Sunday evenings are my best. Not Saturday evenings, not Friday nights. The latter mentioned brackets of my weekend are usually sacrificed to Lagos and her more-strenuous-than-fun activities, or some family function that sees me bowing to greet eighty percent people whose faces I cannot recognize, but who would swear they changed my diapers more times than my mother did.
But with Sunday evenings, it’s cool breeze, right outside my front yard – feet on the bare ground, wine glass in hand, AirPods in ears; either digesting new music or listening to the most outrageous podcasts.
Last weekend, it was podcasts, and Joey Akan’s Afrobeats Intelligence more specifically. Since its OkayAfrica partnership (or acquisition, I’m not sure yet), the pod has had more appealing aesthetics that have had me even more drawn to Joey’s storytelling work. It’s why I was eager to dive into this episode with Muyiwa Awoniyi — popular to be manager to Tems.
And everybody knows, Muyiwa has a lot to say and every moral standing to say as much as he does. Himself, Wale of Show Dem Camp, and Tems have had too many wins with their company, The Leading Vibe, since its inception six years ago. So when people like Don Awon — like he’s fondly called — speak, I listen with rapt attention.
“Thinking Afrobeats is a collective is a flaw,” Muyiwa points out to Joey as he progresses with a question. They were speaking about the “Afrobeats to the World” movement, and how the culture failed to hold its break into the American music market.
According to Muyiwa, the first mistake one would make regarding approaching this issue the right way would be to think that the big players in the Afrobeats scene were ever a collective.
“When Rema plays at a festival in Europe or America, at home, Twitter goes ‘oh afrobeats just did Ballon D’or’. But to the Americans, it was Rema who did it, not afrobeats.”
I absolutely, vehemently agree.
Through the very short lifespan of afrobeats to the world peak, I was privileged to have experienced the era both as a consumer and as an executive. And from both standpoints, I could see that we were never a collective. It was individuals breaking the records, getting the cash, signing the deals, selling out the venues, showing up at the galas etcetera. It was almost never the culture or the movement. It was Rema, Ayra Starr, Davido, Tems, Burna Boy and Wizkid. Almost never afrobeats.
And Muyiwa’s postulation for this is the cliquish nature of the industry at home. How everyone has their circle and represents it. We like to deny it, but all eyes are on the bread. It’s business and we really are here for the money too. This means, every man for himself — trying to fit in and feed; a stretch would be to term it neo-colonization.
So no, afrobeats is not a collective. It’s each with her (I’m learning to generalize with female pronouns because why not?) own agenda, camp and allies. Perhaps, this acknowledgment is the first step towards finding a structure that works for the culture, home and abroad. But that’s if “Afrobeats to the World” is even still the goal.
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.
