EDITORIAL
Afrobeat Is At The Final Stage Of Taking Over As A Global Sound
The influence of Afrobeat is growing with each seconds, each minute with each song released in the industry. This is significant with the different collaborations between Nigerian artist and their western and American counterparts. The invasion began with a rivalry with South Africa for the supremacy and control of the African market. Then, South Africa was Backed with the biggest music station in Africa “Channel O”
Soon, the Nigeria Afrobeat started getting popularity, more air playing time and more acceptability. Channel O noticing the danger and treat of the sound to its nation of origins, they began to reduce the playing time. Even at this, the Nigerian artists keep clearing awards over awards from MTV to BET among others.
Nigeria Entrepreneur’s eyes were then opened to the untapped market when MTV decided to host the first ever MTV awards in Nigeria. This resulted into the launching of music stations like Soundcity (the first), Hip TV, Trace Naija, Nigerzee among others. The struggle to make South African music the main stream music led to the decline of Channel O, With viewers all over Africa including South Africans themselves given preference to the Naija Afrobeat, as a result embraced the new and upcoming Nigeria music stations. This resulted in the removing of channel O from most of the cable networks in Africa including the DSTV which originated from same country. This was all summed-up in AkA (one the biggest Artist in South Africa) in his tweet after his nation lost to Nigeria in the CAF’s nation’s cup when he wrote: “Why do we always have to loose to Nigeria”.
At the beginning of the decade, the world invasion began with Afrobeat A-list like D’banj, Psquare, Tuface to mention a few, paying heavily to have collaboration with American singers just to penetrate their market. A move which was successful with songs like Oliver Twist by D’banj getting into billboard top ten in both US and the UK. Then, the success was followed up by the following generation taking their tours to the western world. Most successful among the group has been Wizkid and Davido who both successfully sold out the famous O2 Arena.
In recent times the tides has turn from Beyonce collaboration with African Artist to Universal music and Roc Nation signing African artist to their label and most recently with African producer producing for America singers.
Their is now the influence of Nigeria Afro-pop slangs trending in American songs. In Drakes collaboration with Swae Lee tilted “Won’t Be Late” there is the use of the word “Bakasi“ meaning ass and “Ikebe” having same meaning. These two words are words that originated in Nigeria while latter is from the Yoruba language the former is from Igbo language. A fact that drake himself did not denied why responding to fans who claimed Tekno (who happened to producer the song) Might have told him to use the words. Drake claimed he researched and arrived at those words himself.
Putting all things together, it will not be far fetch to say music is finally returning home to the land of its origin, Africa to become its head quarters.
