When your song is titled “Declan Rice” and has the footballer it’s named after with millions of followers massively support its release, there’s almost no way it wouldn’t do incredible numbers and chart activities. This was the case with ODUMODUBLVCK’s 2023 hit hiphop record. It was the artist’s first number one song on DSPs Top 100 lists out of Nigeria, but it was also a display of how much influence the football community has on afrobeats culture.
In 2018, Burna Boy’s ‘Ye’ got similar attention, when afrobeats consumers in the United States had thought the singer’s ad libs were in reference to Kanye West, and it hit European football teams locker rooms. Truth be told, ever since, Burna Boy and his music haven’t stopped receiving locker room love.
From Last Last, to Dem Dey, to Big 7, it has come to look like these change-up areas have become the ultimate afrobeats vibe testers, coming right after that one Osita Iheme video of him dancing in a living room out of a Nollywood movie from the early 2000s.
Today, so many global hits have received the same love. From Ckay’s ‘Love Nwantiti’, to Oxlade’s ‘Ku Lo Sa’, to Davido’s ‘Unavailable’, to the latest buzz — Skales’ ‘Shake Body’.
‘Shake Body’ is off a Skales 2015 album, and was one of the hottest songs in that year, and so it was interesting to see it resurface in 2025 (exactly ten years later) as Lamine Yamal’s favourite song to listen to pre and post matches. It speaks to the fact that good music, truly, is timeless. A vibe is a vibe even after a decade and in a different region of the world.
It wouldn’t be entirely out of place to attribute this new vibe-check to the increased global acceptance that African music has garnered in recent times as even beyond the locker rooms, we see more football clubs use African songs as background music for their reels and TikToks on their official social media accounts. Also using afrobeats catchphrases and slangs as captions for their X posts. Afrobeats has become an integral part of black pop culture that isn’t jazz or hip hop.
As we continue to witness new musicians spring up by the minute, experimenting with what we know music to be in this part of the world, we hope to find more reasons to keep us top of mind across the world. Not for Western validation, but global cultural relevance.
Itty can be caught studying African pop culture, writing about it or hosting a relationship podcast. When he's not doing any of these, then he's definitely at a bar, getting mocktail.
