Like
sparkling city lights, sparse synthesized notes flicker and dance in surreal
slow-motion in the intro to “Call Me, I Miss Ya!,” Victor PEDRO’s brand new
single. Somewhere in the background, a vocal harmony is growing out of the
silence and cutting into our hearts from afar. The melody is warm, but the tone
of the instruments is cold, removed from this world and unlike the vivacious
vocal that will come soaring into the sky only moments away from now. Victor
PEDRO is engaging all of our senses in “Call Me, I Miss Ya!,” and if you
thought that he couldn’t top some of his previously released material, you’d
better brace yourself for the most dynamically stylish single released thus far
in his career.
PEDRO
repeats himself more than once in the lyrics to this song, but it isn’t because
he’s aimlessly looking for words to fill up the space in the track; in fact,
quite the contrary indeed. To emphasize his point, he will reiterate a
statement once, twice, even three times if he deems it necessary, and rather than
elaborating on his point by getting descriptive in his adjacent verses, he
keeps his commentary as sharp and uncompromising as he can. PEDRO doesn’t want
to bore us with a lot of patronizing placations or, for that matter, a stale
beat that’s been reheated after a decade in the freezer (see the new Logic
collaboration for such trite dribble). Instead, this Nigerian singer and
songwriter is pushing his sound into the experimental, and coming up with some
wildly imaginative results.
The
theme of the song comes full circle in the chorus, which marries the question
with the self-explaining answer through little more than a simplistic prose and
a poetic disposition that makes the track so much more relatable than the
plastically-stylized pop fodder of PEDRO’s contemporaries to the west of his
home country. Lyrics are supposed to be the centerpiece of hip-hop, and PEDRO
never tries to skew them with a lot of uselessly indulgent instrumentation
here. He might not be the most famous rapper in the world, or even in Africa,
but he’s got one thing that countless others who came before him never did –
self-awareness. His music isn’t plagued with the same problems that we hear in
mainstream rap, because both he and his aesthetic are lacking in egotism on
(basically) every front.
“Call
Me, I Miss Ya!” wraps up in a gentle thrust that leaves anyone with a taste for
hard-hitting R&B and affectionate hip-hop ready to take on the night and
whatever heartbreak it might have in store for us, and in terms of promoting
its star composer and performer, it does more for Victor PEDRO’s moniker than
any of his other work ever has. PEDRO has a very special talent that he’s
putting to good use in this song, and if we’re lucky, it won’t be the last time
that he puts all of himself into a wicked experimentation. I’ll be following
his progress in either case, and I would tell anyone who loves real, urbane rap
to do the same.
Joshua
Beach
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