Emeka Akumefule (born 29 January 1996), known professionally as Blaqbonez, is a Nigerian rapper signed to 100 Crowns, which is an imprint of Chocolate City. In 2019, he was profiled by The New York Times as one of the new guards of Nigerian music. He is widely known for his controversial self-proclaimed status as the “Best Rapper in Africa” (abbreviated as “BRIA”), which became the most talked about topic in the Nigerian hip hop space between July and September 2019.
Blaqbonez started exploring his rap skills very early, and at 16, came 1st out of over 3000 rappers in Nigeria, who participated in Terry tha Rapman’s Zombie competition. Five years later, Blaqbonez featured Terry on one of his projects. He emerged 1st runner-up in Vector (rapper)’s king kong competition, won the Rhythm Fm Freestyle Fury and became RhythmFm’s artiste of the month, became the Hennessy Vs class captain, part of the Soundcity blast cypher, also released his much talked about mixtape CTAT “Cssette Tapes and Tvs” grossing over 60,000 engagements in streams and downloads, which is his third mixtape, following hip-hop in blaq and the “unfinished EP”
No. 4. Good boy feat. BOJ & CKay: Released as the fifth track off his EP “Bad boy Baq re-up”. The song features vocals for ckay and a rap verse from BOJ. The song garnered over 5.5k views on blaqbonez’s official youtube page and an additional 42k views on chocolate city’s youtube page.
In an interview with The Punch newspaper, he said his “Best Rapper in Africa” proclamation was a response to a diss track and need to wake up other rappers in Nigeria. Blaqbonez has released 8 EPs, a Mixtape and 1 Album.
No. 3. Haba: Originally released in 2020, the song went viral with the hashtag #streamhaba during the lockdown. Blaqbonez continually pushed the song with skits and comments on twitter under tweets of popular artists. The song was later re-released with his latest/debut album in 2021 “Sex over Love” The song was prodced by Tempoe
No. 2. Bling feat. Amaarae and Buju: Off his debut album “Sex over Love” the song was produced by “Beat by J”. The official video has over 457k views on youtube and still counting.
Fun fact; Blaqbonez released a diss track to Kanye West in 2019 titled “Jesus Is Black (Letter to Kanye)”
No. 1. Mamiwater feat. Oxlade: Released under the label “100 Crowns” and off his 2018 EP; Bad boy Blaq, the song is arguably his biggest and shot him to the mainstream with the help of Oxlade dishing out a great hook to the song. The song has over 292k views on YouTube and the video was directed by TG Omori.
