Tekno — Pana

For as long as single words can stand alone, we will always have a Tekno song. It used to be mostly verbs and the odd noun: ‘Holiday’ (2013), ‘Dance’ (2014), 2015’s ‘Wash’ and ‘Duro’ (‘wait’ in Yoruba). There was the pronoun: ‘Anything’ (2014). A few months ago, the man arrived at the adverb: 'Where' (2016).

Is a question mark missing from that last title? No matter. Tekno is a pop singer; he has no use for punctuation.

He has use for hits though. Every song mentioned above has been a hit. And yet, for some time Tekno belonged to the class of artists with songs more famous than themselves.

This is of limited benefit in the Nigerian music industry where corporate endorsements bring in considerable revenue and bragging rights. But big corporations sign big names and perhaps bigger personalities. They have small use for hits without identities: They may use the hit song for a campaign; getting the artist for an endorsement is a different discussion.

So Tekno was without such an endorsement until a recent deal with telecom company MTN. And yet in the most famous of ads for the company, he was surrounded by artists who have not had as many hits as himself. The star of the ad was Falz, an artist with a clear identity as a funny young man; a very good album; and, frankly, a limited number of hits on the scale of Tekno’s.

Never mind that though, Tekno is back with a single. As usual it is a single word title, 'Pana'; as usual it is going to be a hit. What with its grand use of drums and the rather preternatural feel the man has for winning melodies.

This time the title is not so easy to decipher. ‘Pana’ seems to refer to a woman’s name, close in sound to that other titular lady in ‘Panya’, his duet with the duo Bracket. It isn’t though. The name of the girl here is the song's very first word:

Folake, give me love o. Na you dey catch my shot o. For your sake I go go church o We go drive around for my Porsche o Baby Pana, They say you like wahala I get wahala Anywhere that you go I go follow you dey go They say you like cassava I get big cassava  

Going past the title, which ultimately may have no meaning, there's that curious line about cassava as metaphor for male genitals. Before now, there was the ubiquitous banana, used by everyone from D’Prince of the Mavin group to Orezi. There is plantain, used by Myro and Oritshe Femi on ‘Plantain’ (2015). In 2013, Gzik named a song ‘Carrot'. We have also heard about the cucumber and sugarcane. The question that may have occurred to listeners is this: When will the plant-based Nigerian phallus achieve its tuber-destin