The Shuffle: Revisit the title track from P-Square’s platinum-selling album, ‘Game Over’

A rare Nigerian classic fit for a rock metal re-do.

Sibling duo (or trio, if you count, Jude Okoye) P-Square have been accosted with various accusations of sampling and song appropriation nearly as often as the count of every hit song they’ve released. Still, at a time where labels were falling apart internally and Nigerian music had only aging superstars who occasionally misfired, P-Square remained a consistent firebrand for Afropop. They had stage presence, sang their hearts out, and managed to pull off at least one nationwide radio hit per year.

The P-Square legacy may forever be haunted by the questions about originality, but no one will forget the golden P-Square era of Game Over , an Afropop album reported to have sold nearly 8-Million copies across Africa and the world. Game Over packed a punch, though most of that effect is owed to heavy sampling from a broad range of genres and soundscapes, it also explains why an African pop album will have a hip-hop and R&B title-track like “Game Over”.

“Game Over” opens with ominous violins, similar to the ones you hear on Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” . The instrumental quickly dissolves into claps and heavy base drops in quick succession like you would hear on a typical Timbaland produced track. By the time vocals set into the first verse, the mood had already been set for a hard break-up song that would have fit just as right on a rock metal instrumentation.

It is agreeable that after listening to the entire album, the purpose of “Game Over” is lost as a title track. But this is not very uncommon with P-Square albums either. The theme of “Game Over”, however remains a rarity in Afropop. We have all heard sappy Nigerian heartbreak songs, but there are very few that balance the actual rage of losing love quite as realistically as the P-Square do with “Game Over” .

Stream “Game Over” via Apple Music here

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