There is a story Sarz tells about the first time he sat in a real American studio, and it is not really a story about America. He had been flown in, nervous, looking for an A&R rep, when he noticed Timbaland through a glass door, making a beat with another artist like it was nothing. He peered in until security moved him along. Upstairs, another room held Swizz Beatz. Eventually Sarz found his own room, plugged in, and started playing tracks for an A&R who wanted something with an Afro house feel. When one of the beats landed, the executive told him to turn it up. Sarz cranked the volume until it was, in his words, “the loudest, but I kept like just making this seem like, oh my god, there’s something faulty, there’s something wrong with this.”

His computer was not malfunctioning. He was discovering, in real time, that everyone around him was simply working at a volume he had never been conditioned to reach. “In that moment I knew, like, yeah, you got to step it up,” he says. “You got to establish it up when their volumes are louder.” It is a small, almost throwaway anecdote, the kind that gets cut from most interviews for being too granular. But it contains the entire architecture of how Sarz has built a career: notice the gap, absorb the discomfort of it, then quietly go practice until the gap closes.

That instinct, applied over and over across eighteen years, is why a producer who started out trying to sound like Timbaland is now the reason a generation of Nigerian artists know what their own drums are supposed to sound like.

“I’ve never received any residual income from Nigeria”

Sarz opens with a sentence that should stop anyone who thinks Afrobeats’ global ascent has been a clean financial story for the people who built its sound. I’ve never received any residual income from Nigeria, ever, ever, he says, flatly, the kind of flatness that comes from having said it to himself many times before saying it out loud. For most of his career, a producer’s entire economic reality was the advance, a flat fee paid up front, disconnected from whatever the song went on to do. Make a hit, and the money was already spent before the song even reached the public.

The arithmetic was brutal in its predictability. An artist scores a smash off a Sarz beat, buys a car, and the producer who built the engine under the song is still rubbing two dimes for next meal. Sarz describes this gap as a kind of structural injury, the sense that “a producer and an artist share equally the creative input to making a song, so why is one person taking all the financial benefits from that project, and you’re just in the back burner, not getting anything.”

He is careful, though, not to make this purely an indictment of artists or labels. When he tries to locate the source of the dysfunction, he comes up empty. “I don’t have all the answers,” he admits, gesturing at the existence of collecting societies like COSON without much faith that they have changed anything. “It feels maybe like it’s gatekept, or someone is doing something funny somewhere.” The shrug in that sentence is doing a lot of work. It is the familiar expression of many Lagos producers who’ve spent two decades inside a system, profited from it, helped build its biggest exports, and still cannot tell you with confidence where the money is supposed to flow and why it doesn’t.

What makes Sarz’s framing distinct from the standard producer-grievance narrative is where he takes the analysis next. He does not argue that the system needs to be fixed before he can be paid. He argues that waiting for the system to fix itself was never going to be a strategy. “I don’t believe that my destiny is tied around anyone else. I believe that I control my destiny,” he says, and that sentence becomes the spine of everything that follows, his pivot into making his own music, into ownership, into building things that pay him directly instead of things he hopes someone else remembers to pay him for.

The Don Jazzy fork in the road

Sarz draws a hard line through Afrobeats history, and he places himself on the wrong side of it for longer than he is comfortable admitting. “In the early to mid 2000s, you either have music of your own, featuring people, or you sign artists and have a record label,” he says. “I think that’s the only way you can be successful as a music producer. Any other way, if you’re just producing from one person to the other and just waiting for advances, you’re just living from hand to mouth, pretty much.

He names Don Jazzy directly as the producer who understood this earliest, building Mavin around a hits-with-a-bunch ownership model while others, Sarz included, were still working gig to gig, song to song, freelancing their way through a career without the benefit of equity. It is a notably ungenerous thing to admit about your own early choices in a public conversation, and Sarz does not soften it. “For other people like us that were just producing one person to the other, it was really a struggle.”

The fashion metaphor he reaches for to explain why producers without ownership eventually get sidelined is sharper than it first appears. “Sometimes you might like a brand, right? And this other brand is hot and new, comes out. Doesn’t mean that this brand is not creating pieces that you love, but you just want something, you want a change. So how hot can you really be before someone else takes over the same, and they’re eating off your share of the national cake.” Talent, in his accounting, has a shelf life that has nothing to do with whether the talent is still good. Attention moves. Only ownership stays put.

This is also where Sarz locates the specific mental health cost of producing without equity, a cost he describes with more precision than is typical in these conversations. It is not just the money. It is watching someone else’s life visibly transform off a song you built equally, while your own life stays exactly where it was. “You’re not getting paid for it, and there’s also no residual income. So really, how hard can you work before you crash out, right?” He frames the strain as something close to an identity injury: loving the work, needing the work to fund a life, and watching the two come apart in public, song after song.

What ownership actually requires

The instinct toward ownership, once Sarz committed to it, did not arrive with a manual. He is candid that there was no clean blueprint, no moment of strategic clarity. “I really, really liked the song, and I think that I wanted to share that with the world. No matter what, I just knew, like, I wanted to make that happen,” he explains. Asked if he crafted his own records as his own from the start, his answer is immediate: “yes, from the jump, everything!”

But the more striking part of Sarz’s ownership philosophy is his refusal to romanticize it as a complete answer. He has watched peers treat ownership as a kind of moral victory that ends the conversation, and he pushes back on that directly. “Some people talk about ownership and they’re like, oh, they swear by it, but if you own music, honey, music is just your living room, it’s not making nothing, it’s zero,” he says. “You also need to know how to work it. Knowing the licensing companies to work with, that can make your catalog profitable, that’s also as important as owning a catalog.”

It is a distinction that gets lost in most conversations about artist and producer empowerment, which tend to treat owning your masters as the finish line. Sarz considers it the starting line. He gestures toward the long arc of catalog value, creative products that turn a song made decades ago into a quarterly check that still clears. “You don’t know who you’re inspiring, you don’t know who’s gonna listen to your catalog somewhere down the line,” he says, and there is something almost generational in how he frames it. Ownership, not as a transaction closed in the moment, but as a bet placed on a future you will not be in the room to witness.

What America actually taught him

Sarz is unsentimental about what changed his relationship to his own work. It was not a creative epiphany. It was proximity to people who had better resources, were more disciplined, and less tolerant of mediocrity than the environment he came up in. “There’s really no room for mediocrity,” he says of his first encounters with the American studio system. “Excellence in everything that they do. They make sure it’s right, they don’t sleep.”

He is unusually direct about the discomfort of that comparison, and about how much it indicted the culture he had been operating in: “I really hate that culture, in the Nigerian space, like we celebrate mediocrity so much, and it annoys me, it annoys me so much.” The specific technical gap he identifies, that American producers were sending him reference beats that already sounded mastered. While in Nigeria, a song often only sounded finished once it was literally finished. This distinction became something he treated almost as a personal failure to correct. “Now I need to learn industry standard processes, and how to make my music sound as good as possible,” he says. “I just got obsessed with that.”

What is notable is how recently, in the scheme of Nigerian music history, basic professional polish was optional. Sarz describes a culture where producers and artists would tell you with pride that they didn’t mix or master their work. Where demos went out as final products because that’s simply what the workflow allowed. The shift from that world to one where artists now spend thousands of dollars per song on mixing happened, in his telling, inside his own working lifetime. He watched and participated in that correction.

The other shift globalization forced on him was more of a social form: a willingness to collaborate. Before exposure to the American system, Sarz says, working with other producers on a single track was treated almost as an admission of weakness. “How dare someone writes for? You got punished for having creative help,” he says, describing the old mentality. “Everyone felt like doing things by yourself is the way. Collaborating with another person takes away from your creative genius.” Seeing how routinely the biggest American records were built by rooms full of collaborators, ten people on a track with nobody pretending otherwise, dismantled that instinct for him completely. It is worth noting how much of his catalog since, the records that move across continents, depends on a willingness to share credit. He describes himself as having had to unlearn resisting collaboration.

The sound that resists being one thing

Ask Sarz why his drums are recognizable in seconds, and he does not reach for technical language. He reaches for instinct, almost genetics. “I noticed that I did not care for lyrics, I was driven by beats,” he says of his earliest listening habits, citing Timbaland and the Neptunes as the producers who taught him to choose a song by its architecture rather than its words. “Even till date, when I’m working with artists, I don’t really care for lyrics, I care about melodies and the beats. I think this is already in my DNA.”

His origin, by his own account, is hip hop, not Afrobeats. “I would even say by heart I’m more hip hop than anything else,” he explains, tracing a counterfactual career where, if his early circle had been different, he might have ended up a straightforward hip hop producer instead of the architect of a specific Afrobeats drum signature. What redirected him was proximity to a different set of collaborators. Yoruba producers who mocked him for not speaking the language fluently despite a lifetime in Lagos. Gifted peers who were playing KWAM1 while he was reaching for Timbaland’s drum patterns. Rather than abandon either influence, he describes deliberately fusing them. He mixed hip hop’s low end with the textures the people around him were playing.

The result, in his framing, is a kind of authenticity that resists easy classification. “You can take Happiness, for example,” he says of one of his records. “It has some pop, some amapiano, some Afrobeats, some funk. But it sounds like its own thing. It doesn’t just sound like, oh, you just brought things together that don’t work. I brought them together, and it works in an authentic way that can live on its own.” He describes this synthesis instinct as his core production skill, distinct from any single genre fluency. Simply put, it is the ability to recognize which disparate elements will cohere before he has proof that they will.

Eighteen years and the discipline of not waking up passionate

There is a moment in the conversation where Sarz says something that cuts directly against the mythology most people build around long, successful creative careers. “You don’t wake up passionate, feeling like, oh, you know, today I want to create, not as much as you used to do, like, years down the line,” he says. “The flame is a bit tempered, even if it’s there, it’s tempered by experiences.”

This is, in effect, an eighteen-year producer telling you that the romantic version of a creative calling, the idea that passion simply renews itself daily, is mostly fiction once survival has been attached to the work for long enough. He distinguishes sharply between creativity practiced as pure passion, where rejection costs nothing because there was no expectation attached. And creativity practiced as a livelihood, where the same rejection becomes a referendum on whether you can keep affording your life. “When it’s not working for work, it becomes a mental problem,” he says. “What can I do? What else can I do?”

What Sarz prescribes instead of perpetual inspiration is structure. Discipline built specifically to function on the days the passion does not show up on its own. “I’ve also been able to build the discipline for when, for the times I wake up,” he shares, framing the habit less as motivation and more as a scaffolding holding the work together on the days motivation fails to. He links this explicitly to the gym, a relatively recent addition to his routine that he describes as training the same muscle he uses in the studio. “Working out for me has built so much discipline. It’s not just about looking your best, it’s also about showing up when you don’t feel like it. This is why sometimes when I don’t even feel like producing, I could just stand up and go.”

Reinvention as a discipline, not a pivot

The arc of Sarz’s career resists the standard narrative of a producer who found a lane and stayed in it. Production led to artistry, which led to DJing, which has now led to a far more public-facing, camera-forward version of him than existed for most of his career. He is candid that none of these expansions came naturally. “DJing wasn’t easy, because it puts me in front of people,” he says. He describes how, despite already being a recognized name, he initially tried to hide that he was DJing at all. He was uncomfortable with the visibility, until a hype man’s introduction made hiding impossible. From that discomfort to selling out his first London show is, according to him, a direct function of consistency rather than confidence. “Just follow through, just stay consistent, and eventually it will make sense.”

He frames this pattern of expansion not as restlessness but as a deliberate strategy for staying relevant across format shifts he did not choose. Word of mouth built his name when there was nothing else to build it on. Twitter amplified his voice once people could speak more directly. Instagram opened a process-sharing era. Now, he says, “we are in a creation era and an interest era, where sometimes even speaking about things you’re interested in would bring a flock of people to you.” His advice for navigating that, stripped of jargon, is almost severe in its simplicity: “find your voice in every era, find the things you’re comfortable in, and double down.”

He is unusually willing to admit that some of what looks, from the outside, like calculated marketing was not calculated at all. Asked about going shirtless in recent visuals, including the cover of his most recent album, he resists the framing that it was a strategy. “I wouldn’t say I used it for marketing,” he says. When pressed, he concedes the obvious: it helped. “It’s a beautiful thing to see what your body can do.” The exchange is small, but it captures something true about how reinvention actually works for him: less a marketing plan executed on schedule, and more an accumulation of genuine interests. Whether fitness, technology, fashion, or DJing, he allows himself to follow without forcing them into a content calendar first.

The economics underneath the music

Sarz resists, more than once, the instinct to make Afrobeats’ structural problems sound like an Afrobeats-specific story. When the conversation turns to why Nigerian and African artists still cannot reliably tour or perform at scale at home, he locates the actual bottleneck somewhere upstream of music entirely. “I think it’s the economic problem. If we have more buying power, a lot of things will change,” he explains, pointing to the naira’s depreciation as a force quietly determining what concerts, venues, and infrastructure are even financially possible.

He extends that economic diagnosis into a broader cultural one when the conversation turns to why Africans, in his own blunt framing, struggle to organize collectively even when collective action would clearly benefit everyone. He traces it to scarcity itself: a population conditioned by survival to focus resources on themselves and their own. With the rare collective gains in the culture’s history typically arriving as one person’s individual breakthrough that everyone else later copies, rather than coordinated effort from the start. It is a theory of Afrobeats’ fragmentation that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with what scarcity does to a generation’s instincts.

And yet, against that backdrop, Sarz refuses the easy cynicism about how Afrobeats globalized, including the now-common critique that foreign investment compromised something pure about the genre’s rise. “I don’t even think that, when they say we allowed foreign investors into Afrobeats,” he says, before cutting the thought off with a question he clearly considers unanswerable any other way. “What was the other option?” He describes, with evident frustration, the era before foreign capital entered the picture, when a producer behind a song playing across the entire country could still end up gifted a used Camry by a grateful artist. Treated as charity rather than as the compensation it should have been. “That’s crazy to me, he says. We’ve both done our work, it’s successful. The music should be working for us, and we should both be happy.”

Closing

After eighteen years as a professional, Sarz still narrates his career less as a string of hits than as a long negotiation with a structure that was never built to pay the people behind the sound. What makes his account distinct from a simple grievance narrative is the refusal to stop at diagnosis. Every structural complaint in this conversation, about residual income, about gatekeeping, about a culture that celebrates mediocrity, arrives paired with the same private correction: figure out what you control, and move there. “I don’t believe that my destiny is tied around anyone else,” he said at the very start. And eighteen years of drum patterns, catalogs, DJ sets, and shirtless album covers later, that sentence has held up as something closer to a method than a mood.

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We are neighbors, Excel Joab and I. When either of us is frustrated about the industry, we walk to each other’s house and rant. It sounds like a small thing until you understand what it means to have someone nearby who is fluent in your music language, who shares the same vocabulary for what is going wrong and why. In a business that runs on relationships, that kind of proximity feels like infrastructure.

Excel came into music wanting to be a journalist. He was already writing articles, sharing opinions online, building the critical apparatus that good music writing requires. Then, at a listening party, he met Nigerian rap star M.I Abaga. After arriving early as he tends to do, M.I told him something that redirected the next decade of his life: “you like music too much. Someone like you should be in the music business.” He took that advice and found his way. Eleven years in, he has worked in media, content acquisition, digital streaming platforms, brand partnerships, distribution, A&R consulting, label operations, and artist management simultaneously, often in some combination of all of the above. He currently serves as A&R and Artist Development Manager for West Africa at AWAL, Sony Music’s sub-label, while managing artists, running a gospel label on the side, and keeping a front-row view of everything the industry is quietly getting wrong.

The journalism instinct never left him. If anything, it’s been sharpened by his time in the frontlines. Excel Joab talks about the Nigerian music industry the way a very good editor talks about a manuscript with real potential. Only that, the author keeps making the same preventable mistake.

When I ask him what hit him hardest when he first crossed over from the outside into the actual machinery of the business, he doesn’t hesitate.

“The level of work inside it shocked me.”

Xcel had not come in naive. Prior to music, he had worked HR for an airline. He had been a copywriter. A social media manager,and a digital marketing executive. He understood structure and deadlines and institutional demands. What he was not prepared for was an industry that runs without closing hours. Where order is more aspirational than actual practice. A realm of entropy where the gap between what the business looks like from outside and what it requires from inside is so wide, it routinely destroys people who enter with genuine passion but no tolerance for ambiguity.

He describes his saving grace as relational intelligence. “I am a relationship person. It’s easy for me to connect with people, and this is a very relationship-driven business. A lot of times, being able to achieve a deal is about who is on your phone contact that you can call, literally maybe 80% of the time.” But he is careful to distinguish between real relationship capital and the performance of it. The music business, he says, is full of people who mistake friendliness for alliance and mistake alliance for trust. The younger generation of executives, he worries, has grown up in a social media environment where reputation is visible and consequential in ways it never was before. and they haven’t yet developed the emotional steadiness to navigate that.

He puts it plainly: “You can’t expect everybody to be your friend. Maintaining relationships is more than just who is there for you.” If someone has said something unflattering about him, he checks whether it’s true. If it’s not true but the person is still useful for business, he keeps the door open. He does not burn bridges for business. If a shark bites him, he takes the lesson, updates what he trusts that person with, and moves forward. He frames this as the emotional maturity the industry demands and rarely cultivates.

The conversation turns, as it often does with Excel, toward what is structurally wrong with the market and why those structural problems keep reproducing themselves.

He brings up Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, the Netflix film, as a reference point he returns to regularly, for the intentionality therein. “She honored HBCUs. They were part of the band. She honored their traditions and cultures, even during the concert itself. That kind of intentionality you don’t see here with our people.” It’s a pointed observation about what it means to genuinely invest in your culture rather than extract from it. The artists who are currently at the top of the Nigerian market, he argues, have plateaued in part because they have not done that kind of thinking. They’ve hit a ceiling, one they cannot go past, because they haven’t built the foundation that would give them the thrust.

What makes this a structural problem rather than an individual failing is that the younger generation of artists is watching the current top tier for cues about how to operate, and what they are seeing is not great. “Children don’t do what you tell them, children do what they see you do.”

Beneath this is a harder argument about process. Excel is blunt about the fact that very few artists in the Nigerian market can reliably fill mid-size venues. He names Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Rema, and suggests the list effectively ends there. Everything below that tier struggles to sell out halls that hold a few hundred people. And yet, he says, what you see from the generation coming up is not a serious reckoning with that gap. What you see is farming, buying chart positions, screenshotting a number one placement and posting it, then being unable to sell out a local park by December.

“We are horrible businessmen in this industry. We are horrible businessmen. It’s almost like we don’t think. We just want to do what the next person is doing,” he tells me.

The vanity metrics problem is real, he says, but it is symptomatic of something deeper: the absence of critical thinking, which he traces back to an education system that trained people to pass examinations rather than reason through problems. He and I push back and forth on this. I take it further down, all the way to childhood nutrition, the conditions that shape cognition before formal education even begins. He insists on education for causality, but the point is the same: people are not asking the foundational questions. They are not asking how recouping works, how promotion money flows, what it actually costs to push a record on radio in America, which runs north of $250,000 and is why every Nigerian act that has crossed over there is inside the major label system.

How about America? I inquire. Excel offers clarity to that question. He watched what happened when Def Jam tried and failed to move Nasty C to the US market. He expected the industry to absorb that lesson. It did not. The obsession with America as the singular destination for ambition, he says, is the same category error that Nigerian parents used to make when they insisted their children pursue oil and gas, law, or medicine. It’s a narrow definition of legitimacy that forecloses real possibility.

He was in Riyadh for a music festival. Saudi Arabians were walking up to his artist Wizard Chan at the festival grounds, fans who knew the songs, who wanted photographs. He has watched Ckay, another artist on his roster at AWAL, command genuine love across the Middle East and North Africa. These are real audiences, providing real money and real cultural resonance. African music, he says, has never needed permission to be loved internationally. “We have always had that great rhythm and sound that the world has never been able to say no to.” The problem is not the music’s reach. The problem is the commercial infrastructure around it, and the assumption that one geography represents the whole of the possible.

He sees Afro House as the next vector of international movement, European house DJs and Nigerian artists converging on a shared sonic space, the kind of organic cross-pollination that does not require a bidding war or a major label co-sign to generate a consistent footprint.

What Excel looks for when he is deciding whether to invest his attention in an artist, the question underneath all the industry diagnosis, is authenticity. Authenticity that he can assess structurally. He talks about Odumodublvck, a friend and a genuine troublemaker in the literal sense, someone whose public persona is not a construction but a direct expression of who he actually is.

“You can’t beat authenticity. If it is there, it’s there.”

He was initially worried that Odumodublvck’s energy would produce a predominantly male fanbase. But boy was he was wrong. Women love Odumodu as the Big Kala. Authenticity, Excel argues, is the one quality that does not erode over time, because it is not a performance that has to be maintained. An artist who is genuinely who they say they are at 25 will still be coherently themselves at 35. They will have grown, changed, but they will not have drifted away from what first made people pay attention. Those are the artists worth the long game.

He applies this same principle to what he says to younger artists when they come to him looking for either direct investment, links to a label, or a small cheque to get started. He tells them what they have now is not the obstacle. He tells them the Bible says he who is faithful in a few will be faithful in much. If you have twenty people who genuinely love your music, go and gather them. Do things with them. Build something real with what is already in your hands. An infusion of capital will not change the fundamental question of whether you know how to use it.

“If you cannot do anything with what you have now, it’s not when I give you $5,000 you would do miracles,” he explains.

He draws an analogy about men who couldn’t connect with women until they had a nice car, a swanky Lekki address and a certain kind of arrival in the world. He used to warn his female friends about that type. The confidence that only appears after external validation is not real confidence. It is a dependency that will express itself in harmful ways. The same, he says, applies to artists who are waiting for the industry to recognize them before they start doing the work.

None of this makes Excel a pessimist. He holds something rarer than optimism: a clear-eyed assessment of what is broken alongside a genuine belief that it can be fixed.

He talks about the next generation’s demographic advantage. Nigeria’s population skews overwhelmingly young, 70 percent or more under 35. That is a country full of people who need new voices, new artists to represent what they feel and who they are. He points to Mavo as evidence that this demand is real and active. Mavo broke through because he brought something emotionally specific that his generation recognized in themselves. That need doesn’t go away. Every generation produces it.

What he remains troubled by is the pattern of extraction, the way people who have held positions in this industry have not left things better for the people coming behind them. He uses Nollywood as the parallel: Netflix arrived, Prime arrived, money came in, funds were mismanaged, quality control failed, and now those platforms have left in under five years. The next generation of filmmakers are paying for it. The same logic applies in music. Investment came. Some of it was used well. A great deal of it was not. And the people who will carry the weight of that squandered opportunity are the artists coming up now.

“I’ve seen Hamilton twice in London, and every time I watch it, when I’m leaving, I’m thinking: when will I go and watch a theater show on this level in Nigeria?” he asks.

He says it with a quiet intensity that is closer to grief. Grief at the gap between what he knows this country is capable of and what it is currently producing. He still has faith. He says it directly, without hedging. He still believes a few good men and women can change a great deal. He still believes the music is strong enough to carry the industry further than the industry has allowed it to go.

I believe him. And I think about the fact that he walked out of his house and down the street to record this conversation. Which is exactly the kind of proximity, the willingness to show up and say the true thing to someone you can trust, that he says powers everything.

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The night I watched Kcee perform at Bayelsa, January 1 of 2025, he did not do a regular set. He ran a ceremony. Three acts, a full band, masquerades pulling up mid-song. The crowd went somewhere else entirely. I remember leaning over to him afterward, barely knowing what to say, and telling him that I hadn’t seen him like that in a long time. That it was different. He laughed and told me he’d been going back to the drawing board.

That phrase, going back to the drawing board, comes up a lot when Kcee talks about his career. It is something closer to a philosophical practice, the idea that longevity is a discipline, that an artist who wants to last has to continuously ask himself what version of himself is most honest, most necessary, most alive. For Kcee, born Kingsley Okonkwo and raised between Anambra and Lagos, that question has produced one of the more remarkable second acts in Nigerian music.

He won Star Quest in 2002 as part of the KC Presh duo. He got his first global hit with Limpopo in 2013. He made Ojapiano a decade later and watched it generate 120,000 TikTok videos in a single day, organically, without payola, without chart manipulation, crossing into audiences who had never heard his name. In between all of this, he was crying alone, being overlooked for award nominations, watching peers he considered less prolific collect trophies while he performed for fans who loved him without the industry’s co-sign. He is 26 years into a career that was never supposed to hold together this long, and he has opinions about why it has.

Kcee arrives at the conversation having made peace with something difficult and wants to talk about it without emotion. The industry, he says, was not fair with him. He says it plainly, absent bile, the way you state a weather report.

“I grew up in an industry that wasn’t fair with me. There wasn’t attention given to me at any moment. I was doing a lot, the industry wasn’t recognizing. The fans were the ones that were behind me. They were not nominating me for awards, and I cried. I was pained.”

What’s notable is what comes immediately after this admission. Kcee showed no resentment. Neither did he pivot to grievance. Instead, he talks about thick skin. About deciding that rewards matter more than awards. About the Grammys, how you have to be in the academy before you can even get nominated, how your music could be doing billions of streams and none of that will matter without the institutional membership. He says this not as a complaint about the Grammys but as an insight into how all validation systems work. You have to be inside the room before the room opens its doors. He decided a long time ago that he wasn’t going to wait for permission.

Part of what made that possible was his father being a DJ. He mentions this almost every time he traces his origin story, and the repetition is not accident. Growing up in a house where the music never stopped, where Afrobeat sat next to jazz, R&B and Igbo traditional sound, gave him an internal archive that most artists don’t have. It also gave him something more practically useful: the ability to identify a hit. Not make one, specifically, but hear one when it’s happening.

“Most people don’t know the ability to identify a hit record has been one of my big strengths. I don’t know how God does it. That’s why it seems like every other time I must get a hit record.”

He calls it a gift. His producers call it being right when everyone else is skeptical. When he plays them something and says this is it, they’ve learned to listen, because the data has borne him out too many times.

The pivot that changed Kcee’s career’s trajectory happened in 2017. He calls it “going to the drawing board,” but what it really was is a homecoming. He released Eastern Conference, an album that planted itself in Igbo traditional sound, highlife, the instrument palette of the East. He shot the cover on a head bridge, shut down traffic for thirty minutes, and took a photograph of a man insisting on where he was from.

He says he saw the space. Legends like Osita Osadebe and Oliver De Coque had died and left a vacuum. His people were hungry for that sound and nobody credible was filling it. As an Igbo man who also, in his own words, calculates, he saw both the cultural duty and business logic at the same time and moved.

That album has never really left the Apple Music charts since its release in 2021. Five years, moving between 80 and 130, never dropping off entirely.

“That will show you the originality and how people value that sound,” he says.

From there came the idea that eventually became Ojapiano. For over two years, he sat with the question of how to bring the traditional Igbo Oja flute into a pop context. He took it to three producers. All three told him it wouldn’t work. Then he found Jason, who listened, and who tried it. The result created a genre. A framework that nobody else had built. When the song dropped, it was doing 120,000 TikTok videos daily for seven consecutive days without any artificial push. American pop rock band OneRepublic saw it and reached out for a remix. The cultural crossover he’d been chasing as a pop artist for a decade came to him, finally, through the most local version of himself he’d ever put into music.

Kcee says the pop side of him is what made that possible. He never wanted to fully leave pop, not because it was safer, but because the pop instinct in him is what helped the Oja sound reach across. He uses an analogy: the masquerade brings the traditional weight, but you have to walk people to the masquerade through music they already know how to move to.

There is a moment in the conversation where I ask him about writers. He answers with a kind of relief, like a man finally allowed to say something true in public.

When he started, using writers was a taboo. In the quaint Nigerian music honor system, you’d be publicly shamed for it and accused of having no talent. He came up in an era where you wrote the song at home, rehearsed for weeks, showed up to the studio where a mistake meant a wasted tape that cost money to re-record. He learned to craft in the hardest possible conditions. Now, he says, he has kids. He has a wife. He has a business. The resources exist to bring in writers, and he uses them without apology. What he does that most artists without his gift cannot do is select. He sits in the room and listens for the commercial note, the melodic hook that’s going to work in the market, and he doesn’t put his voice down until he hears it.

The writers benefit too. He takes them to events, introduces them to industry elders, lets them watch him work a crowd of thousands into submission. He compares it to apprenticeship, the old Igbo model where a parent takes palm wine to a tailor and asks them to teach their son a skill. He is passing something on. Not just writing credit or income, but the lived experience of what this life actually looks like from the stage.

Kcee’s new album, Okonkwo & Sons Unlimited, carries a name that tells you everything about where he is in his head. Okonkwo is his family name. The “Sons Unlimited” is borrowed from the signboards he grew up seeing on successful Igbo men’s shops, “Chukwudi and Sons Limited,” those linguistic declarations of generational continuity. He woke up one morning and thought about his father, who was the first man in his village to own a colour television, the first to own a generator, who went into his community as a pioneer. He thought about his siblings, “who are all doing well.” He thought about his own children, one of whom, at 15, already has a monetized YouTube channel earning in euros, filming and editing herself, running her own enterprise independently of her father’s name.

“It’s like prophesying into the future. My family name would never be down. Keep going better and bigger from generation to generation.”

That’s the album title as a mission statement. Not nostalgia. Intention.

The fandom question is one I’ve thought about a lot in the time I’ve covered this music, and watching Kcee perform across the years, I’ve had a theory about what makes him different from the pop artists who burn bright and disappear. He tells me that when he gets booked for an event, he looks at what kind of event it is. If it’s a pop crowd, he opens with Limpopo, Pullover, the hits they came with. Then he shifts into the traditional material, and by the time the masquerade is on stage, the crowd is already inside the music, already moving to the rhythm, and the transition doesn’t register as a gear change but as a deepening. He takes them from pop to culture to church, in one set. He says nobody else is doing that movement. He’s right.

The markets reflecting this back at him are interesting. His biggest streaming numbers outside Nigeria are coming from Tanzania and Kenya, then Uganda, then London. East Africa. Highlife’s rhythmic cousins. Listeners who understand the Oja without being told what it is.

When I ask him what he takes home with him after twenty-six years of all of this, what follows him after the show and the interviews and the travel, he gets quiet for a moment. Then he says peace of mind. That God has blessed him with a wonderful career. That he started in 1999 and cannot quite believe he is still this active. That he looks at peers who started with him, or after him, people who grabbed all the glory in the early years, and who either quit or scaled back or disappeared, and he is the one still here.

“I don’t think I need to ask God for too much anymore,” he shares.

There is something clarifying about that statement when you sit with it. It is not resignation. Kcee still travels three or four events on some weekends. He leaves every gig with two or three more gigs booked, because the people who watch him perform want him at their daughter’s wedding, their corporate event, their private celebration. The pipeline is self-sustaining now, driven entirely by the quality of what he does on stage.

What he means by not asking for too much is not contentment in the passive sense. It is the satisfaction of a maestro who has done what he set out to do, who has engraved his name in the correct stone. He set out to put the Igbo sound, the African sound, on the global map. He did it with Limpopo. He did it again, differently and more completely, with Ojapiano. He is doing it now with a new album that carries his family name as a prophecy.

Twenty-six years. Still the one standing. The king who stayed.

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It is December, and Ladipoe has just turned down a gig.

Not because the money was wrong. But it was Christmas Day, and the logistics of getting there and being fully present for that amount didn’t feel worth what the day meant to him. He mentions it almost in passing, the way you mention something you are still working out the implications of. “Those are decisions I never thought I would make,” he tells me. “There was a time where I never thought I would turn down money to get back. Now I’m at a point where it’s like, okay, there are certain boundaries, and it’s a time I want to protect as much as possible.”

He sits across from me in my living room in Lagos, a man in the middle of a new becoming. Not the novel actualisation that happens at the start of a career, when the world first opens up, but the quieter, more costly one that happens after the first wave of everything has already crashed through. After the hits. After the recognition. After the long, grinding silence between projects when the fan base starts to wonder whether you’re still there.

Ladipoe has been an artist long enough to know the price of the thing. He just didn’t always know it in advance.

He came from a family of civil servants and entrepreneurs, he says, and it is immediately clear this is dimensional. There is a tradition, in that stock, of the name meaning something. Not wealth in the monetary sense, not necessarily, but integrity carrying its own kind of currency. “There’s an era of civil servants where your name meant something,” he says. “So I can’t say it was wealth in monetary sense. It was the power of the integrity of the name and maintaining that.” He grew up inside that value system, which made the decision to become a rapper in Lagos one of the more structurally confusing things a person in his position could do. The path was the office, the suit, the tie, and the vaunted job. Music was the opposite of everything the family’s sacrifice was meant to produce.

“I did not even believe I had this ability when I discovered it in school,” he tells me. He started making music with two other guys, in college, as a side thing, because there was nothing to lose. The studio sessions came later, in Nigeria: Red Room Studio, staying up until two, three, four, five in the morning, going home at six, rising again to go to the office. Putting his family’s view of him on the line. Sometimes ending up in places he shouldn’t have been, at hours when things could get dangerous, for music that might not work.

Ladipoe did it anyway. Because the pursuit was giving so much that the cost didn’t register until years later, when the responsibilities accumulated and the clarity came. “As you get older and you start to have certain responsibilities, a certain view of yourself and where you really want to go is much clearer now. The cost becomes even more apparent.”

The shopping analogy he reaches for is apt: you walk past the window, you want the shoes, you want the outfit. You go in. They tell you the price. Your body calms down. The difference with music, he says, is that nobody tells you the price when you’re deciding to pursue it. “Here you’re not told the price. You go for it, and along the way you discover the cost: the loss of family time, the disassociation from yourself, even your own self, what you give up to create.”

What Ladipoe discovered, and is still discovering, is that the cost doesn’t stop presenting itself. It compounds and arrives in new forms. It morphs into the tension between seeing yourself through your own eyes and seeing yourself through the eyes of the audience. He names this as one of the central pressures of the work, the thing that can drive you crazy if you let it get out of balance. “The thing that you bring to your art and to your creativity is your own unique POV, that’s the actual selling point of music. And if you lose sight of that, it’ll start to show in different ways.”

This is not abstract philosophy for Ladipoe. He raps in English, in a market that has historically favored colloquial Yoruba, an assortment of pidgin, the vernacular of the street and the music industry. He came up in a lane that barely existed before he helped make it exist. He knows exactly what it costs to hold a position that the mainstream keeps treating as a niche. “People who make music in that lane are made to feel like you’re doing too much,” he says. “You’re being too difficult. You’re a perfectionist.” He rejects the label, all of it. Not because perfectionism isn’t real, but because the accusation itself is a form of pressure to lower the standard, and he is not interested in lowering the standard.

What he is interested in, what he has been interested in for as long as he has been making music, is the line. The exact line. “I can’t describe to you the feeling of coming up with the line that says exactly what you wanted to say,” he tells me, and in this moment he loses all the careful reserve of a man measuring every word. “For me it is addictive, it is an addictive thing, because it’s like, yo, that’s exactly how I wanted to say it. This is the way I wanted to say, and I’m gonna try and deliver it the way I want. So, before that song is out, I already love it.”

This is where his confidence comes from, and he is precise about what kind of confidence it is. He calls it arrogance, but the word doesn’t quite fit. It is closer to a conviction that has been tested enough times to become load-bearing. Years of making music that the market didn’t immediately receive taught him to locate the validation inside the work itself, before it met the world. “I trust my sense of taste to the point where I will think you have the problem.” He says it flatly, without aggression.

Ladipoe’s next album has been coming for nearly three years. He has been working on it since 2023, and the process has required, in sequence: figuring out what he wanted to say, figuring out how to say it, finding the beats and the sound that matched the mode of communication, and then, underneath all of it, accepting the artist he actually was rather than the artist the moment was asking for. “There are many, many, many layers that have gone into the creation of this project,” he says.

He’s always called his fan base “Lifelines.” No punchlines, just lifelines. The name carries his whole philosophy inside it: the people who have held on through the gaps, who are waiting on the other side of the silence with a particular kind of sustained investment that he feels the weight of, every day. “My fan base is very like they feel a certain type of way right now. Let me just put it like that. Anything I post, last last, oh, cute. Where’s the album?”

Ladipoe feels the urgency. He absorbs it, incorporates it, lets it go into the music. “I feel the urgency of the fan base, I feel the excitement, I feel the anticipation, I feel the apathy, I feel all the different things.” The pressure, he says, is mostly self-generated. He quotes Vince Staples: tortured artists, not a new term, tortured for real. There is audio playing in his head all the time, cataloguing what he didn’t do right, what he could have done better, and he has to make the real audio over and around it.

The album is called a “Revival.” Revival season. He says it with the demeanor of someone who has been holding this thing for long enough for it to breed anticipatory impatience. “Anybody who’s cared, who’s stuck with the art, let it sit with them. They know that there’s a journey that they’re going to experience with the project.”

The guiding delusion, as he puts it, citing my question back at me with clear pleasure, is that you can still connect with people if you are simply yourself. He knows this is a cliché. He says it anyway, because for people who are actually this way, driven by an obligation to their own POV, it is not a hackneyed. It’s a survival position. Everything comes at you offering opportunity, only if you become something you are not. “So many things are, over time it becomes valuable to find out who you’re meant to be.”

Ladipoe arrived in the Nigerian music industry not knowing he would be here. He signed to a Mavin Records, a predominantly pop music house. He’s long navigated the identity crisis that follows commercial connection, the moment when the question shifts from ‘can I make it?’ to ‘what am I willing to do to sustain it?’ He pieced the answer into form with each release: niche artistry, mainstream success, the tension between doing what is authentically you and connecting to the widest audience possible. He and the label named it together, which is itself an unusual enough thing in Nigerian music that it’s worth noting.

“I will always care about writing,” he says, near the end of pourc conversation. It is stated like a commitment he is renewing rather than making for the first time. He will not engage with a rap artist who has nothing to say. He believes lyrical rap is in the middle of its evolution right now, happening in real time, and he names Dave’s recent record, Odumodublvck’s project, and Blaqbonez’s, as evidence of the landscape filling up with people who mean it. “That is how industries grow and niches grow. That’s how we stay healthy. A balanced diet.”

There is a question underneath all of this that the interview keeps circling without quite landing on, and it is the question of what it costs. Not in the abstract, not in the shopping analogy, but in the specific ledger of Ladipoe’s career: the years of not being heard immediately, the Christmas gig turned down, the album held for three years until it was right, the refusal to tweet himself into relevance, the credibility he has protected by saying no to things that would have made his phone ring more, but would have made him less.

“It’s probably the reason why I’ve gotten some opportunities, but also the reason why I’ve lost a lot of opportunities,” he says. He does not regret this. He is not performing the absence of regret. He is genuinely at peace with the trade. He’s made the right calls and then lived inside the consequences long enough to understand why moderation was the better path.

Ladeipoe’s father is an optimist. He gets this from his father. The guiding light, the question that keeps him moving, is the one I keep asking myself too: what if it all works out? “Not all reality checks ground you to reality,” he shares. “Sometimes they confirm that you’re supposed to be floating, you’re supposed to be a bit crazy.”

He is supposed to be floating. He has been floating for a long time. The album is almost here, and the Lifelines are waiting. And if it all works out, which it might, which the music suggests it will, then the price will have been exactly right.

He just didn’t know that when he paid it.

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“For the longest time, I had a beat-up Parado,” Wale Davies tells me, settling into the couch across from me in Lagos. “Up until 2017. I will never put in my rap that, oh, I’m driving a Bentley.”

He says it without ceremony. No performance of humility, no wink toward the audience. Just a man accounting for himself. It’s the way he has always done it. Wale Davies, known as Tec, is one half of Show Dem Camp, the Lagos duo he built with his partner, Ghost. Together they spent over fifteen years grinding, mostly unnoticed by the Nigerian music industry, until the space couldn’t afford to ignore them. Davies moved back from the UK with nothing guaranteed. He drove a beat-up car through an industry that called him an ajebota, and meant it as an insult. He made music that didn’t fit the tempo of the moment and performed to a hundred people at a time, in small venues on the mainland and the island, until the hundred became a thousand and the thousand became a festival. He never signed to a label. He never changed his sound to chase a wave. He never pretended.

That, more than any hit, is the through line.

The story of how Show Dem Camp got started is really the story of how Nigeria got Wale Davies back. After years in the UK, he came home to help a friend execute business. A close buddy had put together the 2face and Friends Tour with MTN, a contract big enough to make a twenty-three-year-old in a corporate job in the UK stop and do the math. “The contract was way more than what I was earning in the corporate world at the time,” he says. “So I was like, damn, these guys are getting this much money at age 23.”

Davies signed up as a producer on that tour. He pulled the show together, traveled with 2face, P-Square, Naeto C, Ikechukwu. He watched the industry up close, from behind the scenes, at a moment when he had just arrived back in a country he would now have to learn all over again. “It was the first time I had seen, like, I just moved back to Nigeria, it was like a crash course into all of the artists, all the people that were doing great things.”

When he and Ghost eventually launched as artists, they already knew everybody. 2face and the late Sound Sultan were on the first album, as the industry respect came early. But the public recognition did not. “The artist knew,” he says, “but then the public were like, who are these guys?”

They were, to a segment of the Lagos music scene, the rich kids. The ajebotas who had gone abroad and come back thinking they could teach everyone something. He dismantles this mythology with precision. “I live in Bariga,” he says. “Like, jeez.” The perception had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the fact that they had British accents, wore certain clothes, and didn’t rap about things the Lagos street scene recognized as its own. On one side, his family was asking why he had wasted a foreign education to come home and rap. On the other side, artists who were hustling in Festac were looking at him sideways. He was marginalised from both directions at once, which is its own kind of clarifying.

“Thankfully, we found people that we connected with. Like Sound Sultan, rest in peace, 2face, people like that at the time who embraced us.” They embraced them because, underneath the accent and the aesthetic, they were just guys who loved music, who showed up, drank, smoked and partied alongside everybody else. “They love the music as much as we do.”

What followed was a decade of becoming. The conformist period, when they tried to rap over the faster BPMs that were moving at the time, and felt their own inauthenticity in real time when they had to perform those songs live. “You can’t be fast-paced and then be slowly rapping and giving them swag. You have to be active with the music, and it’s not really us.” The pivot to ‘Feel Alright,’ which happened almost by accident in a London studio when their friend, BOJ, came down from university for a session, and the beat producer Juls had given them finally found its moment. They spent the next four-years after that, trying to find producers who could replicate what Juls had done, until they met Spax.

Spax is the third character in this story, even though he doesn’t appear until 2017. When they finally sat down together, he told them something that cut straight to the truth of what they’d been dancing around for years. “He said, the SDC I want to reconnect with is the ‘Feel Right’ SDC. That’s the SDC I enjoy the most.” It took 4 years, but the outside world was finally saying out loud what they already knew about themselves.

The first batch of songs they made with Spax became Palm Wine Music Vol. 1. But the album was only half the revolution. The other half was the live show.

“You’d get a booking, you’d go to Lagos Countdown or Eko Hotel, and there’d be like 50 artists on the bill, you have your 10 minutes, you do your thing, and get off.” He says it without bitterness, but the frustration underneath is audible. They wanted to perform and build a crowd, not stay stuck servicing and executing concert slots. So they started their own sessions. Ikoyi’s Bogobiri, first. A hundred people. Then the mainland. Then the island. Then a brand booked them as headliners and brought a thousand revelers. Then they looked at each other and thought: if a brand can bring a thousand people to see us, what happens if we do it ourselves?

They responded with the Palm Wine Music Festival, now one of the most distinctive live music events in Lagos, and a piece of IP they own entirely. He says it was inspired by watching a friend launch Art-X in 2016, an art fair built from scratch at a real scale. “Seeing someone close to my age creating something at that scale, a piece of IP that belonged to them, I was very inspired by that.” Everything that followed carries that same fingerprint: owned, curated, built for longevity.

Show Dem Camp never signed with a label. Through the Afrobeats boom years of 2021 to 2023, when labels were throwing money at Nigerian artists with a kind of desperate enthusiasm, Tec and Ghost stayed independent. Not for lack of opportunity, and not without regret at the time. Davies had sat in label offices and busted flows for executives who nodded and called later with nothing. He had watched Chocolate City launch MI Abaga, Ice Prince, Jesse Jagz, and felt genuine frustration that those artists had structural support while he and Ghost were crowdfunding their first video from aunties and uncles and a girl he was probably dating at the time who paid for fuel.

But Covid changed the math. When the industry obeyed lockdowns and stopped full operations, their checks didn’t. “You don’t have to break 70% or 80% of your check with a label. It’s all you.” And then the artists who had collected the big checks started getting dropped, with labels writing off the investments as bad debt. “I feel like the music industry lost,” he says. “In the sense of the music, and in the sense that investment dried up.” The labels moved on to wherever they smelled the next opportunity. That is what labels do. “Once they see there’s an opportunity, some of them, the smart ones, will go and gamble ahead. Some other people will be late to the party. But at the end, if nothing is there, they move to the next place they smell blood.”

He is not bitter about any of it. He is just clear-eyed, the way people are when they have spent long enough observing a system from the inside to understand exactly how it works.

The conversation keeps turning toward film, because film is where Wale Davies is going next, or rather where he has already arrived. My Father’s Shadow, the BAFTA-winning film he made with his brother, traveled to Canada, circled the global festival circuit, and generated the kind of goodwill that fifteen years of respected music had not fully produced in terms of industry doors swinging open. He describes the reception with a mix of genuine surprise and quiet pleasure. American filmmakers who had been making work for fifteen years were asking how he got there so fast.

He knows the answer, though he holds it lightly. He came in without the baggage of what film is supposed to look like, without the habit of making the Nigerian version of a Western thing and calling it original. “I’m tired of watching, if it’s Nollywood or if it’s Hollywood’s portrayal of Africans, some people with some weird accents that you don’t know where are from.” He is tired of the impulse to import a format and rebadge it. “He will get people here who watch it for entertainment, but he can’t travel, because those guys who created that will look at it like, oh, this is just a rip-off of ours.”

What he wants to make instead is work that can only come from where he comes from. The same logic that drove “Happy Weekend Sir” many years ago, a song about Lagos social customs that his cousin from London couldn’t decode because he kept thinking people wishing him happy weekend were trying to get money from him. Selling your own culture back to the world, rather than consuming theirs. “Our own culture is equally as interesting,” he says. “Why don’t we sell that?”

He has ten film ideas in his notes right now. Maybe one or two will get made. That is enough.

There is a phrase a producer friend of his named Ikon gave him, and he often turns it over in his mind. Ikon said he plans to die empty. “That resonated deeply, because I don’t want to think of what I could have done.”

He has met artists across his career who he believes are more talented than him, full stop. Rappers he will tell you are the best he has ever heard. Singers who could outsing everyone in the room. Talent sitting on hard drives, unreleased and unknown. Execution is a separate challenge from skill possession. The willingness to say, in Lagos, I am going to be a rapper, that is my job, and to keep saying it while people look at you like you’re unwell. To say it even when your family is confused. While the industry ignores you. While the car is a beat-up Parado. While the crowd is a hundred people and the promoter gives you ten minutes and DJ Xclusive’s beat and nothing else. That willingness is rarer than talent.

“How do you believe or see something beyond anybody?” he asks. It is not a rhetorical question. He has been answering it with his body for fifteen years.

When I ask what connects all of it, all the roles he has played, rapper, producer, festival builder, collaborator, manager, filmmaker, he thinks for a moment. Then: “It’s about people, man. That’s really what I genuinely believe.” Two hundred cast and crew on the set of My Father’s Shadow. Each one with their own IMDb credit, their own achievement, their own story that intersects with his. The lighting guy. The camera assistant. He gave them a job, treated them with respect, and made something together that people watched on a big screen and cried at. “To me, that’s a form of magic. And that to me is very addictive.”

The fulfillment is the point. Not the watch, though he spent one night borrowing an AP from a friend and finally understood why men covet them, women approaching him all evening, nobody robbing him, the borrowed jewelry doing its social work before he handed it back at the end of the night. Experiences over items, always. “I can enjoy an experience a million times.”

“Being able to keep creating,” he says, “and being able to create at a high level, is very, very addictive.” He understands, he tells me, why Kanye is mad. When your brain is set up to generate at that frequency, and the frequency keeps coming, the only sane response is to keep going. The only failure is to stop. The only real loss is to arrive at the end with something still left on the hard drive.

He does not plan to.

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“The caption,” Joshua Baraka tells me, leaning forward in my living room in Lagos with the easy confidence of a man who has already decided how this will go, “you have to put, ‘Joey, interviewed by Baraka.’”

He is twenty-something, Ugandan, the most-streamed artist in his country’s history, and he has just spent the last hour doing what nobody does on Afrobeats Intelligence: turning the interview around on me. Before we have even properly begun, he wants to know what makes me laugh. He wants to know what I think about the decline of West African music’s global dominance. He wants to talk about AI, about what humans will be able to sell when machines can generate anything, about why the audience is always more mature than music executives give them credit for, about why creativity sets trends before data can measure them. He quotes Whitney Houston. He cracks jokes about Forex traders. He falls down at parties and wants to leave the country.

He came here to take over the pod. He told me he would. He wasn’t lying.

Everyone who follows East African music mentions 2023. In Nairobi, where I’d been the week before, sitting with Bien over dinner, drinking six beers with Watendawali, asking people who the region’s biggest artists were, Joshua Baraka’s name kept surfacing. Not as a Ugandan artist. Just as a name. The kind of name that travels without needing a geography attached.

The song responsible for that motion was “Nana.” Baraka had been making music for three years before it, dropping almost every month, the way young artists do when they’re trying to find a world-beating frequency. “Nana” was it. It went to number one across East Africa and stayed there, until Davido dropped Timeless and finally nudged it off the top.

“It was a cultural movement,” he says, and this is not hyperbole from a young man still learning to contain the excitement of his success. It is a measured statement about what a song can do in a market that has been told, repeatedly, that it cannot produce music fit for export. Uganda’s top 100, he tells me, was entirely foreign artists before “Nana.” People were saying Ugandan music wasn’t ready to be global. And then, out of nowhere, a song arrived that made people say: “Wait. Is this person Ugandan?” The pride it generated was its own second wave of momentum. The song was a hit. The fact of the song, a Ugandan song doing these things, was its own kind of cultural event.

He had, by then, been taking buses from Kampala to Nairobi to push his music. Fifteen hours on a bus, one way, to go meet people in a city where he didn’t know anyone, in a country that hadn’t asked for him. He would show up, find whoever was connected to some music, and try to plug himself in. “That’s what I’ve been doing with my team for a very long time,” he says. It is the kind of detail that does not belong in the story of overnight success, so it rarely gets told.

What makes Baraka unusual, genuinely unusual and not the press-release version of unusual, is that he thinks. Not just about his own music, but about the industry as a system, about culture as a living organism with observable growth cycles, about art as a practice that has to be defended from the people who manage it.

Sitting across from me, he delivers a theory of AI and artistic value that I did not expect and could not have scripted. “Now is the time to understand your craft,” he says, “because if you don’t understand your craft deeply, every surface-level bit of information you have, AI has.” Baraka is not worried about AI the way most people are worried about AI. He doesn’t harbour the fear of replacement and the anxiety about the erosion of authenticity. He is worried about something more specific and more interesting: the flattening of experience. What AI cannot do, he argues, is sing about the specific suya spot on a specific road in Lagos. It cannot quantify the feeling of taking a particular keke napep from Ikeja. It cannot understand what Lagos means to someone who has actually lived in it.

“We’re reaching a point,” he says, “where intimate human connection and relation will be the only thing humans can actually sell.”

He says this with the confidence of someone who has already built his career on the premise. All the music he makes, he tells me, is “deeply personal” and “deeply true” to him. He tries to make art that cannot be made by anyone else. He tries, specifically, to make art that cannot be made by AI. He names this goal explicitly, which is the kind of thing most artists feel but few are willing to say out loud, because saying it out loud is a commitment. A commitment to human supremacy.

But the argument he makes that lands most squarely is about executives and the relationship between data and creativity. “Creatives set the trend,” he says. “The data comes after what I’ve done.” He is pushing back against the industry habit of using metrics to constrain artists: the two-minute-thirty-second song, the TikTok hook in the first eight seconds, the vocabulary optimized for virality. All of this, he says, is backwards. The data measures what the last creative did, not what the next creative should do. If Rema had tried to make another “Calm Down” instead of making “Ozeba,” then “Calm Down” would still be the standard. “The trend is what the creative decides it is.”

I tell him he’s sold me. He seems pleased but unsurprised.

Baraka also has an argument about where the music industry is right now, specifically about Afrobeats and its global influence, that is both generous and unflinching. He believes, and I tell him so on the record, that mainstream West African music is on a slight decline. He watched it happen in Uganda, where there are now entire events dedicated to South African music culture. He watched it in Nairobi, where I had just spent a week hearing almost no Afrobeats played outside a single Nigerian-themed club. He frames it without malice: West Africa led for a long time, and that dominance is now being negotiated. The bubble had already burst, he says, though it took a couple of years for the consumption side to feel it.

And East Africa, he believes, is up next. Not because they are better (he would never say that) but because they are different. East Africans are storytellers. Every song has a story. East Africans are excellent live musicians. “Here, bro, it’s hard for you to be a successful artist if you can’t do live music, if you can’t do it band.” He says there is a gap in what East Africa can offer, a distinct flavor of vulnerability and narrative depth that the world has not fully encountered yet. “I feel like East Africa is in the same mind frame, but the other way,” he says. “We realize there’s a gap for what we can offer.”

Baraka grew up in Rwasi, in a church choir, and then in the grinding realities of Kampala. He went from church to the streets, from the streets to the bus to Nairobi, from Nairobi to Lagos, from Lagos to wherever his music is taking him next, which appears to be everywhere. His new album Juvie, out since November 2025, is his most complete statement so far, the document of a young artist who came up in the East African trenches and now feels the weight of representing something larger than himself.

He does not buckle under that weight. He carries it lightly, the way people do when they’ve been thinking about it for a long time. He knows that his arrival coincided with a moment of anxiety in Uganda about whether Ugandan music could mean anything outside its borders. He knows that “Nana” answered that question in a way that mattered beyond his own career. He knows, and says plainly, that he wants to be bigger than Michael Jackson. “It’s a big dream that deserves a toast.” And that is not empty talk. He says it because he has been putting in the work, because he has been on the buses, because he has been in the studios in Kampala and Nairobi and Lagos, because he understands both the art and the game well enough to know that the two are not always opposed.

The last thing he says, before the sign-off, is the thing I keep turning over. We have been talking about AI and what it cannot replicate, and I have made the point that the general public may not care enough about the difference between AI writing and human writing to make the distinction matter. He pushes back, gently but firmly.

“People can tell the difference between good art,” he says. And then he makes the Whitney Houston argument. You can give people the current songs, the quick-consume, two-minute-thirty-second machine-optimized product, and they will listen. They will stream it. But ask them, ask anyone, whether something surpasses what Whitney Houston did. They will say no. Not because they’re music scholars. Because they can feel it. They have just adapted to consuming less than what they know is possible. “We just try to dumb down things,” he says. “And the audience is still so mature.”

He blames executives more than artists. Executives walk into studios and tell artists what the data says about attention spans, about TikTok hooks, about words that are trending. They are not wrong about the data. But the data describes the last creative’s work, not the next creative’s possibility. A creative who breaks the mold becomes the new data point, and then the executives arrive with their charts and tell everyone to do what that creative just did.

Baraka has the mind of someone who is already past that cycle, who is already thinking about what comes after the trend he is trying to set.

“That’s why,” he says, at the very end, almost as a joke but not quite, “AI can’t write this.”

He means the conversation. He means the interview where he interviewed me, where he talked about music and technology and the future of human artistic value in my living room in Lagos, a city he visits now because the world has gotten small enough to let a kid from Kampala show up and take over your podcast and mean it.

He is right. AI can’t write this. But neither, I suspect, can most people. That’s the point.

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“I was shocked to see people singing my song, word for word,” Shallipopi tells me, sitting across my living room couch in Lagos, as my reflection from his sunglasses catches my eye. We’re mid-interview, recording an episode of Afrobeats Intelligence Podcast. It’s his second appearance on the show, earlier showing up in 2024, while navigating his explosive ascent into stardom. In the two years between episodes, he consolidated his position as a staple of African pop culture, weaving his unique take on artistry into Afrobeat’s lifeline. He’s also dropped three albums in that time, with an ever-expanding discography buoyed by hits like “Laho,” heavy-hitter collaborations across the globe with Burna Boy, Rauw Alejandro, Gunna, Odumodublvck, and Swae Lee, tours across two continents, and a carousel of cultural touch points.

The people singing his songs, word for word, were in Portugal.

It was Afro Nation. Shallipopi had walked through the streets of Portimau earlier that day and nobody people had looked twice. Then night came, the stage lit up, and Portuguese-speaking strangers sang his Benin City slang back at him, syllable for syllable, in a language that wasn’t theirs. “It was a crazy thing to see,” he says. He laughs when he says it, but the laugh carries something underneath it. It’s not pride, exactly, because Shallipopi is philosophically suspicious of pride. But a kind of amazed recognition. The world had gotten bigger than he had imagined, and he had gotten bigger inside it.

This is the central tension of sitting across from him: the artist who took over the clubs, who bent the sonic grammar of Nigerian pop toward his own image, who built a sound so distinct that an entire generation of new makers have quietly pressed their ears against it and called it a template — this same artist insists, calmly and without any performance of humility, that none of it really moved him. Not in the way you’d expect it to move someone.

“It’s just a job, at the end of the day,” he says.

Shallipopi grew up in Benin City, in Edo State, the eldest of three brothers who shared the same restless ambition and nowhere to put it. Before music, there was comedy. Before comedy, there was dancing. The three of them would make videos — skits, dance routines, whatever format seemed like it might catch — filming on a neighbor’s Samsung phone, editing on the phone itself, posting to YouTube. The app they used to record music in those early days was called “To Me,” a primitive voice-capture tool that ran through earpiece mics. He mentions it with the fond detachment of a man who has since been inside London’s best studios.

“The highest views was just 14K,” he says. “It was not like it was too much.”

But even at 14K, he understood that the views were not the point. The views were evidence of something he had not yet built: a reason for people to stay connected. “Those 14K people, they didn’t know me,” he explains. “They’ll be just like, ‘Okay, this is a cool dance.’ And then they go search for more dance videos. And they see maybe 10 more that’s better than ours.” He shrugs. It was a clean equation. When the container changed and music replaced dance, the same hunger that drove the dance videos drove the music. He simply needed searching for a lever for stardom.

That lever arrived in time as hit record, “Elon Musk.” When that song began to pull traction, he knew something had shifted, though he describes the aftermath with the same low-key precision he applies to everything else: “You drop. It waits. Maybe you try and gather money and send one. That doesn’t work. You wait again.” Then “Shapiru.” Then “Ex-Convict.” Each song moving him a few inches further into a market that had not yet agreed to make space for him.

At that point, market was not looking for what he had. Nigeria’s pop infrastructure was built around a certain sound — melodic, Afrobeats-adjacent, tending toward warmth and sentiment. Shallipopi arrived with something else entirely. He was a trapper who talked over Amapiano production. He had always been a trapper. He says it flatly, without apology: “I’m a trap star.” The Amapiano influence that eventually powered “Elon Musk,” the song that broke him nationally on TikTok in 2023, was a winning compromise. “It’s Amapiano that bring food to the table,” he says, “so we’ll do it. I will drag it with them.” He laughs at the memory of it. It’s the laugh of a man who let the market think it had figured him, while keeping his own identity completely intact, as evidenced by his latest album.

Auracle, his latest project, is where the mask comes off, or more accurately, where he stops wearing one. The album splits almost evenly between Amapiano, Afrobeats, and trap — each genre calibrated for a different temperature, a different room, or even a different part of the listener. “If you want the house to be shaking, play the Amapiano,” he explains, with breezy logic, reverse-engineering joy. “If you want the cool vibes in your chilling section, play your trap music.” He says it like it is the most obvious thing in the world, because to him it is.

The trap section of Auracle, completed in three days in London — three days during which he barely left the studio, barely slept — is the most revealing work of his career. Songs like “Hymn” and the Gunna collaboration and the record with Swae Lee pull out a version of Shallipopi that his earlier audience mostly wasn’t allowed to hear. He flowed differently. He spoke more. He arrived on the beats with a vocabulary and a looseness that surprised even people who had been paying close attention. When I tell him this, he is unbothered. “That’s the way I’ve been singing,” he says. “If you watch my old freestyles, that’s the way I’ve been singing.” The market simply was not ready to receive it.

“Like That (bomboclat)” the record with Wizkid — made in roughly an hour — gets a characteristic response when I ask about it. “It was lit now,” he says. “We have a fun studio type shit.” He pauses. “It just sounded mad, bro, without no mixing.” There is something in this, in how matter-of-factly he narrates what would, for most artists, be a career-defining moment. Wizkid, in an hour, sounding mad without mixing. He says it the way you might describe finding good rolling paper.

What is actually interesting about Shallipopi — more than the hits and the trajectory — is his relationship to strategy. He denies that he is strategic. He insists he is simply “thinking.” And then he describes, in lucid detail, decisions that would make a label executive weep with admiration.

“Laho,” the breakout collaboration with Burna Boy that became one of the year’s most-played Afrobeats songs, was not designed to be a global anthem. It was a Benin City anthem. “In this album, let me put one track for my Benin people,” he explains. “That was the ‘Laho.’” Every album, he tells me, has one. A track rooted in Edo identity, in the heritage of where he came from, placed inside a project aimed at everywhere. He says it the way a contractor might describe a structural decision.

Then came the versioning. “Laho” found its audience in Nigeria, then the UK, then the United States, where Burna was on tour performing it live. By collaborating with Puerto Rican superstar, Rauw Alejandro, Shallipopi moved into Spanish-speaking markets. He says it’s not just Spain, but all of the Americas that speak it, by recruiting a collaborator ranked in the top 50 artists in the world. “I was like, ‘Shit, man. Go for it.’” Part one, part two with Burna, part three in Spanish for the diaspora. Three markets, one song, sequenced like a television franchise. When I call this strategy, he pushes back lightly. “I was just thinking,” he says. Then he pauses. “I agree,” he concedes.

His successful brothers, Zerry DL and Famous Pluto, are now artists in their own right. They are signed, releasing hits, and orbiting the same cultural universe. He speaks about them with a warmth that is different from anything else in his register, softer and less guarded. They started together: the comedies, the dance videos, the YouTube channel. When “Elon Musk” moved, he did not call them to say they were next. It did not work like that, he explains. It moved gradually, the way all real things move. Song by song, show by show, until he had enough of a platform to extend. “Those are like my first children,” he says, and then immediately seems to reconsider whether that framing makes sense. “Something like that. You get what I mean?”

He insists on keeping work and family separate. It is a line he draws clearly, almost philosophically. And yet his brothers are his collaborators, his people, his “warriors” — a word he uses with unmistakable pleasure. When I point out the contradiction, he does not really resolve it. “I don’t know how to explain. Those are my brothers. I trained them. There’s difference.” He sits with it for a moment. Then: “All of us grew up together. So I don’t know how to explain the whole issue for you, my bro. It’s just I have to separate work from family.”

It occurs to me, listening to him say this, that the separation is not about distance. It is about protection. He has organized his world in compartments because unorganized worlds collapse under the weight of success. He has watched that happen to people around him. He has thought about it carefully enough to name the danger. “If you feel too fulfilled,” he says, unprompted, when I raise the idea of satisfaction, “that’s when you feel too comfortable and start relaxing because you did it. You’ll be lazy and all that. And that’s the beginning of falling off.”

I tell him about the Roman generals. About the tradition, after conquest, of stationing a servant beside the triumphant commander to whisper memento mori into his ear: remember that you will die. A check on pride. A way of staying human inside the celebration. He has never heard of it, but he nods slowly when I explain it.

“That’s true,” he says.

Shallipopi does not feel pride, he insists. He equates pride with rudeness, with a kind of ceiling that settles over you when you think you have arrived. “I know the outcome of being rude,” he says. He is not interested in the ceiling. He is interested in what comes next. When I ask what has been most important to him, across all of it. Is it the albums, the awards, the tours, the collaborations, the billion streams and the Benin City boys who made it to London studios and back? He does not hesitate. “Family, bro.” He grins. “Family and a lot of money.” Then, reconsidering: “Fulfillment? Fulfillment is tricky. The moment you’re too fulfilled, you stop pushing.”

He seems satisfied with this answer. He leans back as we wrap up. Shallipopi, the trap star who let the market think he was an Amapiano artist, who placed a Benin City tribute on every album and turned it into a global hit, who made the clubs sound like him and then quietly watches an entire generation of new artists try to make the clubs sound like him. Shallipopi sits there in his sunglasses, still composed, still seeing everything.

“Strategy is life,” he says. Then he laughs. “That’s what I’m telling you now.”

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“Man know thyself…”

If self-awareness is the height of personal truth, Omah Lay is the best of his graduating Socratic class. The pop star has always nursed a fascination with the workings of his mind, and how that impacts his creativity and life force. It’s a torturous exploration for him, echoing the hard life he lived as a child. Life gets real fast when you become your family’s bread winner in childhood, watch your friends die from oil bunkering, find escape and succor in music, before riding your skill to the height of your profession. Omah’s ascension through the hierarchy of the music industry changed his material status, but the demons in his head remain tough tenants. They come calling with each project, coloring his highs with melancholy, as he struggles to find respite from his depression. His entire discography so far has been multiple rounds of failed eviction notices for his tormentors. A literal dance with the devil.

Omah’s lamentations work well. He’s one of Nigeria’s most gifted artists, lots of No. 1 singles, a few global tours, and collaborative chart-toppers that thicken the tapestry of Afrobeats. Bad Influence, his incomprehensible titanic debut hit, opened the spigot from which flowed Soso, the de facto yearner selection on romantic playlists, where love is touted as both salvation and an existential balm for all the ills of the heart. And on Clarity of Mind, his second album following 2022’s successful Boy Alone, his moaning deepens, as he embraces spirituality, weed and acceptance on this exciting comeback.

This is where we find Omah Lay. Here he sings about being an obsessive beau, a cannabis enthusiast and God-lover, as well as his navigation of pain, and his place in the game as a songwriter and performer. He comes to this project bleeding from the start, albeit with the gained wisdom of a depressive veteran who has spent enough time with his pain to find clarity in coping. With the opening Artificial Happiness, he makes the defining declaration that “Igbo (marijuana) is telling on me,” a smoker’s hustling manifesto that invites singing with its meandering melodies, heavy kicks, and background chants of “Blood of Jesus!” It begins with a cinematic bass intro, guiding us backstage into a defiant picture of daily wake and bake sessions, and the winning inspiration it provides him. (”One in the morning time, that’s how I start my day. Advantage to start my day to see money clear,” which is something every stoner worth their puff will say).

The album’s first half continues to grapple with weed, God and sex, with Omah reflecting about his self-actualisation journey, his trysts with women, and how weed helps with pursuing money. On Jah Jah Knows he appreciates the struggle to win, and the uncertainty of everything working out. “Do you believe I’ve given it all of me,” he sings, an explanation that would be obvious to those who have followed his story. Canada Breeze is smack on the nose, reading out his compulsive desire to light up a jay. He breaks down his smoking routine over probing highlife guitar harmonics, and how it all helps him navigate his pain. “I no normal,” he repeatedly affirms his proclivities. All of it, the weed, the sex, the God-pleading, is the same thing wearing different clothes. Omah Lay is a man building a daily case for his own survival, and every song is another piece of evidence.

This type of directness is par for the course with Omah; his rawness and silliness have been defining pillars of his artistry, and it’s refreshing to hear him present this once again. “Girl get on your knees, come check in my jeans, wetin she see, she no believe…” is what you’d expect from Omah Lay’s writing, but he takes it a step further on Water Spirit by providing a blow by blow account of a blowjob. It’s this little familiarity that also appears on Mary Go Round, making sex an inside joke to his fandom, and his feverish dedication to getting laid saturates the mournful Don’t Love Me. Sex is both pleasure and absolution for him.

Coping Mechanism, a heart-to-heart between lovers featuring new signee Elmah, introduces love as a possible respite from pain, but Omah is too honest an artist to let it stick. The relief is temporary, the warmth conditional. In Julia, the loneliness returns with full force, eating him up despite being surrounded by people. “I’ll rather be alone, than with anyone else,” he sings, and then goes on his knees pleading, “my baby show, my baby show.” It is the sound of a man who has diagnosed his condition perfectly and cannot cure it anyway.

The final three tracks of Clarity of Mind are more tightly bound than anything else on the project, with Omah Lay in an uncharacteristically self-possessed mood across the Lekaa Beats-produced I Am, the hit single Holy Ghost, and the closer Amen. On I Am, the repetition is the argument, “I am who I am, I am who I am,” and the sparseness of the writing, the deliberate refusal to say more than is necessary, turns out to be where his greatness lives. The chest-thumping is liberating precisely because it costs him so little. Amen leans into Ikwerre highlife for its only verse, a groovy, prayerful request for the uncomplicated life, riding a 3-Step production with the looseness of a man who has already made his peace. “All I want for the rest of my life is some peace of mind,” he sings, “and enough money to purchase anything wey I wan buy.” It is the most honest thing on the album, which is saying something.

The first hints of Omah Lay’s spiritual reckoning were buried in the melancholy of Boy Alone, but nothing there suggested he would arrive at acceptance with this much ease, this much looseness in the shoulders. Clarity of Mind does not resolve his demons so much as negotiate livable terms with them, weed and God and sex serving as the unlikely trinity through which he finds his footing. He is still bleeding at the end of it. He is also, somehow, dancing. That combination, mournful and celebratory at once, has always been his gift. Here, for the first time, it feels like he knows it too.

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We’ve been here before. Afrobeats and all its pomp, hopes, shine, and appetite for the big moments have been here before. Once again, we’re experiencing the familiar feeling of a failed attempt to fly, the cathartic ebbing of pre-Grammy mass hysteria giving way into disbelief, the slow-dripping agony of heartbreak and acceptance, the local industry discombobulation, and a short but feisty grapple with the meaning of loss on music’s biggest stage.

On Sunday night, the 68th Annual Grammy Awards rolled into the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. As is often the case, the best of global music made the journey for all that the ceremony offers: the chance to find inspiration, shake powerful and necessary hands, plant new seeds of collaboration at the highest levels of a $29 billion industry. And maybe, just maybe, return home with a trophy as reward for hard work.

The ceremony delivered. Countless parties and events graced the week. Performances, linkups and new pathways were forged. Winners were announced, speeches delivered, and trophies raised. A few tears were shed, and many wholesome moments generated. It’s a moving spectacle, where for one night, we get to discover how we fit into the global entertainment matrix.

The Recording Academy made Fela Kuti the first African recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award. The recognition comes at a moment when Fela’s legacy has become a point of public contention, with recent disputes over how contemporary Afrobeats artists should relate to the Afrobeat pioneer’s revolutionary work. For a figure who spent his life railing against Western institutions and suffered brutal consequences for his activism, being honored by the Recording Academy represents a complex full-circle moment. The timing feels significant, arriving nearly three decades after his death as arguments rage about what his name means and who has the right to invoke it.

The Fela award proves the Recording Academy knows how to honor African music properly when it chooses to. It can recognize towering influence, revolutionary artistry, and cultural impact that transcends geography. The Academy understands that some legacies demand their own space, their own terms of evaluation. The question now is whether that same clarity can be applied to the living, breathing genres that carry Fela’s torch forward.

The Nigerian entertainment industry continues to grapple with its place in the global order, and nights like these present enough data to fashion an informed consensus. At the turn of the 2020s, Afrobeats elevated itself to global acclaim. After nearly three decades of finding a viable sound and a working connection to major music markets, the scene finally found its way with hits by Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy and an emergent generation of creators. Sony, Universal, Warner, Empire, and nearly every vital music corporation put boots on the ground, backing an ascending expression from West Africa.

Eight years have passed since 2018. The landscape has changed. Things appear to have hit a stasis at home, with the industry grappling with the loss of the novelty bounce. Questions are beginning to be asked about sustaining momentum and defending its vaunted position with new hits at the highest levels. Questions on return on investment, and how the market can find a route to sustainability.

While the world watched Afrobeats pull its weight from a consumerist perspective, its most important work happened in the background. In boardrooms and endless meetings around the world, the movement forced a reckoning. Afrobeats arrived on the global stage and demanded institutional recognition. The result: Billboard created an Afrobeats chart in 2022. Apple Music and Spotify built dedicated genre categories. And in 2023, the Recording Academy, after years of pressure, finally established a Best African Music Performance category at the Grammys.

This was supposed to be the victory lap. Afrobeats had achieved what seemed impossible: it made the world’s most powerful music institutions acknowledge Africa. And in some ways, it has worked. Nigeria has found its way to the winner’s circle. Tems won Best African Music Performance just last year, with a song rooted in African sensibility that connected globally. The category has proven it can reward the right music. But here’s where the story gets complicated, and where Sunday night’s ceremony reveals a structural problem that Afrobeats itself helped create.

Consider the case of David Adedeji Adeleke, known as Davido. His song “With You” wasn’t simply popular. It was the hottest song in West Africa, dominating airwaves and streaming platforms across the region for months. It was the sound of 2025 in Lagos, Accra, Dakar. When Afrobeats fans talk about what deserves recognition, this is exactly what they mean: songs that define moments, that soundtrack entire seasons, that everyone from taxi drivers to boardroom executives can’t stop playing.

Davido didn’t win. This marks his fourth Grammy nomination without a win, a painful pattern for one of Afrobeats’ most relentless builders. Burna Boy has won once. Wizkid has won once. Tems has won once in an African category. The losses outnumber the wins, but the wins are real. The system works. It simply wasn’t designed to capture everything Afrobeats actually is.

The winner was Tyla, and before the conversation goes any further, let’s be clear: it was a deserved win. “Push 2 Start” wasn’t just an African hit. It was a global one. The song hit the Billboard Hot 100, topped the US Afrobeats chart for twenty consecutive weeks, went gold in the US, platinum in Brazil, and charted across dozens of countries from the UK to the Philippines. Tyla became the first artist to win Best African Music Performance twice, and she did it the right way: with a song that carried African elements, specifically her signature blend of amapiano and pop, into the widest possible conversation. That’s exactly what the category asks for. She obeyed every parameter of the game and won.

The backlash against her win from Nigerian fans is precisely the kind of energy that needs to be interrogated. Tyla is South African. Her sound is rooted in the continent. She didn’t steal anything or sidestep anything. She simply reached further. And yet, for some, her win feels like a loss because she isn’t Nigerian. That reaction exposes the real tension hiding inside the category: when we say “African Music,” do we mean the continent, or do we mean Nigeria? Because the Grammys mean the continent. And Afrobeats, for all its dominance, is one genre within a much larger musical landscape. Directing frustration at Tyla instead of examining why the category is structured the way it is reveals more about where the real problem lies than any loss could.

The problem runs deeper than Afrobeats artists losing repeatedly. They are playing in a category that was never designed to fully capture what Afrobeats is. When the Recording Academy established the Best African Music Performance category, it made a crucial decision: it would honor “African music” broadly, not Afrobeats specifically. This might seem like an inclusive gesture. Why limit the category to one genre when Africa has so many? But in practice, it means Afrobeats competes against a wider field on terms that don’t necessarily reflect its dominance.

The category is too broad by design. Africa is a continent of 54 countries, with thousands of distinct musical traditions. Lumping them all into one Grammy category isn’t celebration. It’s consolidation. The Recording Academy is saying: “We’ll acknowledge you exist, but you all have to compete for one trophy.”

Compare this to how the Grammys treat American or European music. There’s no “Best North American Music” category forcing country, hip-hop, rock, and R&B to battle for a single award. Those genres get their own lanes, their own respect, their own space to be evaluated on their own terms. But African music? One category. Take it or leave it.

Afrobeats has earned its own category. Not as a subset of “African music,” but as a genre with its own history, its own aesthetic codes, its own commercial infrastructure and global reach. It has produced arena tours, billion-stream songs, and influenced pop music from Toronto to Tokyo. The genre has done the work. It has built the audience, generated the streams, and proved its commercial weight. What it needs now is a category that reflects that.

Instead, what we have is a system where songs like “With You,” which dominated West Africa, compete against songs that may have had bigger budgets, slicker productions, or collaborations with American artists that give them broader recognition with Grammy voters. The category becomes less about what’s hot in Accra or Lagos and more about what resonates in Los Angeles or New York. That’s not a flaw in Afrobeats. It’s a flaw in the frame.

This is the trap Afrobeats built for itself. By pushing so hard for institutional recognition, the genre accepted recognition on the institutions’ terms. The Recording Academy gave Afrobeats a category, but not autonomy. It gave African music visibility, but not on African music’s own terms. And so the conversation each Grammy night becomes less about celebrating what Afrobeats has achieved and more about measuring it against a standard it didn’t set.

The truth is Afrobeats has already won in the ways that matter most. It controls its own festivals, from Afro Nation to Detty December. It fills stadiums from London to Atlanta. It generates billions of streams and drives fashion trends and influences how young people speak and move across the world. Afrobeats artists negotiate directly with platforms and labels as equals, joint venture experts. The infrastructure is there. The audience is there. The money is there.

So why does losing hurt so much? Because representation matters, even when it’s imperfect. Because for artists like Davido, who have spent their entire careers building bridges between Africa and the world, a Grammy represents validation that their work matters beyond their home base. Because when young artists in Lagos or Kampala watch the Grammys, they’re watching to see if their dreams are possible on that stage. Call it ambition.

But ambition shouldn’t be spent crying over a loss. It should be spent changing the game. The Recording Academy isn’t our institution. It wasn’t built for us, and expecting it to fully understand what makes a song blow up in Warri or Kumasi is asking the wrong question. The right question is: how do we build a category that does? Play the game, or build your own. But stop treating every loss as an injustice when the terms were never yours to begin with.

What Afrobeats needs now isn’t more Grammy nominations under a flawed category. It needs to push for its own. An Afrobeats category that honors local dominance, that measures success by the metrics that actually matter to the genre. One that recognizes “With You” for what it was: the defining sound of a region. The Recording Academy has shown it can honor African music on its own terms. It did it with Fela. It’s time to do it with a living genre.

Davido will be fine. He’s a hustler, and soon, it will fall to him. His legacy isn’t determined by Grammy voters. It’s determined by the millions of people who made “With You” their anthem. But beyond Davido, beyond any single artist, Afrobeats has a bigger move to make. Stop measuring success by institutions that were never built to understand it. Build the ones that are.

The real question isn’t why Davido keeps losing Grammys. It’s why Afrobeats keeps giving the Grammys the power to define what winning looks like.

Afrobeats Intelligence exists to bring rigorous, thoughtful analysis to conversations about African music that too often get reduced to hot takes and tribalism. If you want writing that respects your intelligence and the complexity of the culture, subscribe.

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It’s 2026 and we’re back. The Nigerian music industry is roaring into the new year by throwing us the gift of a project. Wizkid and Asake’s “REAL” arrives on the back of a whirlwind week and the general renegotiation of Fela Kuti’s legacy. Song and drama, just like the old poets foretold.

This episode has all the hallmarks of a classic tale. Seun Kuti, a duty-bound descendant of greatness, launches a holy war against the passage of time and a new generation of cultural aggressors who find scarce use for old treaties. In that melee, we have great declarations of greatness on both sides, a clash of consumerist perspectives and a reiteration of what “legacy” represents in an age defined by the primacy of numbers across digital platforms. Fela could impose his will on his burnished saxophone and put his life on the line against the oppressive government of his day. But does he have “Essence?” How does pioneering a foundational music genre hold up against an influx of dollars underwritten by “Afrobeats to the world?”

We are all slaves to time and documentation. And they both combine to drive us to task. It’s in the fundamental nature of music to act as a tool for both. A good song transmits a feeling by capturing, documenting and transmitting data reflective of the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times. Pop culture twists and turns with passage of that time, converting momentary bangers into time capsules woven into the fabric of culture. And as all things in flux, the euphoria of today becomes tomorrow’s nostalgia.

Fela Kuti captured foundational data that continues to serve and inspire subsequent generations of creators. Wizkid — whose favored consumption and reinterpretation of that data inspired an arm tattoo of Fela — believes his new contributions deserve similar or higher consideration because of their impact on pop culture.

The old classics also run on a generational theme of sons challenging fathers after passage of time. It’s the coming-of-age story. Zeus led his siblings against Kronos, with victory creating a new order of gods. Oedipus slew his father to get to his mother’s embrace. Nwoye embraced Christianity in defiance of Achebe’s Okonkwo. Sango grappled with Oranyan’s looming legacy on his path to deification. Tales as old as time.

In music, an endeavor streaked with creative ego, every generation believes its expression to be the best. Today’s rappers will pay homage to past MCs but spray “greatest rapper of all time” all over their hits. Pop singers might not compete with the greats of old in sheer talent (because of general democratization of the creative process), but they will hoist their outsized streaming numbers and certifications as proof that they can hang. Never mind that this is the most connected humanity has been and frictionless tech-enabled distribution means their art can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.

With empirical measurements muddied by time and tech, what then constitutes a real measure of worth and achievement across ages?

Musical legacy operates fundamentally as a measure of sustained utility across time. When we call someone a “great” artist, we’re essentially recognizing that their work continues to serve purposes for audiences decades or centuries after creation — whether that’s emotional catharsis, cultural identity, technical instruction or pure enjoyment.

Fela Kuti endures not because critics in the 1970s declared him eternal, but because each generation finds something useful in his compositions: musicians study his complex polyrhythmic arrangements, activists draw inspiration from his fearless political messaging, and global audiences continue discovering how Afrobeat can express resistance and joy simultaneously. His music remains potent because it keeps serving new purposes — soundtracking protests, influencing contemporary Afrobeats producers, teaching younger generations about Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial struggle. Legacy, then, isn’t about some abstract quality of “greatness” frozen at the moment of creation, but rather the accumulated proof that the work keeps working for people across different contexts and eras.

This utility-across-time framework also explains why contemporary acclaim doesn’t guarantee legacy and positions someone like Wizkid in an interesting moment of legacy-building. Wizkid dominates his era by capturing the global sound of contemporary Afrobeats, bridging African and international audiences and shaping how a generation moves and feels. But his ultimate legacy depends on whether future generations — 20, 40, 60 years from now — still find utility in his innovations: Will producers study his melodic approaches? Will his collaborations remain reference points for cross-cultural fusion? Will his songs still soundtrack important moments in people’s lives?

Fela’s legacy grew because each decade revealed new layers of usefulness in his work. Wizkid’s trajectory suggests similar potential, but the greatest creators are those who’ve built work dense enough, open enough or innovative enough that people separated by decades of technological and cultural change still find it indispensable. Legacy is simply the long receipt of usefulness.

The tension between Seun Kuti’s defense of his father’s legacy and Wizkid’s assertion of his own greatness is ultimately a false binary. Both can be true simultaneously because they operate on different time scales of the same utility principle. Fela has already passed the test — his work has proven useful across five decades, survived technological revolutions, political shifts and generational turnover. Wizkid is still in the crucible, his impact undeniable in this moment but his legacy still being written with each passing year.

The real question isn’t whether Wizkid can be compared with Fela now, but whether in 2070, people will still be discovering new uses for “Essence” the way they continue finding new applications for “Water No Get Enemy.” The debate itself, however heated, is actually healthy — it forces us to articulate what we value in music beyond the immediate rush of consumption.

What makes this generational clash particularly instructive is how it exposes the limitations of our current metrics. Streaming numbers, certifications and sold-out arenas tell us about reach and contemporary impact, but they’re poor predictors of endurance. The Billboard charts of 1975 were filled with songs no one remembers, while Fela — who never topped any Western chart — grows more influential with each passing decade. This doesn’t diminish Wizkid’s achievements; it simply reminds us that we won’t truly know his legacy until we’re no longer here to argue about it. The artists who endure are those whose work contains enough depth, innovation or emotional truth that future generations can mine it for purposes we can’t yet imagine.

In the end, legacy is determined not by proclamations of greatness but by the quiet accumulation of usefulness over time. Fela didn’t plan to become a revolutionary icon studied in universities worldwide — he was simply making the music that felt necessary in his moment, and that necessity happened to resonate across generations. Wizkid is doing the same, creating sounds that feel essential now. Whether those sounds will feel essential to our grandchildren is a question only time can answer.

The gift both artists give us is the music itself. The legacy is what happens when we’re all gone, when the debates fade and only the utility remains — when future listeners, facing their own struggles and joys, reach for these songs and find them still potent, still useful, still necessary. That’s the only receipt that matters.

In 2020, I was sitting in my apartment in Ajah, watching editorial budgets dry up across international publications. The commissions I’d relied on were thinning out. I’d built a reputation as a troublemaker in the Nigerian music industry—someone who asked difficult questions and wrote uncomfortable truths—and that reputation, while earned, came with professional costs. People were retreating. The walls were closing in.

So I started a newsletter.

It wasn’t a grand vision at first. It was survival. Every Monday, I’d sit down and write about African music—the business, the culture, the stories nobody else was telling. I called it Afrobeats Intelligence. Over time, tens of thousands of you subscribed. You showed up. You read. You cared about the work.

Eventually, I bought equipment and turned the newsletter into a podcast. Not because I had a production budget or a media partner, but because I believed in documenting this moment. I believed in archiving the spirit of what we were building—the artists, the sound, the movement—before it disappeared into the blur of viral clips and algorithm-fed nostalgia.

Last month, I was invited to speak on a panel at Meta’s EMEA Communications Offsite in London. The session was called Fuel for the Feed: Creative Lessons from New Media, and I sat alongside some of the most innovative independent media builders in Europe—Laurence Moss from The Brit Spot, Alma Fabiani from SCREENSHOT Media, and Julia Czub from Newonce. We spoke to Meta’s communications team about how creators like us are disrupting traditional media, building direct relationships with audiences, and creating value in spaces the industry overlooked.

It was a strange and humbling full-circle moment. Seven years ago, I was pitching editors with a spreadsheet, trying to convince them that Afrobeats mattered. Now I was in a room with one of the most powerful media companies in the world, explaining how independent platforms—newsletters, podcasts, social publishers—have become essential to how people consume culture.

What I talked about on that panel was something you already know if you’ve been reading this newsletter: the power of moving from the niche to the center without losing your voice. When I started Afrobeats Intelligence, I wasn’t trying to be mainstream. I was trying to be real. I was trying to tell deeper stories, the kind that take time and care, the kind that don’t fit into 60-second TikToks or headline-optimized clickbait. I was exploring. I was being intentional about what I archived and why.

But over time, that niche became a reference point. It became infrastructure. And now, what started as a reaction to being shut out has become a space that artists, executives, and listeners trust. That’s the power of independent media: you build your own platform, you control your narrative, and if you do it with integrity, the audience finds you. The brands find you. The world finds you.

On that panel, I talked about the machinery that powers this work—the consistency, the relationship with your audience, the balance between artistic exploration and commercial sustainability. I talked about what it means to stay rooted in your mission even as the opportunities grow. I talked about the responsibility of documenting culture as it happens, not after the fact, because we’ve lost too much African music history already to poor archiving and Western gatekeepers.

I’m grateful. Grateful to OkayAfrica for investing in Afrobeats Intelligence and believing in the vision. Grateful to Meta for the platform to share these lessons with people building the future of media. Grateful to you for supporting this work from the beginning.

This panel wasn’t just about me. It was about what we’re all building—independent voices, creator-led platforms, and new ways of documenting culture. If you want to see what I said about the journey from newsletter to podcast, from niche to the mainstream, and what I think the future of media looks like, [you can watch it here].

Let me know what resonates. Let me know what questions you have. This is still a conversation.

Onward,
Joey

ALGIERS — The Turkish Airlines relay from Lagos through Istanbul dumped me in Algiers on Friday, Sept. 5, the Algerian summer’s last ragged breath clinging to the air. Outside Houari Boumediene Airport, Arabic flowed like river talk, French clipped sharp, diesel growled low—a Mediterranean fog blurring the Casbah’s white cliffs into half-remembered lore. The city thrummed, avenues jammed with delegates in linen cuts and kaftan sweeps, all funneling to the Palais des Expositions des Pins Maritimes. This was IATF 2025, the fourth Intra-African Trade Fair—a seven-day sprawl of grit where Africa’s trade maps crossed its cultural blade. From Sept. 4 to 10, themed “Boosting Intra-African Trade for a Sustainable Future: Innovation, Value Addition, and Green Industrialisation,” it aimed to patch the continent’s cracked lines. For me, a Nigerian music journalist who has chronicled Afrobeats’ global ascent from smoky Lagos clubs to Coachella stages, the real draw lay in CANEX, the Creative Africa Nexus, where sounds, stories and styles would be forged into something sharper and more bankable.

Jet lag clung to me as I dropped my bags at the hotel near the expo grounds, but the evening’s mega concert refused to wait. CANEX’s flagship showcase at the Algiers Opera House had dominated my Lagos group chats for weeks: Wizkid headlining a pan-African bill to cap the fair’s creative thrust. I grabbed a quick taco from a street vendor and pushed through the dusk crowds, my sparse French coming to my rescue with the taxi drivers. The Opera House, perched on a hill in the Ouled Fayet suburb, already heaved with 100s of attendees. On my way to the venue, flags from 81 countries snapped in the breeze, Nigerian green-white-green brushing Algerian crescents and South African rainbows.

The night ignited with amapiano heat from South Africa’s Musa Keys, the producer whose “Tanzania” had soundtracked a continent’s summer. Flanked by collaborator DBN Gogo, he transformed the stone venue into a pulsing dance floor. Basslines thudded through the humid air, his set a clinic in Gqom grooves laced with house flourishes. The crowd, a blend of diplomats, designers and deal-makers, shed decorum fast. A Zimbabwean student swayed beside a Kenyan filmmaker, phones aloft. Musa Keys owned the stage solo at first, his energy contagious, before handing off to openers: Grenadian singer Jeverson Ramirez, whose reggae-soul tracks carried a Caribbean lilt; Kenyan DJ Coco Em, layering deep house synths over tribal percussion to nod at East Africa’s electronic edge; and local Algerian raï acts, their accordion riffs channeling Cheb Khaled’s golden era.

Then Wizkid arrived. He stepped out alone in a minimalist black tank top, his signature outfit, backed only by his personal DJ, DJ Tunez. No guest features, no orchestral swell as I’d half-anticipated from his global tours. This was Wizkid stripped to essence, raw and regal, leaning into his catalog with storyteller poise. He opened with “Ojuelegba,” the Lagos anthem that launched his ascent a decade ago, his voice slicing clean over stripped guitars. The crowd exploded, a sea of waving arms and choruses in Pidgin and French. “Kilo da le!” he called, and the reply rolled back like thunder.

He paced through hits deliberately: the sultry sway of “Come Closer,” the triumphant horns of “Fever,” the introspective haze of “Essence” solo, rendered with a haunting falsetto that hushed the amphitheater. The sound stayed pristine throughout, every note landing sharp in the salt-kissed air. Wizkid powered through, ad-libbing laughs and crowd call-outs. “I have day one Wizkid fans here o?” he grinned, sweat gleaming under the spots. The irony struck mid-set: the artist whose O2 sell-outs I had dissected in London now anchored a continental spectacle for a crowd spanning Sahel to Cape. No diaspora polish, just home-soil fire. The night crystallized CANEX’s ethos: repatriating talent, turning export dreams into local thunder.

Exhausted but buzzing, I crashed at the hotel, beats echoing in my skull. The concert had set the tone, but to grasp IATF’s sweep, I needed the origin. Flash back to Thursday, Sept. 4, the official opening at the Abdellatif Rahal International Conference Centre in upscale Club des Pins. I’d missed the pomp, but footage and delegate whispers painted it vivid: a marble-and-chandelier grand hall, air-conditioned against the swelter, packed with 1,500 dignitaries from 140 countries. Heads of state in national attire filled front rows, Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president and IATF advisory chair, beside Mauritanian and Tunisian counterparts.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune took the podium at midday, commanding in a dark suit, flanked by Afreximbank brass. Silence fell as he invoked the fair’s slogan, “Gateway to New Opportunities,” framing IATF amid a “sensitive global context where events accelerate at an unprecedented pace.” Algeria stood proud as host, he declared, vowing active contributions to Africa’s developmental challenges. A video montage followed: independent Algeria’s pan-African legacy, from anti-colonial solidarity to Sahel mediation, underscoring its continental anchor role. Tebboune emphasized youth’s pivotal place, noting Africa’s young population as both greatest asset and urgent imperative. “We must empower them to drive integration,” he said, his gravelly baritone echoing off walls.

The ceremony flowed into “Algeria Day,” showcasing investment reforms and megaprojects: Sahara solar farms, coastal desalination plants, Oran electronic hubs. Obasanjo praised the host, calling IATF a “vital step in continental integration.” Deals teased early: a €245 million sports media rights facility with New World Television, spanning 24 nations. Speeches rolled and hands clasped in the foyer. The message landed clear: this was a blueprint for economic sovereignty.

Saturday, Sept. 6—Day 3 of IATF—and the CANEX Summit unfolded in a floodlit auditorium, where leaders delivered a clear verdict: Africa’s creative economy stands at the center, not the margins. It fuels strategy and capital, shaping the continent’s path forward. With proper backing, they argued, imagination sparks jobs, fosters inclusion, and drives industrial momentum across borders. Namibia’s vice president, H.E. Lucia Witbooi, captured the spirit: “Creativity is a currency. Culture is capital. Africa’s youth are the entrepreneurs of a new age.” She urged governments and businesses to weave artistic pursuits into their core strategies for growth.

Afreximbank’s EVP Kanayo Awani carried the momentum, recalling CANEX’s 2020 origins as a bridge from innate talent to thriving enterprise—armed with funding, training, and policy tools. “When we invest in our creators, we invest in Africa’s prosperity,” she said, citing last year’s surge in intra-African trade to $220.3 billion. H.E. Wamkele Mene, AfCFTA’s secretary-general, linked it to deeper unity: The sector, valued at over $50 billion, could thrive in a 1.4 billion-person market with stronger IP protections, digital marketplaces, and expanded access for artists. “Through the AfCFTA we can protect intellectual property, expand digital trade, and open new markets for our artists.” The session closed on a surge of resolve, as designers, musicians, filmmakers, and digital pioneers committed to forging an economy rooted in identity, pride, and global edge.

The CANEX Creative Return by JVL followed, opened by Ben Bruce—a Nigerian entrepreneur, media powerhouse, and former senator—who framed the creative sector as the engine of industry, employment, and worldwide influence. The panel had actress and activist Yara Shahidi; Algerian singer and ambassador Lila Borsali; Basketball Africa League president Amadou Gallo Fall; Afreximbank’s Temwa Gondwe on creatives and diaspora; writer and social entrepreneur Lavaille Lavette; Nollywood’s Funke Jenifa Akindele; and actor Winston Duke. They delved into the power of cross-border, cross-industry partnerships—tools to shatter barriers, reframe narratives, and convert inspiration into lasting value.

Shahidi evoked the core call: “Unless we begin to see ourselves as a collective and build relationships amongst ourselves, we will never realise the true power of Global Africa.” Akindele outlined the essentials for endurance: “You have to respect culture, be transparent, and carry your partners along. Only then can a collaboration truly succeed.” Duke lifted it to purpose: “At the end of the day, it is not about money or fame. It is about changing reality, so our children see themselves as whole, and our spaces reflect the beauty that is already there.” The takeaway rang true: Culture operates as capital, amplified through deliberate, equitable, and resilient alliances. Grounded in mutual respect, balanced investment, and robust infrastructure, these bonds empower Africa and its diaspora to seize fresh opportunities and assert global presence.

For me, the music sessions hit hardest, CANEX’s vital rhythm. “Decolonising Algorithms: Compensation and Fair Value for African Artists” confronted the digital divide head-on, probing how to ensure fair returns in an algorithm-fueled landscape. Eddie Hatitye of the Music In Africa Foundation moderated, joined by Dr. Adesegun Adeosun Jr. (King Smade, Afro Nation co-founder and Smade Group CEO), Idir Smaili (Algeria’s copyright digital deputy), and Boubacar Djiba (Vasy founder and CEO).

Adeosun championed unity: “We need to collaborate across industries, partner with each other and align around culture if we are to build lasting value for African creativity.” Isolation dooms the effort, he warned; music, film, fashion, and platforms must interconnect to retain creators’ worth on home soil. Smaili drilled to the root: “Art is not free. Every creation represents work, and that work must be compensated.” African ingenuity draws endless acclaim yet meager reward — reframe it as economic labor, and just systems emerge. Djiba scaled the vision: “Culture is the new crude oil. If we invest in it with the same seriousness as natural resources, it will power industries and livelihoods across the continent.” As hydrocarbons defined past eras, creatives can define this one, provided they receive commensurate funding, frameworks, and focus. The session crystallized the challenge: Value creativity on par with any sector, and artists not only captivate the globe but cultivate enduring prosperity within.

A fireside chat brought Khaby Lame, the platform’s most-followed creator, into conversation with Konnie Touré. He traced his path from a pandemic-era factory layoff in Italy to idle TikTok sketches that erupted into billions of views and over 160 million followers. His signature silent clips? “They work because everyone can understand: humour is universal when told through mimic and expression. I always liked making people laugh,” he reflected. “I was shocked but happy to see all of the sudden followers when I started blowing up. I appreciate every single one of them.” The exchange revealed digital realms’ transformative force for African talents, unlocking unexpected paths to international acclaim.

Sunday, Sept. 7—the CANEX Music Masterclass “Rewriting the Rules: Securing Fair Pay and Content Ownership for African Artists” dissected the era’s thorniest hurdles: retaining authorship and securing equitable pay amid digital flux. Hatitye moderated anew, with Mehdi Delmi from Algeria’s copyright office and Tobie van Zyl, Makerverse founder. Delmi laid the groundwork: Losses stem from unregistered claims, erroneous metadata, or under-equipped collectives unable to enforce collections. Counter it with enhanced literacy, streamlined tools, and unified continental standards—making royalties verifiable, prompt, and dependable.

Van Zyl illuminated innovations via his Metaverse startup: Fan-direct sales, transparent licensing, and blockchain contracts bypass legacy hurdles, anchoring revenues locally while immersing Africa’s young creators in the global arena. The dialogue demystified the path: Seamless registries are a neccessity, accurate tagging of songs, empowered collectives, and airtight licensing; AfCFTA-linked networks to span frontiers.

As Day 4 waned that evening, the hall hushed, then surged as the Mansa Orchestra transported us through Africa’s chronicle—from the anguished strains of women consigned to desert crossings and oceanic voids, to the radiant fanfare of Mansa Musa’s gilded entourage. Drums resounded, voices ascended, strings intertwined, forging epochs of anguish into resolve, resolve into victory. Sorrow yielded to dignity; desolation, to aspiration. Africa’s chronicle endures not as ordeal alone, but as testament to tenacity, ingenuity, and inexhaustible reinvention.

Midweek blurred: jet lag and handshakes. Undercard gems persisted. A film panel hashed Nollywood-Egypt co-pros. A literature class dissected Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s trade tales. I dodged the automotive electric minibus pitches for a Senegalese-Algerian thiéboudienne-couscous fusion tasting, Gondwe’s blend in edible form.

Sept. 10 broke with the IATF closing at the Pavilion Saoura, AfCFTA banners draping the cavern. 112,000 souls had streamed through: 60,650 live, the balance virtual, from 132 countries. 2,148 exhibitors, 958 buyers.

The curtain fell on the fourth Intra-African Trade Fair in Algiers, capping a transformative week from September 4 to 10 that drew tens of thousands of visitors, exhibitors, and visionaries from Africa’s farthest reaches and the world beyond, all united in harnessing the African Continental Free Trade Area’s boundless potential to forge enduring partnerships and chart the continent’s bold tomorrow. H.E. Larbi Latrèche, Commissioner General of IATF 2025, reflected on Algeria’s timeless solidarity with Africa—from championing liberation battles to defending sovereignty and self-determination—now revitalized under H.E. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s steadfast guidance, which propelled this edition to unprecedented heights in scope, drive, and resonance. He extended profound thanks to H.E. President Olusegun Obasanjo for his sage counsel that steered the fair to triumph, alongside the unwavering alliance of the African Union, AfCFTA Secretariat, and Afreximbank. In the shadows of the spotlight, ministries, agencies, security forces, and myriad unsung architects collaborated seamlessly toward a singular vision: not just execution, but ignition.

Awards punctuated: prizes for CANEX Shorts for filmmakers, Book Factory Prize to a Zambian migration anthology. Confetti rained as Obasanjo named Lagos 2027 host. Diplomats and sneaker-clad creatives flooded the reception, champagne toasting AfCFTA horizons.

Algiers’ dusk enveloped me, minaret calls adrift. The whirlwind recapped: $640 million creative inks, music to fashion. Intangibles endured: networks beyond news cycles. For the Nigerian fans I rep, this whispered futures. Afrobeats home-manufactured, royalties fueling Lagos dens, tours threading Dakar-Dar es Salaam. Flight-bound, Mediterranean shrinking, Gondwe lingered. We’re exporting cultural capital. In Algiers, it brimmed infinite, graspable at last.

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Life as a Nigerian music fan in Nigeria is a wild ride. The advantages far outweigh the drawbacks. Every Friday brings a flood of new tracks as favourite artists inundate streaming platforms. Star musicians are generous, often dispensing cash and gifts on impulse. On Lagos Island, you might share a joint with your idol at a random party while soaking up the latest celebrity drama, relationships and podcast gossip.

But there is a flip side. The highs of proximity can reach stratospheric levels of enjoyment and connection, yet the downsides cut deep. They restrict access to a fuller music culture. The music business rarely invests its full resources in Nigeria, especially for experiences that are routine in other markets. Commercial realities explain why. The country is gripped by severe inflation, eroding the purchasing power of young people — the core consumers of pop music. Standard live-performance venues are scarce. A touring circuit is virtually nonexistent, and novel ways to experience music remain absent.

On Nov. 8, the Afrobeats star Asake will take the stage at Red Bull Symphonic in Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. He will perform his greatest hits with a world-class orchestra conducted by Glenn Alexander II. This one-night-only event marks the first time an African artist has headlined the series in the United States. It celebrates a sound Asake helped carry to the world.

Asake is bringing his homegrown melodies and Afro-fusion to New York, reworking hit records into orchestral form for his debut in this hybrid format. All tickets sold out quickly — a clear sign of demand. Red Bull Symphonic redefines musical boundaries by fusing high-energy contemporary sounds with orchestral grandeur. The result is a cultural collision that amplifies artists’ visions on an epic scale. For Asake, the event acknowledges his role in exporting Afrobeats globally and signals the series’ commitment to elevating diverse voices. Innovation flourishes when genres refuse to stay in their lanes.

Red Bull Symphonic excels at spotlighting boundary-pushers. In 2023, the producer Metro Boomin electrified Los Angeles by reworking trap anthems with a full orchestra under Maestro Anthony Parnther; bass-heavy bangers became cinematic swells that left audiences spellbound. Last year, the Amapiano maestro Kabza De Small heated up Johannesburg’s Lyric Theatre, fusing soulful house grooves with Ofentse Pitse’s symphonic vision and a 33-piece ensemble to create a rhythmic symphony pulsing with South African pride. These triumphs underscore the series’ global reach and set the stage for Asake’s Afrobeats odyssey in Brooklyn.

So why is this not happening in Lagos, Asake’s hometown? The answer lies in the details.

Afrobeats’ global expansion over the past decade has showered Lagos with blessings. A generation of Nigerian pop artists cracked the international market, powered by major-label contracts and TikTok’s democratizing force. Stars like Rema, Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Tems and others found new audiences and cultures, expanding Lagos’s creative blast radius. One welcome consequence is exactly what Red Bull now offers: an African star reimagining local art for a global audience on a global stage.

Yet Nigerians are watching from afar as Brooklyn hosts this milestone. The longing for a homegrown version is real. New York deserves Asake for his cross-cultural brilliance, but Lagos deserves him more — in this format, on this scale, at this moment. A Red Bull Symphonic in Lagos is a cultural necessity. The city birthed the sound, nurtured the artist and fueled the global wave. It has earned the right to host its own symphonic revolution. Anything less leaves the story half-told.

Begin with the audience. Lagos does not merely support its artists; it anoints them. When Asake released “Lungu Boy” in August 2024, the city claimed it. From Surulere to Lekki, from beer parlors to boardrooms, every corner echoed “Active,” “Fuji Vibe” and the inescapable “MMS.” TikTok challenges erupted within hours. Street vendors sold bootleg merchandise by noon. DJs folded tracks into club sets by nightfall. In Lagos, communal ownership runs deeper than passive consumption. Nigerian fans need no permission to celebrate their own. Burna Boy’s 2021 Grammy win sparked a citywide party without official events. Rema’s “Calm Down” remix hitting a billion streams lit up the internet like New Year’s Eve.

This same audience sold out Asake’s 2023 O2 Arena headline show in London, driven by Nigerian money, passports and cultural pride. They crossed oceans because Lagos could not host it. That energy remains homegrown. Fans here crave more than another concert at Eko Hotel or a pop-up party in a dingy warehouse. Lagos music culture seeks elevation and innovation. It yearns for a night like this, where the music it gave the world returns transformed — as a coronation.

Infrastructure is finally catching up. The National Theatre reopened after renovation backed by federal and private investment. This 3,000-seat mainland marvel boasts upgraded acoustics, lighting and staging that rival midtier venues in Europe or North America. The forthcoming Eko Arena will offer 12,000-capacity multipurpose space on Victoria Island, built to international standards with private capital. Terra Kulture Arena, Alliance Française and the reimagined Balmoral Convention Center at Federal Palace add further options. Lagos is building for the future — a future that includes symphonic Afrobeats, jazz-fusion concerts and electronic orchestras. Red Bull Symphonic fits perfectly. Venues exist. Talent abounds. Conductors can be flown in or sourced locally; Nigeria has classical musicians trained at the MUSON Centre or the University of Lagos. Orchestras can be assembled. Audiences will show up.

Red Bull knows the playbook. It staged the event in Johannesburg with Kabza De Small, in Cape Town with Black Coffee years earlier, and in Vienna, Dubai and Los Angeles. Cultural resonance demands the authentic city, not the safest one. Johannesburg hosted Kabza as his home; the Lyric Theatre delivered a homecoming. The audience moved. The orchestra grooved. A rooted base creates that alchemy.

Lagos calls for the same. Picture Asake on the National Theatre stage in Iganmu. Lights dim. A 50-piece orchestra of Nigerian and international players strikes the opening chord of “Sungba.” Talking drums answer. Violins swell. The 3,000-strong crowd erupts. They sing every word. Phones wave like lighters. A classical hall becomes an Afrobeats cathedral. This can be Lagos today.

The local live-music scene has looped too long: album launches, “detty December” concerts, one-off festival slots. They deliver fun, loud chaos in the best way. Yet they remain predictable. Fans arrive, artists hit their marks, and everyone leaves sweaty and satisfied. That is the baseline. Red Bull Symphonic breaks through. Afrobeats is evolving from party soundtrack to multidimensional art. A genre forged in Lagos backyards can command concert halls. At home, it is no different. Afrobeats dominates globally — on Grammy stages, NBA halftime shows, fashion runways and Hollywood soundtracks. Lagos built it, yet the city remains a bystander to its own evolution. Nigerian fans pay premium prices to fly to London, Paris or New York for elevated formats, spending thousands on flights, hotels and tickets to watch abroad what belongs at home. That path is unsustainable, unfair and unnecessary.

Red Bull has already started it by pioneering another live experience elevation of Afrobeats. In Lagos, live formats innovations like this can ignite a movement. It would prove African innovation can find legitimacy at home. A street-born genre can command local concert halls without losing its soul. Nigerian fans can gain lifelong memories as participants, not just spectators, in foreign cities.

The audience is ready. The venues are ready. The artist is ready. The sound is ready. Bring it home.

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Kizz Daniel, the Nigerian hitmaker who’s been bending the Afrobeats curve since his 2014 debut “Woju,” has always had a knack for bottling life’s fleeting joys and aches into earworm anthems. His latest EP, Uncle K: Lemon Chase, a seven-track prelude to his forthcoming album Uncle K, is no exception. Released in late May 2025, this project is a compact yet sprawling meditation on life’s dualities—sweet highs, sour lows, and the messy in-betweens. With a star-studded cast of collaborators and producers, Kizz Daniel delivers a work that’s as introspective as it is infectious, cementing his place as Afrobeats’ restless storyteller.

The EP opens with “Black Girl Magic,” a love letter to Black women that’s equal parts reverence and cheek. Kizz Daniel’s signature wit shines through in lines like “Make I be your Joseph knack you like carpenter,” a quippy, playful nod to his knack for turning the mundane into the mythic. The track, co-produced by Reward Beatz, Bando, and Blaise Beatz, is a warm, melodic embrace, its lush instrumentation cradling Kizz’s vocals like a sunlit Lagos afternoon. It’s a bold opener, setting the tone for an EP that refuses to shy away from big emotions or bigger hooks.

What makes Uncle K: Lemon Chase stand out is its emotional range. Kizz Daniel has always been a master of balance, weaving party-ready bangers with moments of quiet introspection. On “Eyo,” produced by Reward Beatz, he channels the effervescent spirit of Lagos, blending nostalgia with pop rhythms that feel both timeless and urgent. The track is a love letter to the city’s pulse, its horns and percussion evoking the chaos and charm of a Friday night in Yaba. Yet, it’s followed by the Zlatan-assisted “Secure,” a bass-heavy ode to the hustle where cash reigns supreme. Here, Kizz trades his romantic croon for a streetwise swagger, proving he can hang with the new school while staying true to his roots.

The EP’s heart lies in its quieter moments. “Al-Jannah,” featuring Bella Shmurda and Odumodublvck, is a raw meditation on grief and loss, a stark departure from the EP’s more celebratory tracks. Bella’s soulful rasp and Odumodublvck’s gritty delivery add layers of texture, while Ayzed’s production keeps things sparse, letting the lyrics breathe. It’s a gut-punch of a song, one that showcases Kizz Daniel’s willingness to lean into discomfort—a rarity in a genre often obsessed with escapism. Similarly, “Peace I Chose,” with Runtown, is a tender reflection on finding calm amidst chaos, its gentle guitars and Kizz’s understated delivery making it a standout.

The closer, “Police,” is where Kizz Daniel pulls out all the stops. Featuring Mavin Records’ Johnny Drille and five-time Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo, the track is a romantic, whimsical flourish that feels like a victory lap. Kidjo’s ethereal harmonies and Drille’s soulful croon elevate Kizz’s performance, creating a soundscape that’s both cinematic and intimate. It’s a bold move, pairing Afrobeats with global music royalty, and it pays off, offering a glimpse of Kizz Daniel’s ambition to transcend borders.

Behind the boards, the production team—Reward Beatz, Blaise Beatz, Magic Sticks, Bando, and Ayzed—crafts a sonic world that’s as diverse as Kizz’s emotional palette. From the pulsating beats of “Titi” (featuring Fola) to the soulful grooves of “Oshe” (with Sauti Sol), the EP is a masterclass in Afrobeats’ versatility, blending dancehall, R&B, and indigenous rhythms with a polish that never feels overdone. Each track is meticulously crafted, yet there’s a rawness that keeps things human, a nod to Kizz’s insistence on authenticity.

If there’s a critique, it’s that Uncle K: Lemon Chase can feel like a teaser rather than a complete statement. At just over 17 minutes, the EP is a fleeting taste of what’s to come on Uncle K, leaving listeners hungry for more. Some tracks, like “Titi,” while infectious, don’t quite reach the emotional depth of “Al-Jannah” or “Police.” But this is a minor quibble in a project that’s so deliberately compact, designed to whet the appetite rather than satiate it.

Kizz Daniel has always been a storyteller, but Uncle K: Lemon Chase sees him peeling back more layers than ever. Reflecting on the EP, he said, “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade out of it. I wanted this project to feel like real life—sweet, sour, confusing, beautiful.” That ethos permeates every track, from the playful to the profound. It’s a testament to his growth, not just as a hitmaker but as an artist unafraid to bare his soul.

In a year where Afrobeats continues to dominate global charts, Kizz Daniel remains a step ahead, not chasing trends but setting them. Uncle K: Lemon Chase is a reminder of why he’s endured for over a decade: his ability to make music that’s both universal and deeply personal. It’s a journey, one that invites you to dance, reflect, and feel the weight of life’s lemons turned into sonic gold.  

Hey family,

I’m writing this with a heart full of gratitude and a to-do list that looks like a mixtape tracklist. But we’re here.

Afrobeats Intelligence just crossed 400,000 views on OkayAfrica’s YouTube. That’s not a viral moment. That’s consistent storytelling. That’s community. That’s every single one of you who tuned in, shared, commented, and argued passionately in the DMs about whether Timaya is the GOAT or just your uncle’s GOAT.

Let’s take a quick victory lap, shall we?

We kicked off Season 4 with:

• Gyakie – the Afro-fusion artist with poise, purpose, and pipes. Gyakie opened up about the emotional and artistic evolution behind her new album, After Midnight, and how she’s learning to carry her father’s legacy while carving a distinct lane of her own. She speaks candidly about navigating the pressures of fame, the complexity of being labeled a "nepo baby," and her deep desire to earn everything on her own merit.

• Joeboy – who broke down his peaceful transition from emPawa Records, launching Young Legend, learning from Mr. Eazi, and building a loyal fan community that goes far beyond hit songs.

• And then… Timaya. Listen — Timaya’s episode should be bottled and taught in cultural anthropology classes. The man broke down longevity like a sermon. The ego, the reinvention, the mistakes, the money, the grace — all of it. That wasn’t just an interview; that was a masterclass in survival and legacy.

These aren’t just podcasts. They’re archives.

Where to Watch (And Listen)

Right now, our YouTube presence is split between two channels — don’t let the algorithm confuse you:

• Afrobeats Intelligence’s YouTube channel has all the snippets and clips — perfect for quick gems and shareable moments.

• But for the full video episodes, head to OkayAfrica’s YouTube. That’s where the full sauce lives — uncut, unfiltered, and in high-definition.

Audio-wise, we're sorting out a little back-end reshuffle. The podcast is still up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, so you’re good there. If you’ve been searching on Audiomack or Boomplay and came up blank — we feel you. It’s temporary. We’re rerouting things to get back on track across all platforms. Thanks for your patience.

What You’ll Get From Us (Now and Going Forward)

The Afrobeats Intelligence newsletter is more than podcast updates. Expect:

• Culture-shifting African music news

• Behind-the-scenes breakdowns of the business

• Hot takes that don’t come from bots

• And maybe a few voice notes disguised as essays

On IG and X, the energy stays the same: sneak peeks, unfiltered moments, and all the in-between that doesn’t make the final cut but makes the story better.

Up Next — This Friday, May 30

Muyiwa “Donawon” Awoniyi is in the building.

If you’ve ever tweeted “Afrobeats to the World” without really knowing what it costs to get there, this is the episode you need. Muyiwa is the man behind Omah Lay and Tems’ rise. A global thinker, a spiritual strategist, and a manager who knows that success without purpose is just noise.

We talked faith, systems, mental health, and the beauty of long-term vision in a short-attention-span industry. It’s not just a conversation — it’s a meditation on what this game could be if we did it with more intention.

Set your reminders. Season 4’s latest episode drops Friday, May 30.

Let’s keep building this thing — loud, layered, and unapologetic.

— Joey A.

Fam,

I want to start with a big thank you.

To everyone who pulled up to the launch party, who danced, connected, and celebrated with us — I see you. Your presence wasn’t just support. It was validation. This thing we’ve been building? It’s real. It matters. It’s growing.

And to everyone who’s already tuned in to Episode 1 of Season 4 with Joeboy, salute to you.

This new season of Afrobeats Intelligence marks a powerful shift — not just in storytelling, but in how we’re telling it.

As you’ve seen by now, Afrobeats Intelligence is now presented by OkayAfrica. A partnership that brings our stories to a bigger stage, louder speakers, and a wider global audience. It’s a huge move. One that comes with a few growing pains, yes — but ultimately, it gives us the platform our culture deserves.

Now, let me clear the air on something important:

Where’s the audio version of the podcast?

I hear you. I hear the DMs. The tweets. The WhatsApp messages.
With new things come new systems.
We’re adjusting some back-end processes and syncing up with our new partners at OkayAfrica to make sure everything runs smoothly.
That means audio episodes will be back soon — very soon. But for now, the only place to catch full episodes is on YouTube.

So if you want to hear Joeboy break down his career, the evolution of his sound, what’s next for his life and music — you already know where to be:

👉🏽 Watch on YouTube: OkayAfrica YouTube Channel

And while you're at it, lock in with OkayAfrica on all platforms to stay tapped in:

• TikTok

• Twitter/X

• YouTube

Season 4 is about scale. It’s about building a stronger media home for African music and its people — the artists, the execs, the fans, the culture drivers. It’s a new chapter, but the mission is the same:
To document the movement with truth, with depth, and with love.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

More episodes. More stories. More intelligence.
We move.

— Joey Akan
Afrobeats Intelligence

Dear Afrobeats Intelligence Community,

We’re pumped to invite you to an exclusive Mini-Listening Session hosted by Afrobeats Intelligence tomorrow, May 9.

Get ready to immerse yourself in the pulsating world of Afrobeats, discover new stories, and vibe with fellow fans and our podcast crew.

What’s in Store:

• A first ever viewing of new episodes.

• Lively discussions on the artists, rhythms, and stories driving Afrobeats’ global takeover.

• A chance to share your thoughts and connect with the Afrobeats Intelligence community.

Details:

• When: Tomorrow, May 9.

• Where: To be communicated, only if selected.

• Duration: ~2 hours of pure Afrobeats energy.

Spots are limited, so RSVP now to join the session.

Let’s celebrate the sound of Africa!

See you there,
The Afrobeats Intelligence Team

This didn’t start with a podcast.

It started with a love for our stories. A passion to capture the richness of African music, our people, and our truth — raw and undiluted.

Season 3 of Afrobeats Intelligence wasn’t just about the biggest names or the biggest stages.

It was about getting closer to the heart of it all.
Sitting with Mr Eazi as he mapped out new blueprints.
Sharing space with Timi Dakolo, who reminded us what soul sounds like.
Listening to Oxlade’s journey of resilience and rebirth.
Marching to the Anti-World Gangstars, live and fearless.

We traveled deeper into the machinery that powers African music.
The A&Rs, the branding geniuses, the unseen architects.

Every story mattered. Every conversation counted.

And now, we are standing on the edge of a new chapter.

I can’t reveal everything just yet — but what’s coming will take Afrobeats Intelligence to new heights. A bigger platform. A louder voice. A deeper mission.

Thank you for rocking with me through every step of the journey.

Stay tuned. Stay ready.

Salud, Season 3.

— Joey Akan

Mabel isn’t just another name on the charts; she’s got legacy in her DNA and a hunger for reinvention. When she sat across from me in Lagos, fresh off the December madness that is Detty December, she wasn’t here to posture—she was here to learn. That curiosity, that drive to get her hands dirty in the Afrobeats scene, made our conversation one for the books.

You might know her as Mabel, the UK R&B-pop sensation with the kind of smooth, sultry vocals that slip effortlessly into your playlist. From her breakout single “Finders Keepers” to her UK pop chart domination with “Don’t Call Me Up,” she’s built a career that stands tall on its own. She just dropped a track with Ghanaian singer King Promise, 'All Over You,' and if you haven’t played it yet, you’re slacking. King Promise is a king of silky, feel-good melodies, and paired with Mabel’s polished yet emotive delivery, the song is an instant vibe. For her, this collab wasn’t just a feature—it was a bridge. A way to tap into a sound that’s been calling to her for years.

And what better way to tap in than to be here? Lagos in December is a beast of its own. The streets don’t sleep, the air is thick with music, and every corner has a story waiting to be told. Mabel threw herself into it—soaking up the city, hitting the events, and most importantly, sitting down to have real conversations. With me, she spoke about how Afrobeats isn’t just a sound, but a movement, a global force that’s shifting how we define pop music. 'I don’t just want to take from it,' she told me. 'I want to understand it, be part of it, respect it.'

That level of intentionality? That’s rare. A lot of artists come in, grab a feature, shoot a vibey video, and dip. Mabel isn’t about that life. She’s here for the long run, studying the rhythm of the culture, connecting with the architects of the sound, and figuring out where she can bring her voice into the mix authentically.

Talking to Mabel felt like a conversation with an artist who knows exactly who she is but isn’t afraid to evolve. And that’s what made this sit-down so special. She’s not trying to be an outsider looking in; she’s finding her own way to contribute to a movement that’s changing the world. If 'All Over You' is just the beginning, I can’t wait to see what she does next. And knowing Mabel, she’s only getting started.

It’s not often that moments like these unfold. The second-ever live recording of Afrobeats Intelligence wasn’t just another podcast taping—it was a movement. A gathering of minds, spirits, and boundless creativity, taking center stage at the LiveSpot Entertarium during the grand spectacle of Entertainment Week Lagos.

Odumodublvck and his collective, Anti-World Gangstars, transformed the stage into a battleground of ideas, camaraderie, and sonic evolution. This wasn’t just a conversation; it was a masterclass in the alchemy of music, collaboration, and culture.

The Allegories of a Wordsmith

Odumodublvck has carved a unique space in Afrobeats and hip-hop with his ability to wield allegory like a painter’s brush. His words are visceral, layered, and deliberate. In this episode, he unpacks his process, revealing the origins of the metaphors that define his music. It’s a rare glimpse into the mind of an artist who sees every verse as a canvas, every lyric as a story untold.

“I’m not just here to make hits,” he said, leaning into the mic with the conviction of a prophet. “I’m here to create a legacy, to speak truth in ways people haven’t heard before.”

Brotherhood as the Blueprint

But what sets Odumodublvck apart isn’t just his talent—it’s his tribe. Anti-World Gangstars isn’t just a collective; it’s a testament to the power of unity in an industry often marred by egos and isolation. Together, they embody the spirit of co-creation, where ideas flow freely and no one voice dominates.

Their bond is palpable, their synergy infectious. As they spoke about their journey, their struggles, and their victories, the room felt electrified by their shared mission: to push boundaries, disrupt norms, and rewrite the rules of the game.

Nothing Changed, Everything Changed

At the heart of this live recording was the reveal of their latest masterpiece, Nothing Changed. The album isn’t just a collection of tracks; it’s a manifesto. A declaration that while the world around them evolves, their purpose and authenticity remain unshaken.

The project promises to challenge the sonic status quo, blending the gritty rawness of hip-hop with the vibrant pulse of Afrobeats. It’s not just an album; it’s a cultural artifact in the making.

A Moment to Remember

Entertainment Week Lagos was the perfect backdrop for this convergence of talent and vision. The energy in the room was electric, with fans, industry insiders, and creatives bearing witness to something truly special.

This episode of Afrobeats Intelligence isn’t just a podcast—it’s a time capsule of a pivotal moment in Nigerian music history.

Odumodublvck and the Anti World Gangstars are here to remind us all: music is more than sound. It’s a story, a revolution, a legacy. And as long as they’re at the helm, the future of Afrobeats is in good hands.

Catch the full episode now, and step into the world of Odumodublvck and his gang of visionaries. Because nothing changed—except everything.