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By Akan Jonathan Joey
Life in Nigeria is often a multifaceted experience of extremes. Wealth and poverty live side by side, frequently divided by something as mundane as a phone call.
“It’s anybody’s world,” you mutter as you race to your bus stop at 5am, scanning your neighbourhood for threats, on your way to your big break. It’s either one or the other — hope and paranoia fuelling every move as you pursue the Nigerian dream.
That’s the mood hanging in the air on Eddy Ratty’s mid-length debut, My Kind of Vibe, where prayers to God for blessings and safekeeping seamlessly blend into erotic praise for the female form. One or the other. Often together.
Born in Benin, Ratty took the long route to his moment in the sun. A multi-year run around dingy Lagos studios honed his melodic instincts before he struck out alone, independently making a dent with a string of singles, including a cover of Kizz Daniel’s Fvck You.
Subsequent years saw him build momentum, culminating in My Kind of Vibe, a seven-track exploration of earnest expression. Ratty traverses the full range of human emotion with disarming ease. In the first five minutes alone, you are swept from prayer into hedonism, before the album pivots into existential anguish on “Osanle.”
Nigeria’s societal woes bear down on him as he calls out to an American-based compatriot to return home — where the situation is bleak. “Fuel scarcity, bad economy, no security, brutality, no electricity…” he lists his pain without flinching.
Where Ratty does his best work is in yearning and melody. His writing functions as both world-builder and instrument in its own right, complementing the lovelorn production on “Leg Go” and “Drunk in Love.” He retains that same intensity on “Nobody Holy,” an earworm refrain about self-awareness and personal freedom. “Man wey work must to church, me I don work, I must to chop…” Ratty asserts his dues over reggae-styled instrumentation with effortless conviction.
The album closes on a note of quiet triumph with “Blessings,” a heartfelt ode to gratitude that circles back to the spiritual thread introduced at the very start. Amid the chaos of survival, hustle, and fleeting pleasures, Ratty pauses to count his wins — big and small — offering thanks for the journey itself. It is a fitting end to a project that refuses to pick sides between the sacred and the sensual, the struggle and the celebration.
In My Kind of Vibe, Eddy Ratty captures the Nigerian dream as he lives it — raw, melodic, and unapologetically human. Definitive proof that even in extremes, there is space for both prayer and praise.
