Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue,
The Age of Afrobeats. Buy the issue
here.
A20,000-man-strong live audience at the O2 Arena London watched a 28-year-old musician descend from a YBNL-branded helicopter relic on 20 August 2023. This spectacular entrance was 90 minutes late, but it has taken the man on the helicopter a lifetime to get here.
He struggles to lower himself to the stage. He cuts a lonely figure up in that ceiling, a rare moment of life imitating art. There is a set list of songs from his vibrant discography to be performed but, first, this urgent lesson in patience.
In addition to a captive live audience, over 50,000 viewers were glued to a YouTube channel—cheerleaders of Afrobeats, that youngish, West African dance music genre enjoying a global moment while simultaneously auditioning its fastest-rising star till date, our man dangling from the helicopter, Mr Ahmed Ololade, better known by a rather unusual stage name, Asake.
His mother, Asake, whose name he
borrowed for the stage, was also in the O2 Arena, witnessing her son’s greatness. Months ago, Asake was another struggling artist in the sprawling working-class Lagos suburb of Ikorodu. A Theatre Arts graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University with a knack for dancing, Asake came to singing later, by his own
account, an economic decision that has now paid off.
‘Trabaye’, the opening track of his four-track Ololade Asake EP released in January 2022, begins with a babyish voice, ‘Mo fe trabaye / Ye, mo fe trabaye,’ a bassline grumbling behind the chorus. Trabaye means to ‘misbehave as a result of intoxication caused by taking hard drugs’, according to the Urban Dictionary. ‘Traboski’, a hit song by Bnxn (formerly known as, Buju), introduces a past participle tense to Trabaye, arguably a vibrant transitive verb, not just another regular street slang. By the time Trabaye appears on Burna Boy’s lively tune, ‘It’s Plenty’, its negative connotation has been washed off—it has become an innocuous description of making mirth.
Asake’s first verse on ‘Trabaye’ namechecks Kalakuta, Fela’s commune. Asake gestures towards its original etymology. According to Carlos Moore’s This Bitch called Life, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti named his communal compound Kalakuta Republic in 1974. Benson Idonije’s memoir Dis Fela Sef noted that:
…Fela picked this name from the police cell in which he was detained at the CID (Central Intelligence Division).
Kalakuta is derived from the Swahili word for rascal, and Asake pays homage to this life when he pensively sings, ‘Kalakuta no be place for schoolboy/I get niggaz wey don go there before.’ At the end of the song, Olamide, founder of YBNL Records credited for that grumbling bassline, welcomes Asake into the fold but also teases him for being the ‘ladies’ man.
THE BEGINNING OF ASAKE
There is a
short video clip of Asake on the internet. He is sitting in the passenger seat of a car listening to a version of his song ‘Omo Ope’. Halfway into the tune, rapper, Olamide’s unmistakable baritone segues in and confident bars of rap are delivered. Asake storms out of the car and begins a victory lap through that Lagos neighbourhood. This was the moment he realised that his life had changed. His dreams had come true; what remained was the inevitable legwork for which Asake had been training.
Fresh out of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in the mid-2010s, where he affiliated with other aspiring undergraduate musicians like Blaqbonez, FireBoy DML, Cheque, and Chinko Ekun—all stars (albeit at different stations) on the Afrobeats firmament, Asake began to release music in 2017. Asake’s journey to stardom was not as immediate as he may have anticipated. His steep career trajectory met its fair share of failure and indifference. He leaned into his acting chops, made video skits with Samuel Perry (Broda Shaggi) and appeared in Nollywood film cameos that have become viral since he became a superstar. If dancing came naturally to him as a form of expression, he trained as an actor in the Pit Theatre on campus. Music, the eventual consideration, was a cipher, Morse code, he had to break into.
Asake belongs to the Street Hop subgenre of Afrobeats. This movement found its footing in the late 2000s when Afrobeats gravitated towards a more indigenous flair and delivery, first in Pidgin English and then Yoruba. The earliest and most successful progenitors of this movement in Yoruba are Lord of Ajasa, 9ice and Da Grin. Released in 2010, Da Grin’s sophomore album,
Chief Executive Omo-Ita, was the game-changing classic where witty and poignant hardcore rap delivered in Yoruba attained mainstream appeal. Sadly, on 22 April, 2010, Da Grin passed away from injuries sustained in a car crash throwing Nigerian youth into mourning in a manner reminiscent of
Mohbad’s recent tragic passing. Expectedly, a glut of tribute songs emerged, but one by a younger rapper stood out. That rapper was Olamide, an apprentice of ID Cabasa’s Coded Tunez academy. His tribute to Da Grin, featuring a plaintive interpolation of the Scottish tune, Auld Lang Syne, showed promise, skill and soul.
Olamide was tipped as Da Grin’s heir apparent among a cohort of impressive rappers like Seriki, Reminisce, CDQ and Phyno. This roster of musicians fronted their local languages to good effect, executing a coup that first dethroned American English and Pidgin English, the lingua franca of the nascent Afrobeats and, indeed, of Fela’s Afrobeat.
Their accomplishment was so sweeping that the vibrant careers of skilled emcees like MI Abaga, A-Q and Mode Nine were relegated to the uncomfortable niche of a cult following. ‘Local Rappers’, a 2015 tune poking fun at their American-sounding peers by Reminisce featuring Olamide and Phyno, subverted their erstwhile derogatory description—local rappers—in celebration of their grip on the zeitgeist, an irreversible one in retrospect.
Once Afrobeats eased into local languages, a treasure trove of traditional influences and legacy became more accessible. Genres like Fuji, Juju, Apala, and Highlife were adapted to explore the reality of the urban poor using street argot that celebrated vibrant local languages and the occasional joy of spotlighting their grim experiences.
Music’s most important social function in Nigerian society is dance. Afrobeats, even in its earliest iteration as Hip-Hop echolalia, skewed towards dance. An escapist ethos quickly emerged as the Afrobeats idioms became more African. If Hip-Hop was obsessed with materialism and street credibility, Street Hop was obsessed with cannabis, liquor and sex, as best depicted by the late Da Grin in his 2009 song, ‘Make Doe’, ‘Igbo, Shayo, Asewo / This is how we living…’
THE ROAD TO THE TOP
On the Niphkeys-produced ‘Baba God’ Asake sings, ‘Some people dey they wan make I sober / Me, I no fit sober / ’Cause I gat Jehovah gan ni…’ Sobriety and faith, two contradictory phenomena, are braided into an unlikely couplet suggesting that this escapist ethos fronted by Afrobeats is conflicted.
Wisdom Mudasiru, in his 2023 explainer
piece, lucidly characterized Afro-Adura as ‘aspirational lyrics, preferably in Yoruba, sometimes layered on melancholic beats that could very well be referred to as “chants”.’ In December 2022, Afro-Adura was suggested as a subgenre within Street Hop. In retrospect, the Afro-Adura fad has fizzled out unsurprisingly. Afro-Adura does not front a recognizable change in musical style in the first instance. Street Hop, since its inception, has always gestured towards prayer and paranoia. That attitude of prayer and paranoia is bequeathed by the Yoruba worldview, alongside a quest for wisdom, which Asake obsesses about in his songs.
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