Look What You’ve Done, a song in Greatman Takit’s newly released fourth EP, Worship SZN, is equally pliable to multiple interpretations. “What would I do without your love? / I feel the warmth of your arms around me,” Takit sings, his baritone pocketed in a production that sets the tone for a breezy praise-and-worship session.
Of course, if you have listened to the EP up to this point, then you know that the referent of Takit’s evocations is the Christian God, or “Yahweh” as the artist calls him elsewhere. But, say, you had no prior background knowledge of the EP, no one would blame you for thinking the song is in the service of either an earthly love or lover. The song’s earthliness epitomises how Takit negotiates his Christian faith: for him, God is not an abstraction, but rather a palpably human presence. God is as real to him as an earthly lover is—with “arms” and “warmth”—a point stressed across the EP’s eight songs.
Greatman Ademola Takit grew up in Abuja, with his parents and three brothers. That he makes Gospel music is possibly a consequence of the kind of nurture he received: his father is a pastor, and his mother a church minister, suggesting an upbringing heavily premised on Christian doctrine.
However, Takit wasn’t particularly groomed on church music but rather the pop songs of the time—this was the late ’90s and early 2000s, and Rap and RnB soundtracked the epoch.
“I grew up on radio music, and my uncle often played Tupac,” Takit tells me. He realised he could sing in junior high, and, at one point, was the director of both the junior and senior school choirs; he also belonged to the school’s drama group. His artistic neurons, you could say, were fired early in his life.
He recalls a fond memory, “Back then, a friend dared me to improvise a rap. Some of my classmates banged on the desks to make a beat, and I freestyled to it. My rap career took off from there.” On entering Federal University of Technology, in Minna, Takit joined a rap group, where, for years, he honed his musical skills.
His first record, Ain’t Nobody (2016), boasts a fleet flow and tongue-twisting multisyllabic rhymes, and booms with the braggadocious zest typical of rap songs. It is also the first instance of Takit adapting his Christian ideals into verse. The song features in his debut EP, Wildfire (2016), in which he raps for the most part. In one of the tracks, Let My Life, he turns his ire on corrupt pastors and self-serving politicians, and cites the triad of “money, sex and power” as this age’s leading vices.
The other songs, however, are less of a jeremiad and more of a blitz of anecdotal evangelism: Takit tables his life as evidence of divine benevolence. A Whitman’s sampler of Rap, Afropop, Dancehall and Trap, the EP uses popular secular sounds in promulgating its religious message, such that even non-Gospel fans might stay for the percussive beats and piquant rap verses.
In subsequent EPs, Energy (2021) and Commando (2022), Takit evangelises some more but this time does not rap. This modal switch seems intended to flaunt his ability to adapt his message to various sonic topographies.
Worship SZN is sans the rapidly rapped verses that animate Takit’s debut project, instead presenting a stripped-down alternative: the drums, with their rounded edges, are a shrinking violet, mostly ceding space to a mesh of soft piano and guitar chords. The EP, with its easy-going tenor, has a less kinetic feel than his debut; but this is appropriate for the meditative mood that Takit wants to conjure.
When I ask Takit why he has made Worship SZN, he proffers an earthly reason, “I want people to listen to the EP and leave with the opinion that it is possible to do Afrobeats and Rap, and still do this kind of music.”
The primary reason, however, is that he wants to provide listeners with an exalting spiritual experience. “I want it to take people on a spiritual journey; I want people to pray with the songs and connect with God,” he tells me.
As if to impress this prayerly essence on listeners, some of the songs begin with Takit charging you to “speak in tongues right now,” while held in the raptures of glosolalia himself. A striking fact is the kind of prayer that the EP insists on: it’s not the sort that makes demands of God, but that which offers both praise and gratitude to him, convinced that this is a plausible way to invite divine favours.
Anyone who knows anything about human psychology, or the art of persuasion, will tell you that this—incurring goodwill through gratitude, praise, or even flattery—is, in fact, a very earthly thing to do.
