“Volume,” the SWAGUU opener where Seyi Vibez asks for mercy and more money in the same breath, entered TurnTable’s Official Nigeria Top 100 at No. 1 with almost nothing from radio. No song had topped that chart on streams alone before. For its first seven days, SWAGUU lived almost entirely on phones.
On the chart TurnTable published Monday night, covering Sep 25 to Oct 1, the No. 1 is “Ilome,” the SWAGUU song radio decided to play.
The climb from No. 3 did not come from more streaming. “Ilome” went from 5.16 million on-demand streams in its first week to 3.99 million in its second, and the smaller number was still the biggest in the country. What changed was the radio. TurnTable logged negligible airplay for the song in SWAGUU’s opening week; a week later it had 31.4 million in radio reach, No. 14 on the airplay chart. “Volume,” whose No. 1 had leaned on streams alone, slid to No. 5. Seyi now has his seventh No. 1 by TurnTable’s count, two of them from SWAGUU in two weeks, and “GTA,” out weeks before the album, sits at No. 2 again.
Next to “Volume,” “Ilome” is the easier song to hand a radio presenter. Native’s review of SWAGUU called it a song that “seems to do very little while quietly doing a great deal,” with Seyi calm over warm highlife riffs and sharp Ogene. It starts sparse, letting the Ogene call-and-response settle before the groove fills in. The chorus calls on Joromi, the Bini hero Victor Uwaifo turned into a highlife hit in 1965. Its plainest line is in English: do your best and leave the rest.
That same review asked who SWAGUU is for, with Burna Boy executive-producing and the album angled at listeners abroad. Two weeks of charts at home answer part of it. Phones took the whole album at once, and the song that pulled radio in far enough to win the chart is the one that reaches furthest back.