping tomorrow on Friday, October 27th.
Blaqbonez on the Emeka Must Shine movement:
“When the Emeka Must Shine movement started, I could see that my fans related to it deeper than just a title. To them, it was my crowning moment. They’ve supported me all this time, they just want to see me win at the very high level. The Emeka Must Shine movement is like ‘we’re going to do everything to make sure Emeka shines, nothing is gonna stop Emeka’ and stuff. It’s like them just being fully invested, and they’re going fully crazy on the internet. People are just like ‘Emeka is shining! Emeka must shine!’ It’s so so crazy.”
Blaqbonez on merging his different personas:
“Mr Boombastic has a reggaeton type bounce and vibe, right? It’s inspired by the Caribbeans and Jamaican music. There’s Bad Boy Blaq - the rapper - then there’s Emeka The Stallion. Emeka The Stallion is the singer, the one that sings with a clear voice and everything.”
“What I did for this album, in each song there’s elements of these three versions of me. It’s like I could be singing but then I’m flowing, I’m rapping and there’s a little bit of a reggaeton bounce and a vibe to it. I merged all the parts of me into one.”
Blaqbonez speaks on the collaborators on ‘Emeka Must Shine’
“Everything on this album came to me seamlessly. Everybody that worked on it, worked on it out of love so I’m really grateful that the whole process was organic and exciting. Even like M24, he was supposed to travel somewhere, and he had to quickly try to get the verse to me. He’s not somebody I knew before, and we didn’t pay him, he just loved the song and he wanted to be on it and that was really nice.”
“You know Black Sherif paid for the studio session where we recorded the intro. The Zlatan song ‘BAD TILL ETERNITY’, he invited me over to his studio and showed me so much love. And you know everything… it wasn’t like ‘oh, come and hop on this song’, or ‘you do this and my label is sending this to this person’. It wasn’t, it just felt like everybody collectively said ‘we’re gonna make sure Emeka shines this year, and we’re gonna give Emeka whatever Emeka needs.”
Tune in and listen to the full episode this Friday, October 27th on Apple Music 1 at apple.co/_AfricaNow.
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