Asake and Blaqbonez have spent 2026 passing No. 1s between them. “Chanel” gave Blaqbonez his first No. 1 on the Official Nigeria Top 100 in May, and “IKEBE 3000” became his first UK Afrobeats Singles No. 1 on November 1. The first song the two shared is almost ten years older than both.
It is “No Pana,” a cover of Tekno’s “Pana” that Blaqbonez uploaded to his SoundCloud on September 7, 2016, about two weeks after Tekno put out the official video for the original. The credit line reads Jaido P, Kyle B, Asake Medoo and Blaqbonez. Asake still went by Asake Medoo then, and the upload sits at about 3,200 plays.
A clip of the cover resurfaced on X this afternoon.
The song comes out of Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, where Asake studied Theatre Arts and both men were working the campus show circuit. Asake’s first performance there went badly. He walked on bare-chested to cover Fela, and well over 5,000 students booed him. “I was wearing white pant o! I gats go hide for back of speaker, but thank God for Blaqbonez that day sha,” he said in a 2022 interview. He never spelled out what Blaqbonez did that night.
Blaqbonez had his own bad first night on the same campus. He froze halfway through a song he had recorded the night before and was booed off in front of about 5,000 people, he said in a 2019 interview, and he came away treating that crowd as a test he could keep retaking. “You see a ready crowd that is accessible and you can just keep testing,” he said.
Jaido P went on to build his own street rap career. Fireboy DML, Cheque and Chinko Ekun were on the same campus in those years too.
The pair’s 2026 run is still going. “Chanel” spent 17 days at No. 1 on Spotify’s Nigeria daily chart, and “IKEBE 3000” added six more before settling at No. 3 on the latest chart. On October 26, Blaqbonez posted an unreleased Asake verse and wrote that “m$ney said our O2 set was too short, so we linked up and made more songs.” By his account, more of them are on the way.