ATLANTA — On a recent Sunday, the Nigerian Afrobeats artist Mr Eazi joined a panel on an outdoor soundstage about the global reach of hip-hop. Surrounded by peers of similarly international backgrounds — including Spice, the Jamaican dancehall singer and reality star (“Love and Hip Hop”), and the Moroccan-born, Bronx-bred rapper French Montana — Mr Eazi stood out precisely for how much he did not stand out. He was dressed casually in a black sleeveless shirt, wide-leg pants with a subtle floral pattern and chunky-soled Marni sneakers. His flair was minimal: a black leather bracelet, an onyx ring and a small, Bottega Veneta leather crossbody bag.
Eazi was at Revolt World — a three-day summit hosted by Diddy’s digital cable network — for a headlining set as ChopLife SoundSystem, an experimental project he formed with DJ Edu, a Kenyan-born disc jockey and BBC Radio host based in London. “Chop Life Vol. 1: Mzansi Chronicles,” the duo’s first mixtape, is a dance-beckoning collection of sounds curated in celebration of the South African house genre called amapiano. The sound of Afrobeats — at once ubiquitous and, for many, still new — is an innovative sampling of West Africa’s rich cultures, with songs that fuse rhythms and languages (including Nigerian Pidgin, Yoruba and Twi) from across the region. In Mr Eazi, this melding of genres has found both an inventive practitioner and an intuitive impresario, who is eager to see it take its rightful place on the global pop stage.
“When I think of Eazi, I think of him as a duck,” DJ Edu said over Zoom a few days later. “You see a duck flowing, floating on water. Yet there’s a lot of stuff going on underneath the surface. That is exactly what he is.”
For all the music he has already made, Eazi’s own debut album, “The Evil Genius,” only came out last week, following a decade in which he released mixtapes and appeared on attention-grabbing singles and cross-genre collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé, Diplo, Bad Bunny and J Balvin. The 16-track album is Eazi’s most introspective effort yet. It came together in sessions across the world — in Eazi’s native Nigeria, other African nations including Ghana, Benin and Rwanda, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom.
“I always felt like until it feels personal to me, I won’t call it an album,” Eazi had explained to The Washington Post when he sat down for an interview this summer. His mixtapes, “Life Is Eazi, Vol. 1 — Accra To Lagos” and “Life Is Eazi, Vol. 2 — Lagos to London,” first introduced his signature banku style — a mixture of Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian chord progressions. Those projects were personal, too, he said, but more about offering his interpretation of the musical soundtracks to places he holds dear. “The Evil Genius” is a glimpse into Eazi’s life and mind-set as he grapples with fame and reflects on his success. “I’m a vibes person, but this is less vibes,” he said. “It’s more like a note to myself.”
Eazi is part of a cohort of African musicians — including Wizkid, Burna Boy, Asake, Tiwa Savage and Davido — who have become global ambassadors for Afrobeats and the Afropop landscape. Eazi’s investment is deepened by emPawa Africa, an initiative he founded to support African artists and labels emerging from the continent. As an artist, Eazi’s work is informed both by his business savvy and his palpable love for music from Africa and its diaspora.
Eazi was at Revolt World, not so much as a rapper about to release his most intentional album yet, but as ChopLife SoundSystem’s self-dubbed Minister of Enjoyment, providing the electric bounce of amapiano fused with Afrobeats, dancehall and thumping bass. ChopLife is named for a West African phrase that means to have a good time and live life to the fullest. Eazi, with DJ Edu by his side, wanted the crowd to do just that.
Mr Eazi, 32, was born Oluwatosin Oluwole Ajibade in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His father was a pilot in the Nigerian air force; his mother an entrepreneur. Growing up, gospel was the preferred music in their house — Eazi’s mother is a devout Christian — and Eazi recalls listening to Mary Mary and Kirk Franklin. On the global hip-hop panel, he shared that his discovery of hip-hop started with the (modern) classics: Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z. And, he added, Ja Rule — which made the audience laugh.
Eazi first started recording music as a hobby while he was a student at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering. The Revolt World panel, which also included Nigerian-American actor-singer Rotimi, featured plenty of jokes to go around about the rigid expectations Naija parents have for their children: doctor. lawyer. engineer. Eazi was just shy of 19 when he graduated, but says his parents encouraged his independence in a way that was culturally rare.
Music remained a hobby even after he’d found his first hit in “Bankulize,” featuring Pappy Kojo and DJ Juls. Burna Boy later appeared on a remix of the track from Eazi’s first mixtape, “About to Blow,” released in 2013. Eazi became more well-known, following “Skin Tight,” a dancehall-inflected track featuring Ghanaian singer Efya, but he was also a busy entrepreneur trying his hand at production (food, gold) and marketing (petroleum). In 2014, he pitched a business selling pre-owned mobile phones and was accepted into an incubator program through a Nigerian venture capital firm.
“One of the biggest gifts I think my parents gave me is the freedom to decide for myself — decide where you want to go to school, decide what course you wanted to study,” he said. “I hadn’t even turned 19 when I finished university and I didn’t take a job. I wanted to try my hands at entrepreneurship.”
“Where I’m from, you don’t take gap years,” he added. “But my parents just let me figure it out.”
In 2016, a friend sent him Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s “Empire State of Mind” — a book about how Jay-Z became a business, man — and he started to think he could nurture both his entrepreneurial instincts and his penchant for making music. That summer, Eazi took a loan from one of the firm’s owners and invested it in his first headlining show at a former London arthouse film theater called O2 Forum Kentish Town. “When I came out on stage and I saw all those people with the lights up, over a thousand people, I just knew that was what I needed,” he said. “That was the final stamp to prove to me that, okay, this is not just a fad. It’s not something that just happened.”
He explained, “But when you see the actual human beings … that night was so special.”
In 2018, Eazi founded emPawa Africa and soon offered 100 up-and-coming artists the chance to have their demos made into a music video. According to emPawa Africa, the call out yielded 10,000 submissions from artists in 14 countries. The top 10 artists, which included Joeboy, were mentored by working musicians. Among those musicians was DJ-producer Diplo, who first met Eazi in 2017 while touring Africa. “He’s got such an infectious energy and a million ideas,” Diplo said by email. They’ve since collaborated on several tracks including “Oh My Gawd” and “Tied Up,” both cuts with Diplo’s EDM-meets-dancehall outfit, Major Lazer. (Diplo’s favorite, he said, is “Open and Close,” from Eazi’s 2018 mixtape “Lagos to London.”)
It was around the time Eazi founded emPawa Africa that he predicted Afrobeats would “be the hottest genre in the world” within six years. That’s why, he says, he decided not to sign with a major label. “I was like ‘Nah, this thing we’re holding is going to be big and it’s happening in our very own hands.’”
“Calm Down,” a soothing ditty that peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100, is the highest-charting song to feature an Afrobeats singer, Rema, as its lead. Although Eazi was not involved in making the song (which features Selena Gomez on its remix), he said Rema’s “untouched, undiluted Afrobeats record” becoming “one of the biggest songs in the world” is proof to other young, aspiring singers that they can finds success in Africa.
“I think it’s just the beginning,” Eazi said backstage at Revolt World. “Even next year, I can’t imagine what will happen.”
Staying independent has paid off, giving Eazi the freedom to make his studio debut without limitations. Eazi commissioned African artists to create works based on each song on “The Evil Genius” and has hosted well-attended gallery showings — paired with a listening experience for fans — in Ghana and the U.K. “It goes back to what I always wanted, which was freedom — economic freedom and creative freedom. I can achieve all of that and this album is an expression of that.”
Eazi’s parents remain supportive of his career, yet his mother has never seen him perform. “She’s always supported me with prayers,” he said. “The Evil Genius” actually opens with a prayerful voice note from his mother on the track “Olúwa Jọ̀,” which means “Please God.” His mother, who has long floated a desire to see her son make gospel music, will get her wish: the album’s final track is a gratitude-filled appeal to God featuring Soweto Gospel Choir.
Eazi’s father, meanwhile, is prone to showing up unannounced to his shows — “You know when someone surprises you so much it’s no more surprise?” Eazi said, laughing — and often provides mental support. Eazi used to get riled up if he saw media coverage that he felt misrepresented his words. One day his father told him, “If a dog turns back every time they call its name, it will never get home.”
Even now, Eazi said, when he wants to get away from everything he will go stay at his parents’ house for a few days. “And there, I’m Tosin. I’m doing the dishes, I’m sleeping, I’m dusting the table,” he said. “That’s home for me. And I’m eating home-cooked mommy’s food.”
Revolt held its first hip-hop summit in 2019, but the Atlanta event was billed as the inaugural Revolt World, focusing on the global impact of hip-hop — a thread that has been missing from much of the discourse around the genre’s much celebrated 50th anniversary. Revolt CEO Detavio Samuels said it was clear that Afrobeats had to have a presence at the summit. When his team got to thinking about who would make a good ambassador for the genre, the obvious names came up: Burna, Davido, Wizkid, but, he said, “We just felt like Mr. Eazi is doing something unique and fresh and different.”
It was Eazi, after all, who’d collaborated with Bad Bunny and J Balvin on “Como Un Bebé,” a standout track from the reggaeton superstars’ collaborative 2019 album “Oasis.” Helmed by Nigerian producing duo Legendury Beatz, “Como Un Bebé” was an early entry into pop music’s burgeoning catalogue of reggaeton-Afrobeats collaborations. Years later, other musicians are getting into the game: Rema and Colombian singer-songwriter Feid recently teamed up on “Bubalu”; Puerto Rican crooner Ozuna featured Davido on “Eva Longoria,” a track from his underrated “Afro” EP, released in May.
Eazi, who has since logged two additional songs with Balvin, loves hearing that fans discovered him through “Como Un Bebé.” While the song is primarily in Spanish (with Yoruba throughout), Eazi says, “that song is an Afrobeats record, it’s not a reggaeton record. And for a lot of people, that’s the first time they ever heard Afrobeats — on an album that had J Balvin and Bad Bunny, and that’s what has opened the door in many ways that we cannot even measure.”
Eazi called out Bad Bunny last year for heavily sampling and interpolating Joeboy and his producer, Dera, on “Enséñame a Bailar,” a track from the superstar’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which garnered a Grammy nomination for album of the year. Rimas Entertainment, Bad Bunny’s label, disputed the claim, saying that Rimas had purchased the master track. Credits for the song have since been updated on multiple platforms to reflect the Joeboy sample.
Ultimately, Eazi said his decision to speak out was about protecting his artists. “For me, it was more about fighting for these two guys who made those melodies and made the music in Lagos in their bedrooms with not the best laptops and not the best studios, but still found a way to make it global.”
Edu, the other half of ChopLife SoundSystem, said Eazi’s business sense is what sets him apart from his peers — in addition to emPawa Africa, Eazi also founded Zagadat Capital, a tech investment firm named for one of the catchphrases that (along with “It’s ya boy, Eazi”) opens many of his songs.
But “The Evil Genius,” to some extent, required Eazi to put his business savvy on the back burner. “One of the main differences about the creative process of this album was I wasn’t making songs to sell,” he said. He had to banish the usual questions — about marketability and where a given record might play well (the club? Radio?) — from his mind.
“Legalize,” for example, was out straight of his subconscious. Eazi was in New York recording with Haitian producer Michaël Brun and the two were “just vibing and eating so much food” that Eazi felt almost delirious. Brun started playing the guitar and Eazi began freestyling lyrics. He had been thinking about his longtime girlfriend, Nigerian actress Temi Otedola. As Brun played, Eazi poured his feelings into “Legalize”: “Even if you don’t know, baby, I go make you realize,” Eazi croons on the track. “I no go let you go baby na you be my wife.”
The album, he said, is “100 percent heart.”
It arrives at a time when Eazi is truly learning to embrace the phrase that inspired his passion project: Chop Life.
“I realized that because my growth happened so fast, I was just so focused on figuring things out as an independent artist, and I didn’t really take the time to grasp and take it all in. I never took vacation, I never even paused to spend some of my money that I had earned,” he said. “I’m still in the trenches, but I’m taking it in now.”
