The Afrobeats Edit is a column by Lagos-based culture journalist Nelson C.J. that turns a celebratory and critical eye towards Afrobeats and the many subcultures including and beyond music, that have emerged from it.
When identical twin sisters Kehinde and Taiwo Lijadu, a music duo known as the Lijadu Sisters, were coming up in the mid ‘60s, there were hardly any famous women working in the Nigerian pop music scene.
The sisters’ discography was boundless, blending punk rock with reggae, Memphis soul, pop, and jazz; meanwhile, like their second cousin Fela Kuti, they were staunchly opposed to bad governance. The Lijadu Sisters were pacesetters who openly expressed feminist views through their music at a time when it was an unpopular social ideology. Yet for all their groundbreaking contributions to Nigerian music, their impact has gone unacknowledged for decades, with their names regularly omitted from history surrounding the origins of Afrobeat music.
While people are now considerably more aware of the Lijadu Sisters’ role in shaping the Nigerian music industry, their impact could have easily been forgotten, despite the incredible success they achieved during their prime while working in an industry where the idea of a famous musician was and is still to some extent today, very male. The contributions of women like the Lijadu Sisters, Mona Finnih, Sandra Izsadore and many others are often overshadowed by the achievements of the male artists with whom they pioneered this movement together.
We see this in the present day, too — even as artists like Tems, Tiwa Savage, and Ayra Starr take center stage in Afrobeats music globally, prejudices and structural limitations persist.
Budding Nigerian entertainment newsletter The Jollof Diary published an anonymous interview in March 2021 with a Nigerian artist manager who explicitly named their preference for working with male artists over their female counterparts. Female artists are stressful to manage, they argued, even though, by their own admission, they had only ever managed one before arriving at that conclusion. Simultaneously, they talk about the trouble of shielding the female artist away from the many sexual harassments she regularly faced from powerful industry players.
That manager is not alone in their flawed reasoning. The markedly false idea that female Afrobeats artists are difficult to manage, impossible to market, and unappealing to a general audience — and thus not worthy of investment — is one that runs through the veins of the Afrobeats music industry. This warped belief can be traced back to a recurring theme of erasure that has followed the contributions and impact Afrobeats female artists have made and continue to make in the industry. What happened with the Lijadu Sisters happens over and over again.
As the Nigerian music journalist Makua Adimora writes in British Vogue, “When Nigeria was colonized, the British introduced Victorian-era values with a patriarchal view of women that demanded they be seen and not heard. Back then, musicianship for women was viewed disreputably; it was deemed bordering on prostitution for women to be within the music scene. This perception relegated women to backing vocals, where they often transformed good songs into great ones.”
What is even more frustrating, seeing as times have changed and one might imagine that some progress would have happened, is the continued lack of broad industry support for women artists, a pattern that is immediately evident in the scarcity of female artists on rosters of top record labels.
Nigeria’s Mavins Records, one of the country’s most prominent labels, has only ever signed three female artists since it launched in 2012; this is compared to the 17 male artists on its roster. YBNL, another legacy label also founded in 2012 has only signed one woman out of the 17 male artists on its roster. Chocolate City, another big player, has so far only signed four female artists since it launched in 2005. This pattern, to say the least, is worrisome.
Ibukun Aibee Abidoye is the executive vice president of Chocolate City and has worked with the label for over a decade. Abidoye sees this current bias in the industry influenced as much by culture as it is by financial factors. “When you think about the way record labels were set up, most of them were funded by personal earnings,” Abidoye tells Teen Vogue. “At least when I think about how Chocolate City was run, there wasn’t any investment [from other music executives], so your risk appetite was much lower.”
This risk Abidoye speaks to largely revolves around what she describes as labels “having to invest a lot more money in helping female artists” build a compelling brand, rather than focusing on the music. Women have to spend as much time curating a conventionally acceptable image, being pretty or sexually attractive, as they do trying to make good music. It is a situation their male counterparts aren't necessarily subjected to, making the men lower risk picks for many of the label heads, who for the most part, are also men.
“It seems as though, right off the bat, [female artists] are expected to be not just good, but exceptional to be worthy,” says Ify Obi, the music and culture editor at AMAKA. “The exceptionality in question goes beyond music and also includes aesthetics. They have to be conventionally beautiful and present themselves in certain ways as well. She has to be IT or she won’t get the attention that is easily given to men half as talented as she is.”
Another quick indicator of the bias that continues to prevail in the industry can be found in listener data. There were no women on Spotify’s 2022 list of 10 most streamed artists in Nigeria, nor were there women on the most streamed tracks. In the top 10 streamed albums, only Ayra Starr’s 19 & Dangerous made the list, coming in at number eight. There was however, a list dedicated to the most streamed female artists in the country, and even on that list, only five were from Nigeria, with American female artists populating the rest of the list. These gender disparities are also present in Spotify’s year-end data for the U.S. and globally.
When I tweeted about the possibility of a listening bias against Afrobeats women in response to the Spotify report, the response was feral. Someone asked which female artist’s album had as much replay value as their male counterparts. Another asked which female artist can go hit-for-hit with the male artists on the most streamed list. And one simply said, “Maybe because they are not good.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
In a space that has Tiwa Savage, Tems, Ayra Starr, Gyakie, Yemi Alade, Simi, Fave, and others making groundbreaking work, you can imagine how wildly inaccurate that claim is.
“I see it as a chicken and egg type of situation between listeners and the larger industry,” Obi explains. “Nigerian women artists tend to be quite experimental and more open to creating layers that defy the typical elements of Afrobeats. For the labels, marketers etc, the primary goal is to make money. In order to do that, they are more inclined to stick with the status quo and the formula that has already been tried, tested and seen to produce great results. This makes them reluctant to push artists who don’t use those laid out formulas.”
For Candy Bleakz, a street pop rapper signed to Chocolate City, the conversation around bias is one that should be had alongside the level of support Afrobeats female artists extend to each other. “In the Nigerian music industry, we don’t have a lot of female artists, and still there’s not enough collaboration amongst each other unlike the way we have it amongst the male artists,” Candy Bleakz says.
Abidoye believes that this stems from the minimal playing field women are offered in the first place. “There is a perception between a lot of female artists that there isn’t that much room, and because of that you tend to be focused on your brand and that if there is space, you’re the one taking up that space,” she says. “It’s subconscious, kind of like the way we've been sold this narrative that women don't like each other. When I think about most of my landmark moments in music, it has been women providing access to their platform. When you’re in that position of security, it is so much easier to help other women.”
There are other signs of progress. More women are taking leadership positions behind the scenes: Mavins Records’ director of A&R Rima Tahini, entertainment executive and lawyer Oyinkansola “Foza” Fawehinmi, and Tami Makinde, managing editor at The Native Networks, Nigeria’s biggest music and culture publications, as a few examples. But it wasn’t always like this.
As Boomplay’s director of artist and media relations Tosin Sorinola once put it in an OkayAfrica interview, “Back then you could walk into a meeting with a male colleague and everyone there only wants to talk to the guy. They would ignore you and shelve you aside. The meeting starts and, as a lady, when you speak, the men in the room are shocked, nodding their heads like ‘oh, she’s smart.’”
There is indeed a bias against female artists in the industry, a bias that is hard to tackle because it has been normalized for so long. Nigeria’s deeply sexist and misogynistic views around who gets to be an artist and how much expression female artists can get away with, also contributes to this. When women decide to tap into their sexuality through their music, they are put under harsh scrutiny. Nigerian female artists are also not allowed the grace of a scandal. These things can affect the kind of music female Afrobeats artists choose to make; the big dilemma becomes whether to stray from the conventional or risk losing whatever listenership they’ve managed to gather.
Let’s not also forget the marketing side of the conversation. Record labels in Nigeria are often able to influence what people listen to and what is regarded as music worth listening to or an artist worth supporting. With few female artists on their rosters, this influence becomes out of reach for women, thus repeating a cycle where male artists just have to be slightly good to have everyone’s attention, where the ideal Afrobeats artist is male.
So what does the way forward look like? “The first step is always the most important. In this case, it is for [industry players] to acknowledge this and see it as a problem that is limiting the progress of the industry,” Obi says. “There could be so many talented undiscovered women artists who could propel the industry in the ways Tems has. Then actually paying attention to the concerns of these artists as they are pretty important. It is also important to treat these concerns with care.”
For the industry to see a much needed change, it is important that listeners confront their own biases, rejecting the idea that Afrobeats women aren’t capable of making hit songs at the scale of their male counterparts. It is even more important that the labels and all the power players become more intentional about diversifying their roster and ensuring more Afrobeats women get a chance to shine.
As Tems put it to Teen Vogue back in 2021, “If I had the power, I will just open everybody’s eyes and they will realize for themselves the differences that will happen when women are given more opportunities. And the magic will be made.”
The Afrobeats Edit: What to Watch, Read, and Listen to This Week
Read: Vagabonds! (Riverhead Books) quite simply, will flip your perception of all the things you might know about love, about self-acceptance, about living queer or minority in Nigeria, about the person (not place) of Lagos, about the transcendental connections we form with the spiritual and more importantly, about the place of the impossible. Authored by Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds! is written with warmth and heart and filled with unforgettable characters whose lives stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.
Watch: Afrobeats:The Backstory. Created by Ayo Shonaiya, Afrobeats: The Backstory is an expansive documentary exploring the history of Afrobeats and how it came to be. From the genre’s first acts, to the role of community in defining one of the world’s most vibrant musical movements. Watch the documentary on Netflix.
Listen: This week’s Afrobeats Edit playlist is a special dedication to the women who have defined the genre. The playlist includes pioneers like Onyeka Owneu, era-defining talents like Tiwa Savage, and new-age voices like Gyakie.
Nelson C.J. will continue sharing must-know pop culture stories from Africa in The Afrobeats Edit, published bimonthly on Teen Vogue. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.
