Olatunji Ige has an interesting story and an equally interesting way of telling it.
He may have been born to Nigerian parents but his music is far more influenced by the Philadelphia streets than by Afrobeats. And you can tell that the upstart fancies his chances against his city’s icon.
On “Bring Yo Friends”, he benchmarks his flyness against Beanie Sigel’s, while on “Change That”, he engages in a one-sided, d*ck measuring contest with another one –
Young Tun, and don’t forget the J-I / In my city and they love me like I’m A.I.
That’s far too premature but Missed Calls does sound like what happens when dreamers deliberately make dreamy music.
The rapper wants you to get lost in his world and just like anyone who left their teens only a few ago, it’s made up of late nights, alcohol, sex and the all too familiar should-I-or-shouldn’t-I struggle with recreational drugs. If you add some mild-mannered activism to the mix, then you have the beautifully discordant “22”. Tunji is two things, a young man searching for who he is and an artist looking for what he should sound like. He might not have found that man yet but it’s clear he knows who he should sound like, and that’s no one.
“Bring Yo Friends” and “On my grind” are arguably the project’s most conventional-sounding rap records. The Southern cadence and generic, sing-along choruses give Tunji a clear platform to go bar for bar without any distraction. But he shies away, if lyricism is his strong suit, he’s clearly not letting on. He chooses to to show up on the woozy “Fired Up”, well kinda, announcing the demise of trap rap and the rise of his brand of alt hip-hop.
How high will he rise? It depends on whether the audience find listening to his music as fun as he obviously does making it. As the recent college graduate makes the transition from hip-hop as a hobby to hip-hop as a pay job, he will learn to blend R&B, muffled rap and autotune more effortlessly than he did on “War” and he’ll also learn that it’s easier to fill the shoes of Philly legends like Allen Iverson and Beanie Sigel on wax than in real life.
But in the mean time, let’s appreciate Missed Calls for the genre-bending, category-defying, work-in-progress that it aspired to be.