Aṣa released her eponymous debut album in 2007 and has been a favourite of many Nigerians ever since, with fans across generations. Her most enduring feature has been the singularity, not only of her music, but also of the ways in which she has always held herself apart, even when the spotlight was at its brightest.
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The first time that I saw Aṣa perform was at the Eko Hotel in Lagos on 1 May 2016, two years after the release of her album, Bed of Stone. I know this for a fact because I still have the group photo that I took with my friends after the show. On my Instagram feed, several finger scrolls down from my recent photos is a short video from that concert of the whole crowd cheering when she launched into ‘Bibanke’ a lot earlier on in the show than we were expecting. The lighting had turned from a pale green to a deep purple. The whole crowd leapt to its feet. ‘Iwo, iwo ni kan, so so/ Iwo, iwo ni kan, so so!’ We all sang, happily playing our parts as back-up singers as she ad-libbed over our voices. Nothing captures the nature of Aṣa’s popularity as the fact that a song like ‘Bibanke’, for which there was never a video and was never released as a single, is a firm fan favourite.
That concert, two albums into her career and nine long years since her self-titled Aṣa album was released, showed so much about how much she had grown since I first became aware of her. One evening in what must have been around 2005, likely after dinner and doing my homework, I was watching a TV show on MiTV and saw a young woman who I would come to learn was Aṣa. She was a slightly awkward presence, skinny with thick-rimmed glasses, clutching her guitar with a slight frown of concentration on her face. I had seen so many artists come and go on those shows, all young and eager for success and attention. I do not remember any of them that made as much of an impression as Aṣa did. Her voice was emotive yet controlled, husky without being masculine. She sang soulful songs ‘Eye Adaba’ and ‘So Beautiful’ in Yoruba that sounded like they could be performed by instrumentalists in church bands on their days off, without the talking drum and fuji that I at the time associated only with music my mother would listen to. The music felt evergreen but modern. The Aṣa album was released in 2007 and became an almost instant classic, right up there in importance as Nigerian popular music classics like—also known as Tuface)—2Baba’s Grass to Grace, Trybesmen’s L.A.G Style and Wizkid’s Superstar...
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