Ayra Starr’s Transcendental Vision for Afrobeats

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, The Age of Afrobeats. Buy the issue here.

And she did. With just five songs which totalled under 14 minutes, that debut EP showcased Ayra Starr’s knack for creating well-realized pop music. The writing could sometimes be overly saccharine, but the project was immersive and its lead single ‘Away’ bloomed with the defining theme of a young woman’s search for intentional love. The chorus made an experiential art of the word, ‘Away’, working its second syllable to capture the fleeting emotion of the other person leaving, a-way. ‘Sare’ blended boisterous overtones of the country’s contemporary sound with the chants of Yoruba spirituals and sampled ​Lijadu Sisters​ for further effect. Critics were in love, listeners, too—colo​u​red into Ayra Starr’s music was an effervescent personality that seemed at ease with the weight of musical history it carried and likewise each interview she granted purposefully revealed interesting slices of her life’s journey up to that point.

If Ayra Starr made an impressionable entry with that eponymous project and established the touchstones for where she could go musically, those motivations came full circle on 19 & Dangerous, released in August 2021, and which became one of the most definitive debut albums in the history of contemporary Nigerian pop. Where that sounds outlandish on first read, one must consider the breadth of the success the album was able to garner; critical reception, commercial might, visual coherence, perfect timing. Especially the timing: which, coming just eight months after Ayra Starr, few people would have expected the musician to release a lengthier project and even fewer people would have guessed at an album. As Afropop matures conceptually, albums have come to mean a lot more than they used to; with the right promotional tactics, anyone can finesse a successful single, but the album is a different beast, demanding sonic and thematic coherence while rewarding a variance of perspective. Essentially, a good album is made up of songs but it demands more than the interiority of songs to make a lasting impression; the album needs to flow on the exterior scale and know the nature of its ideology.

Let me explain: at first glance, 19 & Dangerous demands you take it seriously. The album cover features Ayra Starr in a colourful, hipster setting, full of eccentric wall clippings, butterflies and human figures. Seated on a sofa, her gaze is confident but vulnerable, inviting the viewer to probe the stories hidden behind its intensity. That purposefulness enters the sound, right from the first record ‘Cast,’ which she tellingly subtitled a Gen-Z anthem. Why was it important to start this seminal album with that song? Well, for a generation of young Nigerians, shame was one of the touchstones of their upbringing. Raised on the philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child, many parents subconsciously taught their children to view themselves in the third person, to always consider the opinions of others when making decisions. It’s not an inherently bad perspective, but it has been more suffocating than instructive, especially when one considers how trauma manifests in contemporary Nigerian society. ‘Cast’ in this context is a Pidgin English-supplied term which refers to shame, to the denigration of one’s image in the eyes of others. So when Ayra Starr sings ‘If I cast, I cast,’ it’s a reclamation of that quirky-but-oppressive language, setting the chest-thumping self-belief that the album would go on to embody...