From The Curator at BlackFM
There is a particular kind of record that arrives not to fill a dancefloor but to still a room, and Kizz Daniel’s “Owo Oluwa” belongs unmistakably to that rarer, quieter category. Translating from Yoruba as “The Hand of God,” the track and its accompanying video—reported first by BellaNaija—represent something of a departure for an artist whose commercial instincts have long been tuned to the ebullient and the irresistibly danceable. Here, instead, is a man taking stock, looking skyward, and dedicating the work to the memory of his late parents. One suspects that grief, handled with any seriousness, tends to recalibrate an artist’s priorities rather more thoroughly than any marketing meeting ever could.
The personnel assembled for “Owo Oluwa” reads like a considered ensemble rather than a star-studded afterthought. Young Jonn lends his voice, the producer Krizbeatz constructs the sonic architecture, and the Wave Choir supplies a choral depth that Afrobeats, for all its rhythmic brilliance, has not always made room for. It is worth remembering that gospel and Afrobeat have long shared a porous border in Nigerian music—one need only think of the devotional undercurrents running through highlife and juju long before Afrobeats became a global export—so this pivot is less a radical rupture than a return to a well that has always been there, waiting to be drawn from again.
Walking Gently Through “Owo Oluwa”
Lyrically, Kizz Daniel settles on a recurring Yoruba phrase, “ṣe jẹjẹ,” which speaks to walking gently through life, unhurried and unburdened by the anxieties that so often accompany ambition. It is an instruction as much as an observation, and it sits at odds with the frantic self-promotion that defines so much of contemporary pop. The song’s message, as BellaNaija notes, turns on “unyielding faith, divine guidance, and inner peace”—a trinity of concerns rather distant from the champagne-and-nightclub concerns of his earlier hits, though no less sincerely rendered for that.
Krizbeatz, for his part, has not abandoned the Afrobeat bounce that remains the genre’s lingua franca; rather, he layers it with a house music arrangement, producing something that moves between the sacred and the danceable without ever feeling like a compromise between the two. Young Jonn’s vocal contributions thread through this hybrid with evident ease, while the Wave Choir’s harmonies provide the kind of textural richness that a solo voice, however accomplished, simply cannot replicate alone.
From Studio Stage to Nigerian Streets
The video itself, co-directed by Perliks Definition and the philanthropist Asherkine, is structured as a diptych: the polished theatre of performance set against the unvarnished reality of community life. It opens, fittingly enough, on an elevated circular green stage, where Kizz Daniel appears in a sharp, oversized black blazer, flanked by the Wave Choir in black-and-white robes beneath draped fabric—a tableau with something of the ecclesiastical about it, deliberately so, one imagines.
From there the narrative descends, quite literally, into the street, where Asherkine’s acts of philanthropy translate the song’s abstract talk of grace into something altogether more tangible. An aspiring fashion designer receives a brand-new sewing machine; a commercial driver is gifted a motorised tricycle. These are not grand gestures in the manner of a benefactor cutting a ribbon for the cameras—they are the small, transformative interventions that alter the daily texture of a life, and the video captures the resulting unfiltered joy and tears of relief with an honesty that resists sentimentality even as it courts it.
A Human Tribute Beyond the Charts
What elevates “Owo Oluwa” beyond the realm of a well-meaning charity reel is the way the footage is intercut with warm, unscripted interactions between Young Jonn and the community’s elders—a reminder that reverence for one’s forebears, whether biological parents or the wider community of elders, remains a quietly persistent theme in Nigerian popular culture, however much the industry’s surface trends towards youth and spectacle. The celebratory street dances that punctuate the video feel less choreographed than genuinely spontaneous, which is no small achievement for a production of this scale.
Taken as a whole, “Owo Oluwa” suggests an artist in a reflective register, using the considerable platform Afrobeats has afforded him to gesture towards something larger than chart performance or streaming figures. It is, in the end, a tribute—to parents no longer present to witness their son’s evolution, to the notion that grace operates in sewing machines and tricycles as readily as in song, and to a genre that, for all its global ambitions, has never quite lost touch with the devotional roots from which it sprang. Whether “Owo Oluwa” marks a permanent shift in Kizz Daniel’s catalogue or simply a solemn interlude remains, naturally, to be seen; but as a single, carefully constructed statement, it does what the best music always does—it makes the listener pause, and perhaps walk a little more gently themselves.
Source: www.bellanaija.com. Keep listening on BlackFM Afrobeats radio.
