The Best Moments From Afrobeats Intelligence This Season

The most impactful cultural conversations are those that are both incredibly nuanced and accessible. The fifth season of Afrobeats Intelligence, presented by OkayAfrica and sponsored by Martell, continues to highlight important conversations in and around Afrobeats. 

Hosted by veteran journalist and culture sleuth Joey Akan, the recent season packs in interviews with iconic producer Sarz, veteran rap artist and award-winning screenwriter Wale Davies, aka Tec, rising singer Shoday, prolific hitmaker Shallipopi, as well as a host of artists and music industry insiders.

Candid moments are littered across this fifth season, helped along by Akan’s roaming yet inquisitive manner of leading conversations. Below, we’re presenting eight instantly memorable highlights from Afrobeats Intelligence season five, for you to revisit or, if you still haven't seen the episodes, as a reminder to tap in.

Sarz recounts the moment that he knew he had to level up

By the mid-2010s, Sarz had already made his name as the premier producer in Afrobeats. So, when he was invited to a studio session by a big-time American producer and label executive, he wasn’t prepared for a somewhat humbling experience. After being prompted to play Afro-house-leaning music, he lined up several beats. “I remember playing some tracks, and there was one of them that they liked,” the producer recalls. Sarz was asked to turn up the volume of the track, but he had hit the loudest volume on the beat. “It was the loudest, but I kept just making it seem like there’s something…but in that moment I knew, ‘you gotta step this shit up.’” That led to an obsession with practicing to make his beats up to global industry standards.

Wale on when his family fully accepted his career path

Wale’s mother wasn’t really impressed when her son signed a record deal. Raised by immigrant Nigerian parents who valued bootstrapping their way through life, his mum worried about how Wale would turn out, considering that he was a knucklehead growing up. That made the news of a career in music not exactly thrilling, even if it was made tangible by a record deal. His dad even sent the car his son bought for him to Nigeria after signing the deal. It wasn’t until 2016, when Wale performed at the warm-up event for former U.S. President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, that his parents really embraced their son’s path. “That picture [of Wale performing at the event] is huge in my mum’s house.”

The moment Aniko flipped the script from backing DJ to Nigerian house music pioneer

Before her pioneering pivot into founding the wildly popular rave Group Therapy, Aniko was the official DJ for Afrobeats star Teni. While she long harbored thoughts of becoming the main character, it wasn’t until a major scheduling conflict that Aniko finally decided to go all in on herself. She had been booked for a headlining slot at a house music event, on the same night as a gig with Teni. Despite her readiness to take on both events, Teni’s set kept getting pushed back, and Aniko eventually missed her headlining set. “After I was done with Teni’s show, I just got to the car and threw a freaking tantrum,” she recalled. She called Teni the next day to quit, and it kickstarted her integral role in an important music subculture.

Joshua Baraka’s wholesome outlook on the future of music, despite AI

There’s a lot of chatter surrounding the ethics and increasing creative license of AI in music, and rightly so. In one of the more optimistic takes so far, Ugandan singer Joshua Baraka shared that AI’s mimicry of the music-making process, however superior, still pales in comparison to the specific emotional experience artists can generate. “We’re now going to start selling human experiences,” he says of the next steps artists can take in honing in on their crafts, especially on the live performance side. “All I can say to every artist, and creatives in general, is that now is the time to understand your craft. If you don’t understand your craft deeply, every single surface-level information, AI has [it].” It’s advocacy backed by a wholesome perspective of a future where creative ingenuity is rewarded over generated tracks.

Wale Davies on the freeing effect of keeping it real

For the initiated, one of Wale Davies’ superpowers as Tec, in the rap duo Show Dem Camp, is his unflinching realness. It’s impossible to feel like he’s exaggerating for effect, and that same quality is evident when he sits on the Afrobeats Intelligence couch. Deep into his conversation with Akan, he shared that he drove around in “a beat-up Kia Sportage” for years, shirking any expectations that he should put up appearances as a moderately known rap artist. “I would never put in my rap that, ‘Oh I’m driving a Bentley,’” he said. That commitment to being real is a definitive feature that helped Davies and SDC figure out their own form of success. “We’ve never had to change or present or posture or pose, and now that things have started looking up in different ways, we still don’t do that. It’s given us the freedom to be ourselves.”

Shoday on the anxiety artists face to stay relevant

It’s common industry knowledge that an artist finally breaking into prominence isn’t a guarantee of a lasting music career. Nigerian singer Shoday is upfront about the fear and mental stress that artists face when looking to go from breakout to ‘too big to fail’ territory, drawing on his own experience. “Most times when I wake up, I wake up with anxiety,” he admitted, pulling viewers in on his fears that the listeners who would proclaim themselves fans of his music could become indifferent if the hits stop dropping—because it has happened to other artists in the past. “Sometimes I have this kind of doubt in my mind that, what if they no like my song again? What if I no sound like wetin dey want make I sound like? If you can have a hit song today and your next two songs are not hits, don’t worry, dem don comot you for that setting. Another person don take over.” Akan’s reaction is apt: “This is so real."

Excel Joab gets candid about Afrobeats’ structural issues

On social media, Joey Akan has been slated as a wanton doomsayer when it comes to Afrobeats, but anyone who observes critically can see that there are merits to his warnings. In an industry dress-down episode with music executive Excel Joab, the shaky scaffolding of the Nigerian music system is laid bare. “Every problem you see in the music business is just indicative of the problems in Nigeria,” Joab says, as he delves into horrible business practices, economic constraints, lack of substantial growth and wonky priorities. To the latter, he cites the U.S. market fixations: “Nigerian artists are so obsessed about going to America [but] American artists are struggling.” Joab concedes that being an artist is one of the toughest jobs in the world, but there’s a dearth of critical thinking and necessary actions to solve the myriad of structural problems plaguing Nigerian music.

Ladipoe underlines the importance of credibility as an artist

According to Ladipoe, he comes from a family of civil servants and entrepreneurs that showed him that a person’s name and values hold serious weight. It’s the grounding for a career that has been consistently defined by doing things in a way that feels true to him. “This is an industry that is typically [about] transactions,” he says, adding that some of these exchange requests demand some of an artist’s credibility. While letting viewers know he’s not a saint, the importance of his credibility is a throughline in his conversation with Akan, including explaining his relationship as a rap artist with a primarily pop-centric record label — “niche artistry, mainstream success” is the guiding principle — and his thoughts on the rather needless nature of beefs in music.