Oluwa Give Me A New Story Review: Eddy Ratty Makes A Decent Bid for South-South Stardom

Nigeria’s pop music has long been dominated by acts from the southwest, an expected outcome given Lagos’s position as commercial centre and cultural locus. Fela, Sir Shina Peters, Banky W, Tiwa Savage, Wizkid, Davido. It’s certainly easier to count the performers who are not Lagos people.

The trendy boys for the non-Lagosian group in contemporary pop are Rema and his peer Shallipopi, both Benin boys. A lesser-known act, Eddy Ratty, throws his hat in the ring with the release of his first single of 2026. Titled “Oluwa Give Me A New Story”, the sing is both an addition to the south-south pop corpus as well as a new entry in Nigeria’s repository of gospel-tinged music from pop acts. 

In the song, which can be streamed on Spotify and elsewhere, the artist deploys some of the usual elements of Nigerian pop lyrics aimed at provoking spiritual blessings. You get a plea: “Oluwa o…change my story”. You also get the express need for financial breakthrough, “Me and poverty, we don break up”. But while the song’s percussive-laden production seems primed for dancing, the song carries a whiff of desperation, which puts the song in touching distance of Victor AD’s “Wetin We Gain”.  

The kinship with the Victor AD track is important mainly because both artists are from the south-south and the male figure in both songs are engaged in voicing a need for the kind of material success that’s not merely for the singer’s wellbeing but also for a degree of excess. With Victor AD, that excess is reflected in his need for a Benz. As he puts it, “If we no buy the benz, wetin we gain?”

In the case of Eddy Ratty, the need is more geographical. He wants God to “catapult” him “to places wey I’ve never been, to cities me I like to see”. Together both songs appear to make a point about the difficulty of becoming prosperous in the south-south community (and maybe even country) these young men share.

This, of course, means that both songs, knowingly or unwittingly, are, at the minimum, tangentially political. This has nothing to do with the song’s dance appeal. As Fela Anikulapo-Kuti showed us throughout his career, the political and the groovy can dwell within the same chorus.

To make a general point: in a poor country, the plea for financial rescue from the young and able-bodied is always politically charged. After all, the willingness to work is not expected to be a challenge. It is this tilt to Ratty’s music that elevates it from standard-issue pop to something a bit more elevated. This is especially true when you consider his older work. Take, for instance, “After The Rain” from his 2017 EP of the same name.

Some of the lines from that song are: “I’m on top of the game”, “Oluwa don bless o”, and “Pepper don rest o”. Those cliches are mirrored by the song’s video, which features routine shots of the artist holding 100-dollar notes as he cavorts with half-clad women in a gaudy mansion. In the same year, he released “Money In the Bank”, a song which pretty much tells you its subject in the title. The production work on both songs is amateurish and derivative.

In the years since then, Ratty has grown enough that production on his 2026 song is much better and even as his concerns have hardly evolved—he still wants his cash and craves the good life—a perceptible switch up is perceptible. Adopt a chronological Eddy Ratty playlist: from 2019’s “After the Rain” to 2023’s “Who Be Dem” (from the Awakening album) to 2026’s “Oluwa Give Me a New Story” and it’s obvious that something has happened to the artist’s sensibility. Or maybe it’s merely the miracle of getting older that’s responsible for the conspicuous glow-up in sonic terms.

That said, Ratty may have made a mistake in not releasing a music video for “Who Be Dem”, a song that features what is certainly his most unusual soundscape. The beat is jaunty and has an oriental tilt, as though someone in the studio was dreaming of Kungfu movies in the 1990s.

In any case, Nigerian radio is not particularly friendly to the kind of innovation in the song, so maybe it was no bad idea to not promote this track with a video. With “Oluwa Give Me A New Story”, Ratty is back to making music that Nigerian radio won’t get a headache figuring out. It is one of the counterintuitive things about pop music: the best songs may sound new but the familiar sounds would almost certainly find a larger audience. That is the logic powering the many versions of amapiano you hear everywhere today.

What does this mean for Ratty’s chances at landing the success aka the “new story” he prays for? Who knows? Pop music is a notoriously whimsical genre and success in it is never promised, given the large number of variables required to make it happen.

What is obvious is that the new song is an improvement on his older songs. Its derivative elements may yet work in its favour because, as said, novelty doesn’t succeed in pop music until it succeeds. Working with known elements always works best. Consider, for example, his 2024 record “Gbido”, which in Spotify’s reckoning is his biggest single so far. It is the most propulsive track in his discography.
Obviously targeted at the club scene, the song sounds like something cooked up with ingredients naturalised from American hip-hop. That familiarity must be responsible for some of the song’s success. (And yet the catchiest part of the song might be the bits where Ratty confidently deploys his native Edo language. On those parts of the song, he sounds like a true popstar, proof that when it comes to pop, aura, as the kids call it, is about as important as anything else in the artist’s bag.) The new song is in a more plaintive key and in Yoruba and works in a subtler way than the groovy “Gbido”.

And although he would need to put in and put out some more work, Eddy Ratty’s evolution—from 2017’s “After the Rain” to 2026’s “Give Me A New Story”—suggests a new story in south-south pop is possible. With a little luck, he just might join Shallipopi and Rema in hoisting the Benin flag on the national pop stage.

by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo