See + Hear: videos: "Heartbeat" and "The Uncomfortable Truth"

Nneka Egbuna at S.O.B.'s: A Serious Firebrand
New York Times * February 4, 2010
by Jon Pareles

Prayers, protests, appeals to conscience and pleas for love filled Nneka's set at S.O.B.'s on Tuesday night. She's a petite firebrand with serious intentions: "It's very important that you pay attention to the lyrics," she insisted as one song began. Her message is steadfastness above all: "You can't take my soul away," she sang. "You can't make me go astray."

Nneka Egbuna (pronounced NAY-ka EG-boo-na), whose parents are Nigerian and German, grew up in Nigeria and built her career in Germany, where she has been recording with hip-hop producers since 2005, although she performed with a live band. She now has homes in Lagos and Hamburg, while her songs are in English with some pidgin Nigerian. She has just released her American debut album, "Concrete Jungle" (Yo Mama/Decon/Epic), a compilation from her European releases.

Nneka has partly modeled herself on American songwriters like Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu, who mix exhortations with glimpses of personal life and mingle some rapping with their singing. Like them, she draws on rhythms of resistance, including reggae, blues shuffles and hip-hop, with a voice that's far more determined than it sounds at first. It's narrow, high, deft and sharp as a scalpel, with rising passion as she rides the vamps of her music.

Nneka also invokes British trip-hop, with its stark reggae undercurrents, and power-chorded rock anthems. Oddly, though she sang about trying to hold onto traditions, she didn't use Nigeria's own Afrobeat. One of her songs, "V.I.P. (Vagabond in Power)," denounces the exploitation of the Niger River delta (where Nneka grew up) by oil companies and corrupt government; it echoes the title of an Afrobeat song by Fela Anikulapo Kuti, but sets her own lyrics to a flamenco-pop rumba.

Nneka is devout; many of her songs call on "the Lord" for strength. She also has a didactic streak. "I tend to explain my songs," Nneka said onstage, and for a few of them she was more eloquent in those explanations than in the songs themselves. "The Uncomfortable Truth," she said, was about "pure love straight from the heart, love that does not possess, obsess, request," which was better than the song's own refrain: "Let us make a change/ Why can't we turn the page."

Yet when Nneka performed, it wasn't her lyrics that demanded attention. It was the way she seized on choruses as incantations, the way her voice curled around the beat and ricocheted off it, the way her tone changed from frail to righteous over the crescendos of her band. What she was saying came through most vividly in the music, the sound of one woman's tenacious sense of purpose.