Op-ed: In a Global Music Landscape, Who Gets To Define A Hit Song?
A recently resurfaced Billboard list ranked Rema as a one-hit wonder. But one question rises above all others: by whose standards?
This ranking brings up old reservations about the West’s unwillingness to fully understand Afrobeats and the cultural contexts in which the genre’s artists operate.
by Alex Goodlett/Getty Images.
Earlier this week, a listicle ranking the biggest one-hit wonders of the 21st century made the rounds on social media. Published by Billboard, the piece immediately brought two questions to mind when I first came across it. Why is a listicle that was published in June of 2025 just now making headlines and setting off a chain of reactions — from surprise to sharply worded indignation — across the Nigerian media landscape? And more importantly, what exactly is Rema doing on such a list?
Rema is one of Nigeria’s biggest cultural exports and is in an exemplary class of cultural custodians. In his work is a serious engagement with his Edo heritage, and strewn across his career are hits and achievements that eclipse his age and staunchly disagree with any one-hit-wonder claims. And so it’s indeed surprising that someone of Rema’s calibre would appear on that list, ranked sixth for his remix of “Calm Down” featuring Selena Gomez.
The article in question purports to be a compliment of sorts. As the writer of the listicle noted, “At Billboard we view being a one-hit wonder as an achievement, and not just for the streaming, sales and airplay: So many songs that fall into this category are classics in their own right, and it’s only a coincidence of timing, culture and business that their performers did not manage more hits. Anyway, unless you’re a baseball pitcher, being a one-hit wonder is better than being a no-hit wonder.”
That statement, turned any which way and inspected closely, feels backhanded. In Rema’s case, specifically, it is wonky. After “Calm Down,” Rema has, in fact, scored several hits, including one on the official Billboard Charts — although not in a lead role, which was a baseline for the artists included in the one-hit ranking. Other measures of success abound. From nabbing a Grammy nomination for his experimental album Heis to a discography littered with history-making moments and a sustained global stay, none of his achievements post “Calm Down” remix are attributable to that of a one-hit wonder.
This ranking brings up age-old reservations about the West’s unwillingness to fully understand Afrobeats and the cultural contexts in which the genre’s artists operate despite being lauded as a knowledgeable institution of success for artists working outside the West. It has appeared in the way awards categories are developed and in the artists that go on to be nominated and win in those categories. It has also appeared in a not-so subtle advancement of many Nigerian artists towards the Western center where the revenues make sense and the fame turns into bigger returns.
Which brings us to the primary concern that’s present at the core of this ranking. The West continues to be an insufficient yardstick for measuring music that is truly global, but we all must collectively come to terms with and find ways to decouple the enduring validation of that insufficiency.
The Stakes of Western Validation in Afrobeats
There was always the possibility of this happening. It’s worth admitting. In a bid to expand the reach of the sound and set up shop in the West (read: the U.S market), Afrobeats music was sure to be subsumed, judged and considered the same as any other genre in that region. The clamoring to strip Nigerian music of its Afrobeats umbrella, of any localization or particularities by the ambassadors of the genre hasn’t helped either. The pursuit of being an artist from Nigeria and not a Nigerian artist means that considerations of their music become culturally abstract. Local charts and systems of rewarding talents in Nigeria are often ignored, in favor of foreign platforms that might have the bigger pot but lack the context to adequately appreciate the weight of our music.
Nobody will take the popularity you have in your home country into account if you no longer strongly identify with that home country.
Still, the American music market is driven by an intensely competitive spirit. There are categorizations, charts, awards, labels, sources of recognition that tell listeners who is worth listening to. Pulled back, one can see how this is a syndrome of a data obsessive era. Artists are hardly culturally significant for the quality of their work but for the number of albums they sell, the number of times their songs break a record or how long it stays on the charts for.
What used to be a sign of success and not the determiner of good taste has now become the all-defining tool for judging which songs are flops (even when they are culturally resonant) and which artists are one-hit wonders, even when that definition is limiting or completely misguided in the case of Rema’s Billboard ranking.
There are a few problems with the Billboard ranking, many of which, of course, begin with the baseline used to judge which artists are one-hit wonders. Because Billboard magazine is affiliated with the venerated Billboard Charts, the rankings were culled directly from its own data, all of which seeks to answer the question: how many times did this artist’s song appear on our official charts?
The problem with that question is the obvious and genuinely rib-cracking presumption that the Billboard Charts are the only and most important metric for judging which artists are successful or what songs are a hit. They are an important metric point no doubt, but in a world radicalized by a variety of democratic metrics, it’s no longer a conclusive authority on what constitutes a hit song. It’s not uncommon these days, for example, to hear someone say they haven’t heard a note from a song currently ranking at the top of the Billboard charts.
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Another problem with that ranking is that it unwittingly misses an opportunity to validate Billboard’s associated charts such as the U.S Afrobeats Chart. By their own admission, Rema has appeared on the top 10 of the U.S Afrobeats Chart, and that still didn’t bear much weight in their consideration when developing this ranking.
At this point, it is important to reiterate that by any standards, charts, awards, recognitions and cultural impact, Rema is far from a one-hit wonder. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call him a pioneer of a new kind of contemporary Afropop music, just as it would be most factual to describe him as a masterful experimentalist. These, not mentioning his songs that have made immense waves across the globe, perhaps outside the line of sight for the people behind his latest ranking, are not the attributes of a one-hit wonder by any sensible measure.
In many ways, this ranking brings up questions about how African artists can be defined in the U.S if much of their impact still lies outside of it. It’s egregiously incurious to define the standards of success through a completely American lens, even when that lens is grounded in specific data.
A more positive way to look at this ranking is to consider its fundamental lack of heft. The little statement it makes about Rema’s already staggering career trajectory is without question. If anything, the energetic reactions it has inspired, reinforces the fact that the future of music is global and not localized to the standards of a specific country. And it’s important that cultural outfits take that into consideration now more than ever.
