In December 2003 a new FM radio station, Radio Freedom, was opened in Kano. Within two years the station had become a catalyst in showcasing the increasing pool of emerging Hausa technopop performers. These were led by Bello Ibrahim (Billy-O). His demo (a studio recording distributed exclusively to other users through Bluetooth technology “Raining Season” (probably intended to be “Rainy Season”) received massive airplay on Freedom Radio in 2005, perhaps the only radio station worth listening to at the time due to its revolutionary approach to public broadcasting. The song’s appeal to young urban audiences was due to its use of Enghausa – starting a verse in Hausa and ending almost every line of the verse with an English word that captures a particular emotion.
Billy-O was a pioneer who was not afraid to explore new musical territories. I became acquainted with him and his partner Kabiru ‘Shaba’ Shariff from 2005, and in 2006, I invited them to perform at a British Council concert in Kano for which I was a Consultant Partner. They were sensational and caught the imagination of both the local audience and visitors who included British, French and Italians. Early to mid-2000 were truly the heydays of musical creativity in Kano.
Billy O has performed and recorded many songs and single-handedly created what I call Hausa Technopop – a synthesizer-flavored Hausa “music”. It was not “Hausa” as such, as no Hausa traditional instrument was used in any of his recordings. But he approached his art with a creative flair no other musician or songwriter in Kano had. The pulsating beat on the synthesizer, which were created by Shaba, defied the then Nanaye vocal arrangements typical of Hausa songs of the period. The Nanaye genre was made up of essentially love songs sun in a duet (male/female) mimicking Indian masala film soundtrack.
Not knowing the differences in evolving musical genres, many listeners label Billy-O as hip-hop. And yet, none of his songs can be considered strictly Rap (the outcome of hip-hop).
While Nanaye studio musicians follow the contours of the songs and create melodies for their clients, Shaba and Billy-O created a soundscape with Shaba’s synthesizer sound that remain constant for the duration of the song. Pioneering this musical development, was Billy-O’s Enghausa lyrics. I remember talking to a well-known (and respected) Nanaye singer who was affronted by Billy-O’s Enghausa lyrics.
Billy-O’s biggest hit was “Raining Season.” What made it even more revolutionary, beside the looping melody, was the mooching voice of Maryam Sale Muhammad, better known as Maryam Fantimoti (because she has a “portmanteau” box of songs). Fantimoti has probably the richest voice of any female singer in modern Hausa music – smooth, melliferous and deep. Performed in two verses with Fantimoti’s moaning chorus, the song revolutionizes economy of expression and delivered its message effectively. The first verse goes like this:
Farkon ganin ki na yo confusing / I was confused the first time I saw you
Sai da zuciya ta tayi ta squeezing / My heart felt squeezed
Sai da temperature ta ta yi rising / My temperature became high
Jiri nake ca ake na sha poison / I was dizzy, as if poisoned
Ni ko so na ke a san ina da reason / I want people to know there is a reason (s)
Reason na farko kina da kyan dressing / First you dress elegantly
Reason na biyu kullun son ki weaving / Secondly your weaved hair
The lovelorn protagonist clearly shows a command of modern urban Hausa Enghausa and respect or at least appreciation for the fashion sense of Hausa women, especially the cornrows they sport with their hair (no wigs!). However, it was verse two that became the main song’s hook for most listeners of the song, which goes like this:
Ɗauki gatarin son ki faskara mini / Split me with the axe of your love
Allurar son ki zurkuɗa mini / Pierce me with the syringe of your love
Fetur na so za ki balbala mini / Douse me with the petrol of your love
Buhun barkon son ki zazzaga mini / Cover me with jalapeño of your love
Ɗau diga ta so zo ki faskara mini / Split me with the pick ax of your love
Ya ki zo nan kar ki yi losing / Come here and don’t lose
Kar ki yi losing cikin raining season / Don’t lose in raining season
The appeal of the song was its deployment of metaphorical violence to express the overwhelming and consuming nature of love, transforming acts of harm into idioms of passion. Using hyperbolic erotic imagery, Billy-O emphasizes exaggeration (hyperbole) as a stylistic device. Thus, the violent metaphors amplify the intensity of desire beyond ordinary expression. The song exemplifies a poetics of tender violence, where love’s intensity is articulated through images of wounding, burning, and dismembering that paradoxically affirm affection rather than hostility. This affective brutality situates love within a continuum of pain and pleasure characteristic of Hausa romantic expression or “zazzafar soyayya.”
Despite this revolutionary start, however, it was not Billy-O/Shaba who released the first Hausa Technopop CD. This honor was taken by Abdullahi Mighty’s Taka, released in 2005 in Kano. Its lead track, ‘Sanya Zobe,’ was a pure dance-hall composition. Aimed squarely at the commercial side of the music industry, it attained its success through its adoption of a technopop dance matrix over-layered with a thin veneer of Hausa Nanaye-style singing. This form of Hausa Technopop music was followed by others, despite the contempt Technopop singers felt toward Nanaye singers. Indeed, the competition and scorn with which the rising Hausa Technopop musicians treat Nanaye lyricists and musicians were brought to the fore in one of the top-selling independent CDs of 2007 – Jeeta, by Kabiru ‘Shaba’ Shariff.
This posting expanded on an earlier published article of mine in 2019: Hausa Popular Music (Northern Nigeria, pp. 168-178), Hip-Hop in Nigeria (Hausa Rap, pp. 258-260). In David Horn, John Shepherd, Gabrielle Kielich, and Heidi Feldman (eds.) Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 12: Genres: Sub-Saharan Africa. New York: Bloomsbury. The encyclopedia entry is available at auadamu.com.
For those nostalgic of a lost Hausa music genre of the early 2000s, virtually all of Billy-O’s songs are available collectively at Internet Archive – that in itself a feat of recognition, ensuring that Billy-O’s music has now joined the exalted category of archival relevance. Note that this archive was part of a bot trawl, as the uploaders don’t even know who he is. But this collection was captured as part of catching of essential modern Hausa music. Billy-O himself has released a CD (the cover illustrates this post), but I doubt if it is available now. The direct download link is below (although link seems either broken or unstable, so just keep trying).
https://archive.org/details/BillyO/billy-o-rangwadar-mata-hbu-m-fag.mp3
