For the introductory skit to his Man of the Year album, Skales recruits Do-2d-tun straight out of Olamide’s Baddest Guy Ever Liveth. An album that curiously begins in copycat mode clearly cares nothing for originality. As a matter of fact, the title “Man of the Year” is quite familiar. Did Phyno not have a song called that?Skales, acronym for Seek Knowledge Acquire Large Entreprenurial Skills, is a self-professed seeker. He rummages through other people’s material and converts it to make his own hits. In his latest album, he gives himself a laurel for these efforts in his album title.
Man of the Year is about aggregating sounds of potential hits under an umbrella, but Skales fails to realize that it is not a rainy day. People don’t get accolades for appropriating other people’s work.
Make no mistakes; Skales is a competent singer. His song writing and delivery are at par with, if not slightly above acceptable standards, but from inception he has failed to distinguish himself as a unique brand of African rhythms biting into Hip-Hop ethos.
Reekado Banks of Mavin Records, Ice Prince, Burna Boy, Phyno, Davido OBO, Olamide YBNL, Victoria Kimani of Chocolate City amongst others lend him their voices for the twenty-track album to which he was generous enough to add two bonus tracks, English and French versions of his biggest hit, “Shake Body”.
He is by himself on eight tracks: “What’s Up” and “I Am For Real” stand out as sterling efforts, but their successes should not be attributed to Skales. For instance, “What’s Up” starts off with him styling his verses after Jazzman Olofin of “Raise The Roof” fame. “I Am For Real” borrows its beat from R.Kelly’s Slow Wind Remix and the lyrical phrasing is straight out of “If It’s Lovin’ That You Want”, a song on Rihanna’s debut album, Music of the Sun.
“I’m A Winner”, the first song on the album, sounds like Crunk with a decent dose of Naija optimism/bragging. In “Always”, he briefly references D’banj’s ‘Fall in Love’ from ‘The Entertainer’. When Skales strives to sound like himself, he is seemingly styled liked a hybrid of Wizkid and Wande Coal.
An allocutus can almost be made on his behalf that no idea is original. Yes, this is true, but Nas also opines further in that eponymous song from ‘The Lost Tapes’–which Skales hasn’t listened to because he did not borrow from it—that it is never what you do, but how you do it. Beyond not breathing his brand into these songs, Skales did not list his references on his album sleeve. Clearly history is not an exerting teacher in the Nigerian musicscape if one refers to 2Face’s song, Flex, where he controversially claimed to have featured R.Kelly himself.
The lack of originality does not make these songs abysmally bad but it also doesn’t save them from the triteness that is the rule with contemporary Nigerian songs. Skale’s music is very melodious, his lyrical phrasing is quite delightful, the beats from his producers (mostly Jaypizzle) are charming—the finished product will not leave a dance floor unattended but neither will it leave a lasting impression.
