We still mostly kinda like him…

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[6.29]

Micha Cavaseno: I always feel oddly unfed by Afrobeats and the new explosion of Nigerian pop. There’s always a peculiar lightness in energy and the production that just doesn’t do it for me, despite my recognition that this is a great movement of new talents. On “Ojuelegba” it’s more of the same; Wizkid leaves me feeling cold, and the production is a melange of cool ideas and sun-soaked qualities, but I don’t feel it. I’m hoping one day these sounds are going to click.
[5]

Iain Mew: The Legendary Beats ident comes off faintly comical when the charm of the song is how low-key it is. It would surely shrug off legendariness like it shrugs off everything else, constructed with care to remove cares.
[7]

Will Adams: With those braided drums and plush steel pans, “Ojuelegba” floats a few inches from the ground, as if it’s too afraid to be a full-on dance track. But damn if it isn’t gorgeous.
[6]

Anthony Easton: I love how dense this is, and how the electronic elements work as a kind of punctuation against analogue percussion– that and how Wizkid doesn’t make the mistake to assume a good flow is a quick flow, or that a quick flow is the only way to add density.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Rating this high for the moments where the instruments, particularly the piano and fluttery kazoo, stop sounding like brillant individual samples and start sounding brilliant together, and for that part in the chorus (“I can’t explain”) when Wizkid sounds uncannily like a pitch-shifted Bjork.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: Lots of interesting sounds, but ultimately trapped in a bit of a sleepy song. 
[5]

Mo Kim: Recently, a good friend educated me on the significance of black spirituality. To paraphrase her thoughts, religion often belies a belief in something beyond the immediate; contextualized within centuries of racism, colonialism, and violence against one’s entire people, it serves as a lifeline to survival, an unbreakable hope that better days will come. Wizkid was born in 1990, nine years before his home country Nigeria would begin democratization, and what strikes me about those dates is how recent they are, how close and how heavy this history might be to those who just lived through it. That weight is felt in “Ojuelegba,” beneath its colorful sound palette of bouncy piano chords, noodly synth lines, and textured percussion, yet the celebration and the pain exist here in relation to one another. Perhaps this is best exemplified with Wizkid’s delivery of “I am feeling good tonight,” a line found in virtually every Pitbull single but delivered here with gratitude (“I am thanking God for life,” he continues, making the connection to his spirituality explicit) and pathos (if you’re feeling good tonight, what does that say about how you feel on other nights?) that’s as far from YOLO hedonism as you can get. Some mornings, I wake up and think about the painful history we have all inherited and the work that has yet to be done. I thank God that we have music to make that work more joyful, if not any less heavy.
[8]