DJ Mankind’s ‘Closer’ is a quintessentia Afrobeats record

By Esomnofu Emmanuel

Mide Troy and Mr. Dee are two of Nigerian finest and skillful artistes. With arrays of songs released individually, they recently came together on DJ Mankind’s brand new single “Closer.”

DJ Mankind, the Nigerian born Disc Jockey has been at the forefront of giving yet to be known artiste platform. Beyond releasing frequent mixtapes that contain their tracks, he has also made it a point of duty to feature them on his songs.

Talent has never been a Nigerian problem, platform and finance remains the stumbling block to the artistes success. The number of record labels, financiers, and investors are low, they don’t even cater for the two percent of the aristes population.

Music industry stakeholders like DJ Mankind have been helpful with aiding budding, creative and out of the box artiste with their platform. With over one hundred thousand total streams on Audiomack, there is no doubt that the artiste is suited for the top in years to come.

With a mixture of Yoruba language, Pidgin, and English Language, the duo of Mide Troy and Mr. Dee profusely expresses their feelings to a girl on a song titled “Closer,” which was released on August 24, 2024. The song starts off with a mid tempo string, it gets embolden and louder as the song snowballed into the first minute mark. DJ Mankind introduces himself with words like “wadup my people, it’s cool DJ Mankind, the man so kind, wherever you are listening to this, this is a brand new one.” It is a solid way of opening a track, he introduces himself and gives the floor to the two singers. They take the opportunity with both hands, on the first verse, the singer serenading the listeners by telling them how the girl makes him feel, lines like “I can’t get you out of my medulla, oh baby, you are my medicine,” Mide Troy confesses. The elation and honesty gets more pronounced on the hook with him repeating “Jeka wa closer,” a Yoruba expression that loosely means Let’s get closer.

On the second verse of this song, Mide Troy is more authoritative with his lines, his masculinity seems to be in control this time around. He even pitched a coitus session with the girl. Closer as used on this song connote two things, romantic relationship or coitus, the latter seems to be true though.

DJ Mankind’s ability to bring up skillful and yet to be known artistes on board shows that he has an artiste development and discovery skill. On this song, he pushes both artistes to dig inward to get some of their lines. They are deep and sophisticated, even on a few occasions when they flex their vocal range, it is glaring that they truly want to do it.

With impeccable songwriters like Angela Utsu, Uwaneyin Daniel, Victor Osei Awauh, Williams Akintoye, Munachi
Onyeukwu aka Munaachucks, Fortune Igoru and Victor Thomas coming together to pen this
song, it shows that DJ Mankind brought the best of both worlds.

Dj Mankind produced the song, Danny Bazuaye Beatz serving as assistant producer while Viighoo served as the mixing and mastering
engineer.

“Closer” was executive produced by Rudebone of R.B Entertainment Ltd with AmeboLoaded Worldwide serving as the label it was released on.

With a copious leaning to R&B genre, “Closer,” is a quintessential Afrobeats record. One of the few that would be here for long.