Music  

12 years later, did P-Square Get Squared?

By Chiagoziem Onyekwena

13 May 2017   |   4:11 am

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Bless Mary Slessor - she fought to convince 19th Century Nigerians that there was nothing wrong with twin babies.

P-Square

Bless Mary Slessor – she fought to convince 19th Century Nigerians that there was nothing wrong with twin babies. In certain cultures, twins were seen as evil, so when a mother gave birth to a pair of babies, they were sent right back to their Maker. And that’s why we do not take for granted that the most recognizable faces in Nigerian pop music, in the last two decades approximately, has been Peter and Paul Okoye of the music group, P-Square.

P-Square’s illustrious career truly took off in 2001 when they won the music contest “Grab Da Mic”. Their debut album, Last Nite, was released 2 years later on Timbuk2 Music. It was a stellar offering but suffered from inadequate marketing and distribution. It was P-Square’s sophomore album, Get Squared, released 12 years ago today,that really turned the dancing duo into legitimate pop stars.

That’s where famed Alaba marketer TJoe came in. Get Squared was released on the freshly-minted, family-owned Square Records but was marketed and distributed through TJoe, as a long and mutually-beneficial partnership was born. The urban philosopher M.I Abaga, immortalized this partnership years later on his song “Fast Money, Fast Cars.” Playing the role of a fictional runz girl sizing up the three men by their wallets, he rapped, “I like Peter and Paul, but I would do TJoe” – that’s how profitable P-Square’s catalog became for TJoe Ltd.

Get Squared was also the start of real commercial success for the twins and it became one of the – if not the – highest-selling album(s) of 2005. Being that P-Square were dancers before they became singers, the album contained a number of dance records specifically made for the club and for their high-octane stage performances. Bangers such as “Bizzy Body” and “Get Squared” became nationwide hits but every one of the nine songs on P-Square’s magnum opus received considerable airplay. Even its most serious moment “Oga Police”, where the twins spoke about police brutality from the viewpoint of a young Nigerian, got radio spins.

When the topic switched to love, P-Square shared the most gripping, melodramatic stories. The ballad “Omoge Mi” was about a cheating girlfriend who slept with, of all people, their best friend, while “Temptation”, brilliantly reversed places, with the twins doing the cheating or at least thinking seriously about it. It was like a telenovela sung to a beat. Get Squared excelled when P-Square was in storytelling mode, the album’s opener “Story” even reenacts the traditional African storytelling setting where children gather around an elder and listened intently.

Making covers of popular Western pop songs was the norm circa 2000. Western music ruled our airwaves, so a few artists ‘tricked’ local stations into playing their songs by making local copies of records that the public was already familiar with. It was a creative low point in Nigerian music history but no one copied with as little shame as P-Square. Rather distractingly, the more intently you listened to P-Square, the more you heard their musical influences. On
“Story” they sang:
12 years ago, when we started dancing
Imitating, miming Michael Jackson
They used to call us Paul and Peter
We realize say P-Square better

The 13-track album (inclusive of 3 instrumentals and 1 remix) opened with “Story,” a tale about the twin’s journey up until ’05, and that’s about where the ingenuity stopped. The very fabric of this song, right down to the kids singing, was lifted from R. Kelly’s “I Wish.” The crunk-inspired “Get Squared” borrowed Lil Jon’s inimitable yelling ad-libs, the lady on “Your Number” sounded similar to the one on B.I.G.’s “More Money, More Problems”; a few lines from Fugees’ “Ready or Not” got rejigged on “Bizzy Body”, while the entire beat from Westlife’s “Soledad” was regurgitated on “Omoge Mi”.

To make matters worse, perhaps in keeping with their new image of self-sufficiency, none of those samples were credited. Although, that’s probably asking too much from an album where no other contributors were credited, never mind the samples. One of those contributors, Waje, turned out to be a star in her own right and it makes you wonder who else was hidden in P-Square’s backroom when making this brilliant album.

Another criticism of Get Squared is that it wasn’t written with any respect to timelessness – the songs weren’t particularly intricately put together or layered with meaning for listeners to peel away through the years. This means that although many consider Get Squared to be a classic, that assessment is largely based on impact more than anything else. The album hasn’t aged as well as albums released around the same time – Face 2 Face by 2Face and Unchained by Sunny Nneji.

However, these are all criticisms that P-Square have withstood in the 12 years that followed the release of Get Squared – the album that came in and changed their lives forever, 100-plus years after Mary Slessor came in and changed the lives of twins just like them.