Pullquote: “From Dior’s flower earmuffs to sculpted blooms across the runway, these Spring 2026 makes florals feel deliberate again”

Florals for spring are supposed to be easy. Predictable, even. The kind of visual shorthand fashion reaches for when it wants to gesture toward renewal without having to say much at all. It’s a language so overused it’s almost invisible. You see a flower, and you understand the assignment. For years, the “spring florals” motif has operated on autopilot through printed dresses, soft palettes, and an easy return to femininity that rarely asks to be interrogated. Spring 2026, however, slows that instinct down.

Across the Spring 2026 runways, flowers are not quite performing the way they used to. Rather than dissolving into dresses or romanticising the body into soft and palatable silhouettes, it sits awkwardly. It feels estranged entirely from the idea of nature itself. Many designers approached spring florals much more grounded and made you actually look again.

At Christian Dior, Jonathan Anderson’s haute couture debut set the tone early in the season. He reoriented the house’s longstanding relationship with flowers away from surface-level romanticism and toward process. 

Inspired in part by a bouquet of cyclamen, Anderson translated botanical forms into sculptural silhouettes. The collection did not rely on floral prints. Instead, flowers appeared as constructed elements through sculptural petals layered into skirts, stems translated into accessories, and most notably, flower-shaped earmuffs that framed the face in a way that felt both playful and slightly surreal. It’s the most obvious extract from nature to fixate on, but that’s exactly why it worked. It pulled florals away from the expected (dresses, embroidery, softness) and placed them somewhere colder, more deliberate. The intentional placements were almost architectural in how they framed the body.

The Spring-Summer 2026 collection made it clear that Anderson was not interested in florals as background decoration. He treated them as standalone forms capable of being repositioned on the body. Even the silhouettes followed that logic and successfully created a controlled version of “blooming” that felt engineered.

What’s compelling here is not just the final look, but the insistence on process. Each element was meticulously assembled through couture techniques: silk petals cut individually, shaped using moulds, dyed to achieve tonal variation, embroidered and reconstructed into their individual pieces. You can visibly see the work in them. Dior’s florals do not attempt to replicate the spontaneity of nature; instead, they foreground the effort required to approximate it. Flowers in this context are a demonstration of craft, discipline, and control. In doing so, Anderson situates florals within the logic of couture itself, slow, deliberate, and resistant to the speed of contemporary fashion production.

There’s a similar thread at Alexander McQueen, though it manifests differently. Here, the bloom is undone. Petals are distressed and intricately layered into garments. If florals once symbolised growth, McQueen leans into the opposite by focusing on decay, erosion, and the slow collapse of something that was once considered beautiful. It’s not exactly nihilistic, but it refuses the optimism traditionally embedded in spring dressing. With Simone Rocha, the florals feel preserved, pressed into sheer fabrics, suspended beneath tulle, as though trapped between states of being. There’s an archival quality to it, like these flowers are no longer part of the natural world but relics of it. Even Valentino, so often synonymous with overt romance, pulled back for S/S26. The florals are sparse, almost reluctant. A single bloom interrupts an otherwise restrained silhouette. The effect is less about indulgence and more about control, suggesting that the excess historically associated with femininity is being reconsidered, perhaps even rejected.

Taken together, these collections show a shift in florals through fashion. What connects these collections is a refusal to let florals fade into the background. Designers are thinking about placement, where a flower sits and why, and considering scale. Whether it overwhelms or barely interrupts. And most importantly, they’re thinking about texture. You see this clearly in recent ready-to-wear drops as well. Across brands, florals are moving off the surface and into three-dimensional space: rosettes that protrude from tops, sculpted appliqués that sit on skirts, fabric flowers that function as accessories rather than embellishments. Even when prints do appear, they’re often enlarged, abstracted, or distorted, less about prettiness and more about impact.

It’s a subtle shift, but necessary. For a long time, florals have been doing very little. They’ve been safe and an easy way to signal femininity without challenging it. But Spring 2026 asks more of them. By stripping back the excess and focusing on construction, designers force the spring floral motif to feel deliberate once again.

There’s also something slightly ironic in how “natural” all of this feels. These are not spontaneous, carefree flowers. They are highly controlled, cut, placed, and fixed in position. Nothing about them is accidental. And maybe that’s the point.

Fashion’s version of nature has never really been natural. It’s always been mediated through fabric, through print, through the designer’s hand. What feels different now is the refusal to hide that mediation. And in that sense, florals this spring feel less like a return to tradition and predictability, and more like a critique of it, which stirs us in a different direction almost entirely.

A thin line between the thunder of traditional Yoruba percussion and the mesmerizing pulse of South Africa’s log drum, a new sound is finding its footing. Fujipiano, the unlikely marriage between Fuji music and Amapiano sounds, which feels less like a passing experiment and more like a cultural conversation unfolding on the dance floor. 

In a region where music is constantly reinventing itself, trying out every and any genre; Fujipiano happens to be the latest reminder that African sound has never been about abandoning its roots. Instead, it is reshaping tradition in a way that it speaks fluently to the present. 

Nigerian music is known for  reinvention as genres rarely disappear. Instead, they evolve, adapt and find new audiences in unexpected places. Ghanaian gave birth to Afrobeats, street-openers form the fusion of Hip-Hop, Fuji cadence and everyday Nigerian storytelling, and now, another hybrid is slowly carving out its identity; Fujipiano. 

At its simplest, Fujipiano is the fusion between Fuji music, which is a widely accepted genre within the Yorubas and the globally popular Amapiano sound that emerged from South Africa. But reducing Fujipiano to a simple genre mashup misses the deeper story behind it. What we are experiencing now is not just a sonic experimentation, but it is a cultural bridge between two generations, a negotiation between heritage and modernity and a reflection of how Nigerian youths are interpreting the sounds they inherited. 

 To understand why Fujipiano matters, one must first understand the concept of Fuji itself. The genre dates back to the late 1960s through the world of  Sir Sikiru Ayinde  Barrister of blessed memory, who was widely regarded as the father of Fuji music. Having drawn his inspiration from Islamic devotional songs performed during Ramadan, Barrister transformed traditional chants into a rhythmic, percussion-driven style that resonates across the Yoruba communities quickly. 

Fuji was more than entertainment; it was storytelling, social commentary and celebration wrapped in one aspect. In the years that followed, artists like Kind Wasiu Ayinde Marshal and Saheed Osupa expanded the genre’s influence as they started filling halls and street festivals with drums, layered percussion, and call-and-response vocals that somehow turned their audience into participants.

Fuji carried the weight of memory as it echoed through wedding celebrations, Ramadan gatherings and late-night street parties where the music felt inseparable from the community's social life. Yet for years, Fuji seemed to occupy a generational niche as younger generations gravitated towards Afrobeats, hip-hop and other globally oriented sounds, leaving Fuji to be largely associated with the older audience and traditional settings because it belonged to a world that moved at a different pace, one where music was experienced physically, collectively and often locally.

Then Amapiano arrived. Originating in South Africa in the early 2010s, it gradually transformed into one of Africa's most influential musical exports. Amapiano did not just enter in Lagos nightlife; it was absorbed into it. DJs reworked it, producers localized it, and the audience embraced it. During the time of absorption, Fujipiano was brewing quietly, less importantly but more culturally significant.
Fuji started to reappear. 

But not in its original form, rather in fragments; in vocal cadences, lyrical patterns and unmistakable rise and fall of Yoruba chants embedded in contemporary production. It surfaced in  Asake’s “Peace Be Unto You” and then his “Sunmomi”, after which it was noticed in Seyi Vibez, Fujimoto, which demonstrates that Fuji’s essence can exist within modern and  digitized soundscape without losing its identity. 

Fujipiano is the next step in that evolution. Or at least, it is trying to be. 
At its best, Fujipiano is a meeting point between two rhythmic philosophies that share a surprising comparability as both rely on repetition, build atmosphere through rhythm and create immersive listening experiences that are more about feeling than they are about sound. But comparability does not guarantee cohesion. And this is where Fujipiano reveals its promise and limitations as a genre. 

Presently, much of what is labeled as Fujipiano feels incomplete; it feels more like an aesthetic overlay than a fully realized genre. Amapiano beats feel like it carries the  Fuji’s vocals. And street-pop structure borrows Fuji inflexions. The elements coexist, but they do not always integrate. Which raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: is this evolution, or is it appropriation of form without depth? 

The distinction matters because cultural evolution requires more than proximity; it requires intention. It demands that artists do more than just reference tradition; it requires that they engage with it, understand it and reshape it in ways that preserve its essence while allowing it to grow. Without the depth, fusion risks becoming surface-level, something that looks like culture without fully carrying it, more like a caricature.

To dismiss Fujipiano entirely would be equally shortsighted. What it represents, even in its unfinished state, is still significant. It symbolizes that a generation raised in a hyper-globalized world is not entirely detached from its roots and culture. Instead, it is negotiating with them, translating and reframing them within the contexts of its own experiences.  

This is not unique to the sound, but participating artists do it with no particular intensity. Its music has always thrived on collisions of genres, influence and histories. From Afrobeat’s fusion of jazz and Yoruba rhythms to Afrobeat’s fusion of dancehall, pop and hip-hop, the country’s most defining sounds have emerged not from purity but from hybridity. 

Fujipiano fits within that lineage, but it also exposes a tension that feels distinctly contemporary, the balance between reinvention and preservation. For the older generation, Fuji represents continuity and a direct line to cultural memory. For the younger generation of listeners, it feels distant, tied to contexts and spaces that no longer define the everyday lives of people. However, Fujipiano tends to bridge the gap, but by doing so, it inevitably transforms what it touches. The question at hand now is whether that transformation deepens the culture or dilutes it. 

There is no easy answer, but it is clear that Fujipiano reflects a broader truth on modern identity as it is layered, fluid and constantly in negotiation. Today, a young artist can move seamlessly between local and global influence, between tradition and trend, between heritage and innovation. Their music must reflect complexity. Fujipiano, in this sense, is less about sound and more about self-definition. It is what happens when a generation refuses to choose where it comes from and where it is going. 

Whether it becomes a fully realized genre or it fades into the background of Migeria’s ever-evolving music scene is almost beside the point. Its existence alone reveals something essential; culture is not preserved by keeping it unchanged. Its existence alone survives by allowing it to be reimagined. But reimagination comes with responsibility. If Fujipiano is to become more than a passing moment, it is expected to move beyond experimentation and into intention. It must find a way to carry the depth of Fuji, not just its aesthetic, into new soundscapes. Until then, it remains what it has always been: Not a genre. Not a movement. Not yet. But a question, which perhaps is its most honest form. 

Because in a world where culture is constantly sampled, remixed and redistributed at speed, the real challenge is not about creating something new, it is about ensuring that in the process of reinventing, nothing essential is lost.

 IG: anuhola_

Every March, the world celebrates women. Corporations turn their logos pink/purple. Governments issue statements. Social media is filled with the language of progress -  empowerment, equality, sisterhood. And underneath all of it, a quieter and more urgent story continues: the organised, global rollback of the rights being celebrated. This piece is not about whether progress has happened. It is about why progress, every time it happens, produces a counter-movement determined to reverse it and why the African feminist tradition, more than any other, has understood this dynamic longest and fought it hardest.

The pattern begins in 1848. Women gathered at Seneca Falls to demand the vote and basic civil rights. The backlash began before the convention was over; newspaper editors attacked the Declaration of Sentiments with such vitriol that many attendees withdrew their signatures in embarrassment. The movement was one day old, and the counter-movement had already begun. Women eventually won the vote in most Western countries by the 1920s. What followed was not expansion but erosion: coalitions splintered, anti-communist politics were weaponised against Progressive women, and the social welfare gains fought for alongside suffrage were quietly dismantled. The pattern repeated so consistently through the 1980s that Susan Faludi named and documented it in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women - the systematic reaction of patriarchal structures to feminist progress, dressed up as common sense, tradition, or protection. She was writing about the 1980s. She could have been writing about now.

African feminism understood this backlash structure long before Faludi named it, because African women were navigating two systems of oppression simultaneously, patriarchy and colonialism, from the very beginning. The movement did not emerge from academic theory. It emerged from the liberation struggle. In Algeria, Mozambique, Guinea, Angola and Kenya, women fought alongside their male counterparts for state autonomy and women's rights at the same time, building a feminism rooted in the specific and the urgent rather than the abstract. Figures like Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, Lilian Ngoyi and Wambui Otieno were not responding to Western feminist frameworks. They were building their own, and they were doing it under conditions of colonial violence that Western feminism has rarely had to reckon with directly. All strands of African feminism are informed not only by patriarchy but by colonisation, imperialism, heteronormativity, ethnicity, race and class, making it one of the most intersectional feminist traditions in the world. 

That tradition is alive and urgent in the present. In January 2024, Kenyan women took to the streets in the largest protest against sexual and gender-based violence in the country's history, demanding President Ruto declare femicide a national crisis. In Nigeria, the Feminist Coalition mobilised legal support, food and medical aid during the 2020 EndSARS protests, proving that when women organise, they organise for the whole of society. FemCo opened feminist conversations in a country that had long treated the word as an insult. In Ghana, the Affirmative Action (Gender Equality) Act 2024 was passed after more than a decade of activist lobbying. The African feminist movement does not wait to be included in the global conversation. It has been having it.

What is different in 2026 is not that the backlash exists. It is that it is everywhere at once, operating across vastly different political systems with the same directional logic. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has banned women from reading, speaking in public, or looking directly at men who are not their husbands or blood relatives - a system of female erasure so total that it has largely disappeared from international headlines, absorbed into the background noise of a world that has moved on. The women have not. In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade removed a constitutional right held for nearly fifty years, and the political machinery that achieved it is still moving. In Iraq, a bloc of 25 female MPs tried to stop the child marriage bill from reaching a second vote. They failed. It passed in January 2025.

Backlash does not arrive randomly. It arrives when power feels threatened and reaches for the most available instrument of control, which has always been the bodies, freedoms and labour of women. Economic instability makes traditional gender roles a political argument for order. Authoritarian politics requires hierarchy by design, and women's equality is structurally incompatible with that hierarchy. And in 2026, there is a third accelerant that previous generations of feminists did not face: the digital infrastructure of regression. The manosphere has given misogyny a global distribution network. Algorithms surface anti-feminist content to men who were not looking for it. For some people on the continent, feminism has been successfully mischaracterised as anti-male, anti-culture and anti-religion - a deliberate and documented strategy of discrediting the movement by severing it from the communities it serves. In 2024, women, girls and gender diverse people bore the brunt of the polycrisis armed conflict, climate change, and economic hardship, while anti-gender movements grew bolder and better funded. 

No country in the world has yet reached full legal equality for women and girls. At the current rate of progress, it will take another 131 years. One hundred and thirty-one years. Set that number down and do not rush past it. And yet since 1995 alone, 1,531 legal reforms advancing gender equality have been enacted across 189 countries. Maternal mortality has dropped by a third. Women's representation in parliaments has more than doubled. These two sets of facts are not in contradiction. They are the same story - the story of a movement that advances under fire, that builds even while being dismantled, that has never once had the luxury of believing the work was done.

That is what the African feminist tradition has always known. Progress is not a gift. It is a negotiation that never ends, conducted under conditions that are rarely fair, by women who rarely have the institutional power of the forces they are negotiating against. The fight does not pause for celebrations. It does not recognise the calendar.

Backlash is not proof that progress is failing. It is proof that progress is threatening something. And threatened things fight back. Women's Month gives the world one month to remember that. The fight does not take the other eleven off.

IG- @ffeistyhuman
Cover Credit: Al Jazeera

Close your eyes, and it’s 2005. The air in the club is thick, and the opening harmonies of Styl-Plus’s ‘Olufunmi’ glide through the speakers. For a moment, it wasn’t just about the voice of one man. It was about the synchronized magic of three distinct voices creating harmonies that capture true love. From the R&B smoothness of Styl-Plus to the infectious energy of P-Square, the early 2000s belonged to the collective.

But walk into a studio in Lagos today, and the room is built for one act. The "tribe" has been traded for the "titan". While Afrobeats conquers the world, it is doing so with solo superstars at the centre, which normally includes Wizkid, Rema, Tems, Burna Boy, and Davido. Boy bands are no longer just rare; they are functionally extinct. This is a structural weakening of the genre’s soul, not merely a shift in style.

To understand what we have lost, we need to start from the beginning. Long before the polished R&B of the 2000s, there was The Remedies. Formed in 1997, Eedris Abdulkareem, Tony Tetuila, and Tony Montana were among the first to "Nigerianize" Hip-Hop, taking American beats and layering them with Yoruba slang.

When their hit ‘Sakomo’ dropped, it wasn't just a song; it changed things. It proved that young Nigerians didn't have to sound like American rappers to be relevant. They were the engine of Kennis Music, the label that effectively built the modern industry. But their story also provided the first blueprint for the “Band Curse”. Their success was massive, yet their split was equally monumental and messy. The moment they went solo, the industry learned that three individual paychecks were more profitable for labels than one.

Emerging from Enugu were the Plantashun Boiz, made up of 2Face (now 2Baba), Blackface, and Faze. They didn't just sing; they lived together, forging a brotherhood that felt like a family. Their success was built on tracks like ‘Knock Me Off’, which proved that Nigerian boys could deliver international-standard vocals. According to Pulse Africa, their debut album ‘Body and Soul’ released in 2000, supposedly sold over 600,000 physical copies. Their dominance earned them numerous accolades just before their split. 2Face’s rise post-split became the dangerous precedent that haunted every group thereafter, proving a solo career could lead you to be a legend.

Another band was Styl-Plus; they brought elegance to the scene. Their debut album, ‘Expressions’ was a masterclass in vocal arrangement. Their emotional love songs, especially ‘Olufunmi’, made them one of the most recognizable voices in Nigerian R&B at the time. Their music was played at weddings, parties, and on radio stations across the country. Their impact was undeniable, sweeping the Channel O Music Video Awards and multiple award nominations at The Headies. Although they didn't break up with a bang, they faded into the background as the industry moved toward solo acts.

Another band from Enugu was Bracket, with ‘Yori Yori’ in 2009; they became the face of ‘Soft Afrobeats’. Their success was validated when they won Artistes of the Year at the 2012 Headies Award and two NET Awards nominations. Their success showed that sweetness and melody could win, but they were eventually pushed to the background. While they never had a messy breakup, they struggled as the industry changed. 

P-Square was the only act that truly challenged solo dominance. Peter and Paul Okoye were a bloodline, turning music into a visual spectacle. They were the highest-paid act in Africa for a decade, winning a total of nine Headies and the MTV Africa Music Award (MAMA) for Group of the Year in 2008, 2009 and 2010. However, their public fallout was the final nail in the coffin. If even identical twins couldn't navigate the pressures of shared money and individual egos, the industry decided the collective model was simply too high-maintenance.
P-Square’s success showed that duos still had a place in Afrobeats. But it also marked one of the last moments where that band format felt central to the industry. Because after that, things began to change.
We can say one of the major reasons boy bands and duos struggle to last is creative disagreement. When more than one artist shares the same platform, they must constantly agree on important decisions. This includes the direction of their music and how they want their careers to grow. Over time, these decisions can lead to tension.

For example, problems within Plantashun Boiz eventually led to the group breaking apart. Each member later pursued a solo career. Something similar happened with P-Square. Even though they were extremely successful, disagreements between the brothers eventually led to their separation.
When these kinds of breakups happen, it reinforces the idea that working alone may be easier.

Money has also been a major factor in the decline of boy bands and duos. In a band or duo, income from concerts, endorsements, and music sales has to be shared between multiple members. As success grows, disagreements about money can become more common. In the early 2000s, physical CD sales and live bookings were the primary revenue streams. Today, the industry is fueled by Streaming Revenue, and the math simply doesn't favor boy bands. For example, on a solo track, the artist takes the entire "artist share" of a stream (roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per play). In a trio like Plantashun Boiz, that fraction of a cent is split three ways before it even reaches their personal bank accounts. This means a group has to work three times as hard to achieve the same individual "take-home" pay as a solo act.

Also, you might think this format works in K-POP, so why is it not thriving in Afrobeats? Groups like BTS or EXO are not accidents. They are built through structured systems, training, management, branding, and long-term planning.
Afrobeats doesn’t have that system.
It is more organic; although that freedom is part of its strength,  it also makes it harder to sustain groups. K-pop builds groups from the ground up. Afrobeats lets artists build themselves.
The structure of the Afrobeats industry has also changed.
Today, the industry is built around the idea of a solo star. Artists are not just musicians anymore. They are brands. Artists like Wizkid, Burna Boy, and Rema have built global careers based on their individual identities. Their music, fashion, and personality all contribute to how they are marketed.

In boy bands or duos, attention has to be shared. This makes it harder for one person to fully dominate the spotlight. As Afrobeats expanded globally, the solo artist model became easier to promote.
Interestingly, while permanent boy bands and duos have become rare, collaboration is now more common than ever.
Instead of forming long-term partnerships, artists now work together on individual songs or even short joint runs that feel like temporary duos. We are also seeing more joint moments and creative pairings that go beyond just one song. Artists link up for multiple tracks, shared sounds, or even short project runs that feel like mini partnerships. Think of the synergy between Wizkid and Asake; creatively, this partnership works because it pairs two fully realized distinct voices. A group requires a "merged identity"; the voices must blend into a singular brand. But in ‘Real’, the power lies in the friction of two separate solo artists. They aren't trying to sound like one unit; they are two kings sharing an EP for ten minutes.

These collaborations give artists the best parts of a duo or group's creative exchange without the long-term pressure that usually comes with staying together.
In today’s Afrobeats, artists don’t need to form boy bands or duos anymore. They can simply recreate that experience when they want, and walk away when they’re done.

So, if you’re waiting for the next P-Square or Styl-Plus to walk through the door, don't hold your breath. Under the current regime of Afrobeats, the "group" as we know it is a dead model. It has been replaced by collaborations that offer the variety of a group without the commitment of a marriage.

For boy bands to actually return, the industry requires more than just "new talent"; it requires a structural change. We need labels to start investing in group development and not just individuals. Fans must also move away from main character worship, where they pick a favorite and pit them against the others. Until then, the system will keep producing solo stars.
What comes next depends on whether Afrobeats is willing to build a system that allows it to happen again.
Because the truth is simple, boy bands and duos didn’t stop working. The industry stopped working for them.

IG- @justcallmetobii

The international reach of Afrobeats is undeniable. Over the last five years, the likes of Rema, Tems, and Ayra Starr have become household names, marking the ushering in of a new guard. Even with its global expansion, Afrobeats has mostly appealed to Africans and their diaspora, only slowly making its way to the Caribbean and the Western world. 
Through social media and the genre’s continued growth, its music and its artists have now reached the East, where new life has been breathed into the music, the events, and the sound - offering a surge of stardom that’s ripe for the taking. 

First coined in the 1970’s, Fela Kuti and drummer Tony Allen’s original ‘Afrobeat’ sound took highlife tunes, American jazz, funk, and traditional Yoruba music and merged them into what became a score for many protests against corruption and human rights abuse. As the years went on Kuti’s band maintained the sound as new artists created different fusions. 

Upon Kuti’s death in 1997, Afrobeats—with the s, a genre more synonymous with Nigerian Pop—  was planted in the 2000s, only sprouting and blossoming into what we now know in the 2010s. With young artists mixing original sounds with global hip hop, R&B, and dancehall in shorter, studio-produced beats, the use of digital technology brought connections around the world. It’s these same techniques that have led to expansion today, as well as the new flavours of Asian influence.

Today’s sounds, though distinct, have changed from Kuti’s smoother fusion. Kuti’s original mixes were featured in legendary Chinese rockstar Wu Bai’s 2016 album Ding Zi Hua (《钉子花》), making him the first mainstream Chinese artist to use the sounds overtly. As the pop and rap scenes have grown across the continent, Bai’s ingenuity spread to wider Asia, alongside the solidification of Asia’s own rap and hip-hop sounds.  

While the pop phenomenon is no stranger to Asia. Afrobeats, Hip-hop, and Rap symbolise a different shift in the culture's taste and, perhaps, its acceptance of outside norms. The current industries, while somewhat established, are still new to Western influence, as major record labels like Def Jam Records have begun to expand their reach globally. African labels, like Sony Music Africa (South Africa), Universal Music Africa, and other independent artists and collectives, like the Hong Kong-based AfroSeas, have made headway on the continent as well, signifying the noticeable gap. 

Like Afrobeat, much of the Rap and Hip-hop throughout Asian countries has lent itself to political commentary and national unity amongst the youth in the continent, advocating against gender inequality, corruption, and more. In the same ethos, the combination of Afrobeats unique sounds and the current identity of Asian hip-hop music play off each other - creating an understanding that’s building its home in the Asian market.  
Since 2020, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Thailand have seen the highest growth in Afrobeats listening, according to Spotify. 

Afrobeats Asia, a Bali-based Afrobeats and Amapiano event planner, organises and promotes weekly events across South East Asia, welcoming artists and DJs from Nigeria, South Africa, France and more. Accelerating the engagement and societal investment in the genre’s rise.

Similarly, AfroDesi is a movement centred around Amapiano, Afrobeats, and Bollywood rhythms performed by South Asian and South East Asian artists and DJ’s, on the continent and in major metropolitan cities like London - welcoming a new demographic and its sounds to the conversation. 

South Eastern and Eastern nations have also leveraged the trend bringing Chrisway, Salin in Thailand, Filipino J-Tajor, Sudanese-Japanese group Makki, and Singapore’s Yung Raja to the stage, domestically and worldwide.

And while the youth’s wish has been the industry’s command, an element of exploitation and cultural appropriation could be noted in the nature of the genre’s sudden and exponential acceptance. In a continent where racism and colourism hold deep roots, capitalising on the rise of Afrobeats should not  be misunderstood as an acceptance of its artists, culture, or core beliefs. Basic business principles, like supply and demand, have often been the core of strategic moves that appear inclusive and multicultural, while lacking any true reverence for the craft or its creators.

In another light, in Asia and abroad, social media has exposed Africa and its music to artists, events, media, and style in keeping with the global connectivity made possible through increased exposure, media networking, and rich diasporic communities in the Western world. The opportunity for representation and new narratives is the core of the movement for some, as well as the prelude to many deeper societal investigations - domestically and abroad..

Where mainstream Asian media in the West has often featured one facet of the continent’s creative, professional, or even fashion profiles, new wave artists throughout the nations  offer multilingual and multicultural, social commentary that have created ties to the original Afrobeat movement, capitalised on the current trend, and created a global symbiosis through sound. 
Just enough to, perhaps, add Asia to Afrobeats shining crown.

Cover Credit: @themesabali on Instagram

IG: clungaho

When you think of French black music? What are the first songs to come to mind? ‘Premier Gaou’? Maybe ‘Papaouti’? Surely, there must be more classics you have heard about… No, in actuality, that is a very realistic first experience for many Anglophone music listeners outside of the French world. That said, there are several noteworthy artists yet to discover, and an entire beaming world of sounds for those who dare. At the forefront? We have selected 5 key artists who we wholeheartedly believe, if not their names already ingrained, will be the bridge that transcends languages, continents and sonic landscapes.

Tayc 

Julien Franck Bouadjie Kamgang, better known to the music world as Tayc is a 29-year-old French Afropop / R&B artist of Cameroonian roots. As one of his most famous lyrics declares, “They will tell you that Tayc only talks about love,” not that it is far from the truth; however, there is more to the harmonizing singer than meets the eye. Take ‘Carry Me’ for example, and you will find that Tayc is a multilingual genius. Singles such as ‘Love Me’ and ‘Forévà’ show how truly versatile he is, ranging from topics about love, heartbreak, to loss and grief.

Dadju

It would be impossible to mention Tayc without his birthday twin–the prince of France, French-Congolese singer Dadju. They are truly two sides of the same coin, although Gims’ half-brother makes truth to his married-family man status and appears less Playboy-ish than his ‘Héritage’ collaborator. Let’s revisit one of his breakout hits, ‘Jaloux’, for example, it’s the epiphany of the good guy done wrong. Dadju doesn’t challenge himself in music; he sticks to what he knows.
And perhaps that could best explain his longevity in the game, but also, how he manages to never be dethroned.

Damso

There are a lot of words that could best describe Belgian-Congolese rapper-singer Damso, one of which is eccentric. Another would be sombre, melancholic, unafraid to speak of his deep flaws. And perhaps that is why black men from the French diaspora relate to him most; Damso exposes the ugly in man and turns it into something beautiful. Darkness never leaves him, even in his song ‘Limbisa ngai’, where he makes use of his rap lyricism to glide on an Afro-rhythmic instrumental. On the other hand, ‘Pa Pa Paw’ is a testimony of a true versatile talent, showing us his singing side, which almost acts like the other half of his personality. 

Tiakola 

Our first French cover star and French-Congolese mélo rapper, Tiakola is a name that keeps echoing to the masses as time flies. If our exclusive interview with the boy did not persuade you to add him to your rotation, we don’t know what else would. Tiakola naturally has all the elements of a star, and his charisma, coupled with his talent, makes him a natural component of the music world. Songs such as ‘Meuda’ and ‘BADMAN GANGSTA’ are an immediate click whenever they cross our playlist.

Stromae

You didn’t really think we would make up a list without the Belgian artist Stromae, did you? Despite what the recent surge of AI-generated versions of ‘Papaoutai’ may make you think, the singer-producer has one of the most solid music catalogues in the Francophone sphere of all time. Previously introduced to us as the party anthem ‘Alors en Danse’ in a distant past, Maestro is an artist of layers both lyrically and sonically. It would be very hard to pin him to a genre; Stromae pretty much does what he pleases. 

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Breaking Boundaries: Dadju and Tayc's Héritage Album: Bridging Francophone and Anglophone Markets with Diverse Genres

Tucked away in Pasadena is a retreat that feels completely disconnected from the city’s high-speed energy. Behind the gates of a massive modern estate, the Hollywood noise trades off for the stillness of a lush, green hideaway. We took full advantage of the beautiful garden location; the hidden trees and secluded corners felt like a genuine oasis. The architecture is sharp, the vibe is serene, and the atmosphere feels effortlessly tropical. This isn't just a high-end backdrop; it’s a reflection of the man himself. During the shoot, Armanii was locked in, showing a level of creative involvement that most artists find years into their careers. He moved with a quiet yet humble confidence, clearly understanding his angles and exactly what he liked. At times, he even gently guided the photographer to the specific perspectives that looked the best, never losing that grounded spirit. He genuinely loved the moodiness of the space and the touches of elegance that defined the day.

The Kingston native has already moved past the "rising star" label, backed by a massive 107 million global streams and a debut album, THE IMPACT, that’s currently shaking up the Billboard charts. He moves with a calculated calm, like someone who knows that when you’re really holding the power, you don’t have to shout to be heard.

The Evolution of the Sound

For anyone who only knows him for the high-energy grit of his early singles like "HAAD (Fiesta)" or "POUNDS," THE IMPACT is a total pivot. It’s a 15-track journey released via UnitedMasters that chooses soul over hype, mixing the heavy heartbeat of Reggae with the smooth, late-night textures of R&B. This is music as an experience something that sticks with you long after the track ends. The moodiness of the album mirrors the sleek, minimal aesthetic of our Pasadena set; there’s a balance here that keeps everything grounded.

As the legend Bob Marley once said:
"Music is the instrument of unity... The people must come together, and music is the way."
Armanii’s new sound lives in that space of unity. He’s bridging the gap between the raw, street-level stories of Kingston and the polished, global appeal of modern soul. Talking about this shift, he was real about where his head is at:

"I feel like R&B inspires my music 75% because I listen to the Summer Walkers, the Giveons, the Drakes, the SZAs... that sound gravitates towards me more. You can hear it whether it's a sample or a beat it just has that R&B feel to it."

This melodic evolution shows a level of vulnerability that’s rare. While his look leans into the high-fashion luxury of Balenciaga, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton, his core is still anchored in the honest stories of his life.

A Superpower Rooted in Reality

Armanii’s mission is all about a universal connection. He doesn't see his Jamaican heritage as just a style; it’s his core, the thing that lets him slide into any genre and still sound authentic.

"Using my roots, and then also getting a beat from somewhere like New York and having Jamaican lyrics on it is perfect... staying true to just who I am as a Jamaican is my superpower."

Even with the global wins like being named Billboard’s Rookie of the Month this February and taking home the Dancehall Impact Award at the 2025 Caribbean Music Awards Armanii stays incredibly tapped in. He speaks on the "default Jamaican story" the path from the ghetto to the global stage with a clarity that hits different. That reality is the anchor that makes his music feel like a real conversation instead of just a performance. He’s been there, he’s seen it, and he’s representing a community that sees their own potential in his wins.

Vision and Community

The title of his album, THE IMPACT, wasn't an accident. He wanted a word that held weight without needing extra hype. His vision goes way beyond the numbers; it’s about building a bridge for the next generation of Kingston artists, proving you can go global without losing your soul.

"Choosing the tracks was the hardest part... I made sure I picked something where people would go, 'Okay, wow. Okay, Armanii,' instead of just what they’re used to hearing from me. I wanted to show that versatility."

The Final Word

Watching the light fade over the trees in Pasadena, it's easy to see that Armanii isn't just playing the game he’s genuinely changing how it’s done. By mixing that raw Kingston grit with a smoother, R&B-heavy vibe, he’s created a space for everyone who wants music that actually means something. He is that essential link between the legends we grew up on and the high-fashion, high-speed future of the Caribbean sound.

With a four-city Canadian tour coming up in May 2026 and the rest of the world finally catching his drift, this moment feels less like he’s reached the top and more like he’s just getting started on shifting the culture. In an era where everything is a 15-second clip, Armanii is focused on the long game. THE IMPACT is more than a title; it’s the only way to describe the wake he’s leaving behind.
Keep an eye out the Armanii era has officially moved in.

Credits

Publication: Deeds Magazine @deedsmagazine
Talent: Armanii @armaniimusiq
Photographer/Producer: Pablo Flores Perez @shootervisualz
Lighting Director: Rudolf Bekker @rudolfbekker
1st Photo Assist: Denver Nelson @denvernelson_
Prod. Assistant: Carrington Smith @directorcarrington
Prod. Designer: Steve Ashby @steveflaneurs
Creative Director: Miguel Garcia @miguelhbz
Art Director: Victor Holt @vicknows_
Cover Design: Shalem Alone @Shalemalone
Fashion Director: Gloria Johnson @Styledbyglo_2
Stylist: Amiah Joy @amiah.joy
Styling Assistant: Micheal Washington @9.to.5
Interviewer: Debra Orols @debraorols
Marketing: Nadyahtaj @Nadyahtaj
Distribution: @unitedmasters
Location Rep: Andy Ta

Ayra Starr recently dropped a new song, ‘Where Do We Go?’, that speaks to the confusion that comes with an undefined love. Unlike her usual Afropop sound, the track is submerged with electronic undertones, a new sonic direction that hints at a new era for the pop star. Some welcomed ‘Where Do We Go?’ with anticipation for how this sonic direction would unfold in her upcoming projects; a majority were consumed with something else entirely: her outfit. The Grammy nominee dons a mini black sequined dress paired with purple tights in the visualizer and the song cover art. This style has since angered many fans, who are now not so quietly questioning the direction of her career.

This reaction has long been brewing. Ayra’s fanbase began criticizing her style since the yellow and black cape and peplum three-piece from Luar she wore for a performance in Ghana. Most reactions that followed that look were a mix of displeasure or concern, and sometimes both. As with most fandoms, Ayra’s fanbase turned their criticisms towards the person behind the change, her new stylist, Elly Karamoh.

Karamoh, who only began working with Ayra a few months ago, has so far leaned into a more opulent, high-glam direction with playful twists. Fur, structured pieces, and heavier styling choices take center stage with occasional pulls from 2010s trends; think peplums and pumps. In many ways, his interpretation of Ayra’s image feels bolder in contrast to the look Ayra had been known for.

This change has not landed well for fans. Among hundreds of comments, the most echoed has been that Ayra looks older. For an artist whose style repertoire has been placed at the center of Gen Z fashion, and curated a following from this base, fur coats and peplums, to some fans, felt prematurely aged and out of place for her image as an African pop star. 

This displeasure feels familiar. It’s the same reaction that reverberates when teen stars transition into adulthood and move away from the image that made them popular. Culturally, as Ayra is one of the newest teen-to-adult star transitions Nigeria has witnessed, the reaction may be subconscious; still, it mirrors the same patterns of scrutiny young female stars elsewhere have long faced.

Fans nonetheless express their thoughts as concern for her pop star status. Some worry she will lose her pop star appeal with this new style change, while others interpret the new look as a lack of direction.

But with the changes in Ayra’s personal life, her style choices like wearing fur feels natural. The artist recently moved to New York, and in a Substack post from December, she briefly reflected on the city’s climate and how it has influenced her mood. While she didn’t directly link this to her style, she included a photo of herself in fur. In the “Where Do We Go?” visualizer, she is also framed against skyscrapers, a setting that mirrors her current surroundings and also subtly positions her within a more American landscape.

It's unclear whether this style is simply personal or signalling a new era. One thing is certain: ‘Where Do We Go’ is sonically different, and speculations that she’s trying her hand at American pop have followed. When viewed through this lens, her recent looks make sense.

Still, fans' attachment to Ayra’s earlier image remains strong. Early visual framing of her identity through style, cover art, and music videos has set a precedent for how they read her as an artist. This type of fan attachment is often a result of great branding and building eras. Thanks to the modern pop economy, rollouts are elaborate and tease hidden meanings. Now audiences have been conditioned to read styling, hair, and overall presentation as a signal of what the music might sound or feel like. So when the visual language changes, it can create uncertainty around the music itself for some.

Within that context, the reaction to Ayra Starr’s evolving style begins to make more sense. To understand why this shift feels so jarring to fans, it helps to look at how Ayra Starr’s image was first constructed and how closely it became tied to her sound.

Ayra Starr was introduced to audiences in 2021 through her self-title EP, which wasn’t much of an era in the grand pop sense as it was an introduction phase and a testing ground. The sound was fun and fierce, and that, in conjunction with colorful graphic liner, playful makeup, and cropped shirts, positioned Ayra as the girl next door. Even without a defined era, this first introduction set her up as a girl’s pop star, and that image continued.

Much of that image was later sharpened under the direction of stylist Pat Ada Eze, whose approach to fashion was rooted in reflecting the core audience. “To truly be a star and inspire that level of adoration, you need to excite people, and one of the best ways to do that is through fashion,” she explained in an interview.

With 19 & Dangerous, the girl-next-door image was “baddified”: soft and youthful, but sharper and more self-assured. Through elements like graphic liners, cropped silhouettes, and Y2K references, Ayra sat at the intersection of trendy and alternative, becoming both reflective of and influential within her audience. Mini skirts, cropped shirts, and high boots became the Ayra look, a familiar image that audiences grew attached to. Through color, textures, or overall styling, there was always a thread of softness and youthfulness tying it all together as she experimented across different releases.

But outside of the machinery of branding and rollout strategies, Ayra’s style has never been a fixed image entirely dictated by her sound. She has said in interviews that she dresses for fun, moving between looks and refusing to be boxed into one version of herself. 

So while her previous style has become iconic, it was also distinctly tied to Nigerian youth culture, rooted in a Gen Z-coded style that shaped how audiences first understood her. There is, however, another layer to this reaction—one that doesn’t apply equally across pop

The misogyny of it all

When male artists experiment with their image, the conversation rarely extends to their music in the same way. Criticisms of male artists’ styles are rarely tied to how their music is received.

For example, Rema’s backpack, high tops, and wife-beater combo in the 'FUN' video was critiqued for looking Black-American, with some arguing saying it didn’t fit with his act as an Afrobeats artist. Despite the backlash, the criticism of his clothes barely crossed into how people perceived the music itself or whether they would listen to it.

Asake, in the last few months, has appeared with a different look almost every market day, to the point where constant transformation has become part of his identity. The office shirts and pixie cut hair, among many other looks, have at best earned him praise for his nonconformity and at worst been ridiculed, but not once was his artistry questioned. Meanwhile, each outfit change from Ayra Starr feels, to some fans, like a test of her loyalty to the image they first embraced.

Women in pop are judged more harshly for stylistic changes because their image is often treated as their primary currency, while male artists are still allowed to center their music and persona first. In other words, male artists can have style without being defined by it, while female artists are often defined by their style, whether they want to be or not. You can see this in the early conversations around Tems. 

When Tems first arrived on the scene, she played into the Billie Eilish handbook of purposefully wearing oversized shirts and baggy bottoms to avoid being objectified and taking attention from her voice. Still, her body would remain a point of discussion almost as much as her voice. And when she eventually moved away from baggy clothes to the soul singer look, that too became another talking point.
Even when they aren’t seeking attention for their image, female artists often find that their appearance becomes inseparable from the way their music is interpreted.

As Ayra steps into what may be a new era, the question becomes less about whether the image works and more about how much weight fans allow it to carry. In this age where branding is central to a pop star's image, can we judge the merit of their sound outside of the fashion style they present with it? ‘Where Do We Go’ is a chance to engage with Ayra’s art as she chooses to present it, understanding that her image functions as supplementary context or a continuation of the narratives within her music rather than the full picture itself. 

@radgalrabi

There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when Afrobeats enter a room. 

Picture a club somewhere in East London, 2019. The DJ has been playing the usual — UK drill, some R&B, and the occasional throwback. Then, without announcement, the opening notes of Burna Boy's “Ye” drop into the air. And something shifts. The crowd — Nigerian, British, second-generation everything — starts to move differently. There's a recognition that passes through the room like electricity. By the time Wizkid's “Soco” follows, it’s no longer a matter of who knows the words. Everyone moves.

That feeling of universal arrival is what Afrobeats achieved. It won hearts all over the globe musically, culturally, diplomatically and even commercially. It walked into rooms that had never made space for African sound and made itself at home. Afrobeats won, convincingly, and on its own terms, too. 
But the thing about a sound that conquers the world is that it tends to conquer the story too. 

The Coronation 

Afrobeats didn’t just break through — it reached a magnificent level of global success that is impossible to ignore. 
In 2021, Wizkid's “Essence” — a song recorded in Lagos, sung partly in Yoruba, and built on a distinctly West African beat- became a global phenomenon. It peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. It went platinum in multiple countries and made Tems a household name overnight. A year later, Burna Boy became the first African artist to headline Madison Square Garden — and sold it out. In 2023, Afrobeats became an official Grammy category. The continent not only arrived, but it also restructured the room and expanded the conversation.‍

Afrobeats won for several interconnected reasons. The African diaspora — millions of Nigerians, Ghanaians, and other Africans living across the UK, US, and Europe — created a ready-made global audience that already knew the music and carried it into new spaces. The sound itself is architecturally brilliant for export: rhythmic, danceable, and melodically accessible across language barriers. 

It doesn’t demand cultural fluency to enjoy; it invites people in through the body first. TikTok's algorithm also rewards sounds that make people move, and combining this with the influence of major label partnerships – that gave artists like Davido and Wizkid global distribution — Afrobeats success was almost inevitable. 

This is Afrobeats' genius. It is the most exportable version of African music ever produced. It is clean, danceable, streaming-ready, and culturally resonant without being culturally exclusive.
The problem is not the victory, but what the victory has come to mean. 

Somewhere between Burna Boy’s Grammy speech and Tems performing at the Super Bowl halftime show, "African music" quietly became a synonym for “Afrobeats.” It was not in every room and with every listener — but it was enough. Enough that when a Western journalist writes about African music, they mean Afrobeats. Enough that when a global playlist is labelled "African," it is overwhelmingly Afrobeats. Enough that artists making music on the same continent, in the same cities, sometimes in the same studios — but not in that particular sound — find themselves outside the frame of what counts as African music.

A continent of 54 countries, over 2,000 languages, and more distinct ethnic groups than most of the world combined, has been handed a single genre as its cultural passport. The result of this is that a lot of other very African sounds get left at the border for not being Afrobeats. 

The Sounds & Culture Left Behind

Alté:

Alté (pronounced ul-tey, reclaimed by Nigerian youth culture to mean something "alternative" or "other") emerged from Lagos in the mid-2010s as a direct response to the dominance of mainstream Afrobeats. This is not simply a music genre; it is an attitude. It is a culture built on deliberately rejecting conventional expectations. Where Afrobeats is polished and globally legible, Alté is deliberately messy, genre-fluid, and stubbornly local. It pulls from jazz, soul, psychedelia, funk, and traditional Yoruba sound. It drapes itself in thrift-store fashion, speaks in code-switched Pidgin and English, and refuses the kind of streamlined production that makes a song easy to market internationally.

Artists like Cruel Santino, Odunsi The Engine, and Lady Donli built this world almost entirely outside the mainstream industry's attention. Cruel Santino's 2019 project Mandy & The Jungle is perhaps the defining Alté document: a swirling, maximalist, deeply personal record that sounded like nothing else coming out of Lagos at the time. Not only did it receive critical acclaim, but it also did not chart globally. But that gap — between artistic achievement and commercial visibility — is precisely what Alté is.

What makes Alté significant is not just the sound. It is what the sound represents. In a country where success is often defined by how much money you make and how mainstream your taste is, Alté carves out a different definition of cool. ‘Cool’ here is rooted in self-expression, fluidity, and a rejection of the idea that African music must translate easily to be valid. The Alté community listens differently, dresses differently, thinks differently, and occupies public space differently. It is a subculture in the fullest sense — and it has been almost entirely invisible to the global gaze that has been fixed so intently on Afrobeats.

Amapiano

Amapiano is Afrobeats' closest rival for global attention, and its story reveals a different kind of erasure.
Born in the townships of South Africa — particularly in Pretoria and Johannesburg — sometime around 2012, Amapiano is built around a distinctive log drum pattern, soulful piano melodies, and a tempo that is slower and more hypnotic than Afrobeats. It is the sound of South African township life, of Sunday afternoons and late nights, of a specific joy that is inseparable from a specific geography and a specific history.

By 2022, it had gone global. Amapiano-influenced tracks were appearing on UK charts. International DJs were also incorporating its elements. The log drum — the calling card of underground South African parties — was showing up in pop productions worldwide. In 2023, Shallipopi's “Cast” brought Amapiano into Nigerian street culture, and the fusion was infectious.

But the world largely received the rhythm. It vibed with the log drum and the danceable surface. What it did not receive — or did not bother to look for — was the context. It did not receive the South African township culture that birthed Amapiano. The language, the references, and the specific social world the music was made to soundtrack. The artists who built the sound from the ground up — DJ Maphorisa, Kabza De Small, Focalistic — have found some international attention, but the genre is increasingly being reproduced by people with no relationship to its origins. It has been stripped of its meaning and retained for its marketability.

Street-Hop and Indigenous Sound 

Portable's “Zazoo Zehh” — a chaotic, profane, brilliantly unhinged record — took over Lagos in 2022 in a way that made very little sense to anyone who wasn't living inside that particular moment. The slang was hyper-local, the production was deliberately rough, and the references were invisible to anyone outside a specific Lagos street context. It was, by every measure of the global filter, unexportable. And it was a phenomenon.

This is the same tradition that runs through Fela Kuti's political Afrobeat and Olamide's early YBNL run, which built an empire on the dignity of the Lagos street voice. It runs through Seun Kuti, who still carries his father's fire, and through a generation of artists making music in indigenous languages — Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Twi, Zulu — for audiences who don't need a translation because they are the intended listeners.

This music is the most honest document of African everyday life that exists. It does not flatten itself for palatability or negotiate with the global filter. It asks for nothing except that the listener belongs to the world it was made for. Because of this, the world largely doesn't hear it.

African Indie

Before "Free Mind" made Tems a global name, she was making music for a smaller, more intimate audience. Soft music, searching, and deeply personal in a way that her later work, brilliant as it is, sometimes traded for scale.

That earlier mode — introspective, quiet, and unbothered by marketability — is what African indie represents. It is the Moonchild Sanellys, the Msakis, and the Asa's of the continent. Artists who make music that prioritises feeling over function, storytelling over danceability, and the interior world over the communal floor.

African indie rarely travels. Many times, it is dismissed for not "sounding African enough," — as if Africa is only allowed one emotional register, one volume setting, or one relationship to music. As if the soft, the searching, and the interior are Western inventions that Africans should leave alone. This is the invisible gatekeeping that no one names but is enforced on a global scale. 

The Global Filter 

None of this happens by accident. There is a filter, and it decides what is palatable for global consumption and what remains local.
Streaming platforms are built on engagement metrics — plays, skips, saves, shares. Afrobeats, with its rhythmic accessibility and high replayability, performs excellently by these measures. Music that is more challenging, more contextual, or more reliant on cultural fluency tends to perform worse. This is not because it is inferior, but because the algorithm was not designed with it in mind. Spotify's African playlist curators have improved significantly, but the structural logic of the platform still rewards the most immediately accessible version of any sound.

Record labels also compound this. When Western labels began signing African artists in earnest — Universal's partnership with Davido, Sony's investment in Afrobeats infrastructure — they were investing in what they already understood would translate. The pipeline that was built moved Afrobeats artists onto global stages. Artists outside that sound found that the pipeline didn't quite reach them.

The diaspora, too, plays a complicated role. African communities abroad have been the greatest ambassadors for their home cultures — but they are also, inevitably, performing those cultures for non-African audiences. In that performance, simplification sometimes happens. The most legible version of home gets amplified. The more complex, the more local, and the more untranslatable parts get set aside for a later time that never arrives.

The filter is not intentionally malicious. It is structural, and is the accumulated result of thousands of small decisions — what to sign, what to playlist, what to promote, and what to stream. Each small decision seems individually reasonable, but are collectively devastating to cultural complexity.

‍The Cultural Cost - Music is never just Music 

When Afrobeats becomes the world's primary reference point for African identity, it carries with it an implied story about who Africans are, how they live, what they feel, what they celebrate, and what they mourn. That story is not false — but it is radically incomplete.

A continent of 1.4 billion people, spread across climates ranging from Saharan desert to equatorial rainforest to Mediterranean coast, speaking more languages than any other landmass on earth, producing art across every conceivable tradition — that continent, in the global imagination, increasingly fits inside a single Spotify playlist.

The psychological cost of this falls on African artists first. When the only viable model for global recognition runs through Afrobeats, artists who make different sounds face a choice: adapt toward the dominant sound and gain access to the global machine, or stay true to their artistic identity and accept relative invisibility. This is not a free choice. It is a subtle, structural and relentless pressure.

The cultural cost falls on audiences everywhere. A world that only knows one version of Africa is a world that makes the worst decisions about Africa — in policy, in investment, in solidarity, and in simple human understanding. Culture is the software that runs our empathy. When the software only has one African reference, the empathy that runs on it is limited accordingly.
This is bigger than music. It is a question about who gets to be complex.

The Shift

But recently, there’s been progress. Though slow and uneven, it is unmistakable. Cruel Santino's Mandy & The Jungle has found a second life in international critical circles. Amapiano has forced global audiences to reckon with the fact that Africa's musical landscape has more than one address. Streaming platforms are beginning to develop more granular African playlists that distinguish between regions, sounds, and traditions. Publications like Pitchfork and The Guardian have begun covering African artists who don't fit the Afrobeats mould with more seriousness and more nuance than they did five years ago.

More importantly, a generation of young African listeners is growing up with a more sophisticated relationship to their own music. They know the difference between Alte and Afrobeats. They know Amapiano's origins. They can tell you who Msaki is and why she matters without needing a Western co-sign to validate the claim. The knowledge is being kept alive, even if the global spotlight hasn't caught up.

But the shift is fragile. Every time a Western artist samples Afrobeats and wins a Grammy, the global centre of gravity moves slightly further toward the one sound. Every time an African artist softens their edges to fit the global playlist, a little more complexity leaves the building. 
The music industry — and the audiences that sustain it — must learn to hold more than one story at a time because Africa does not sound like one thing.

Africa sounds like Cruel Santino building a psychedelic mythology in Lagos. It sounds like Amapiano's log drum echoing through a Soweto living room on a Sunday afternoon. It sounds like Portable's unhinged genius making something out of nothing on a street corner. It sounds like Msaki singing something so quiet and so true that you have to lean in to hear it. It sounds like 2,000 languages finding 2,000 different ways to say: I was here. I felt this. This is what it meant to be alive in this place, at this time.

Afrobeats is Africa's greatest introduction. But an introduction is not the full conversation. And the world — if it is serious about actually knowing this continent, and not just dancing to it — has to be willing to stay in the room long enough to hear the rest of what it has to say.
The continent is not a playlist; it is an archive. Africa is more than Afrobeats. 

Social media: Substack

‍

A Blend Between Soukous and Afrobeats World Was Born

When Nigerian Afropop singer Ayra Starr first released ‘Sability’ in 2023, it received mixed reviews. The public seemingly adored the song, with it charting no. 1 in Nigeria’s TurnTable Top 100 and no. 2 in the UK Afrobeats Singles; however, the press saw things otherwise. Ramblings of ‘a miscalculated production choice’, and a flat chorus filled social media blogs. And what could have been a moment of recognizing an African cross-genre blend between the Congolese power hold of Soukous and the newer Nigerian dominant genre of Afrobeats ended up falling short. Little did they know that Ayra Starr’s sample by legend Awilo Longomba was once renowned for its influence on the continent & beyond, respected for pushing boundaries and forever changed the soundscape of African music.

Soukous is a Congolese dancing genre that was first popularized in the 60s, deriving from Rumba. The main aspect that differentiates both sounds is that Soukous has a fast-rhythmic pace, accompanied by guitar improvisations and is often danced to ndombolo, whilst Rumba is a slow ballad and usually enchants lyrical themes of love. Historically, both genres have always gone hand in hand, where Congolese legendary artists such as Koffi Olomide, Fally Ipupa, or the late Papa Wemba and Franco Luambo would dabble back and forth between them, depending on the trajectory of the song they wanted to produce.

When Awilo Longomba released his second album, ‘Coupé Bibamba’ in 1998, it really shook things up. You see, Awilo was born into this, hailing from a musical father, Vicky Longomba, the lead vocalist and founder of the Rumba pioneering band TPOK Jazz. Some would say that music was in his blood; however, it is him revolutionizing Soukous with Electronic elements that really set him apart. The term techno-Soukous was then coined, bringing worlds together that had never been seen in the same category, let alone in the same room. The lead single that shares the title and 2023 sample made waves, encouraging the continent to dance along. The whole project was so popular that it even made noise in Europe & America through the diaspora.

It is 2023, and Thisizlondon, or London in short, is in the studio with Ayra Starr (At least that’s how we imagine it). We presume London showcased the original song to the team, and Ayra fell in love with it first listen, which prompted its immediate release. All jokes aside, ‘Sability’ was surely a brand risk, just for the mere fact of its unusual melodies, eclectic rhythms and still very evident Soukous influences. As Afrofusion is often known for wanting to try new blends, which were received pretty well by fans. That is, until critics shared their questionable point of view, and the try-out came to an end.

What ‘Sability’ showcased at the time is the lack of cultural context within foreign entities, but also in its continental limitations. This is because the lyrics that were met with perplexity are the same elements that make a Soukous song. Lyrics are simplified, often just shouting out names, or in this case, “Awilo” at the refrain, which is the name of the artist himself. This is a key attribute incorporated into Soukous music as its purpose is to make you dance, and not dwell on the meaning behind words. Surely, one could argue that Ayra’s remake wasn’t as convincing as Awilo, and a feature would have made the hook justice. However, when Burna Boy and Wizkid borrow famous Fela Kuti’s lyrics and melodies to fuse them in their sound without its initial message, why doesn’t anybody bat an eye and just dance along?

Let’s take Rema’s 2025 single ‘Kelebu’, for example, which also fell into the same fate. A song mainly heavily influenced by Ivorian Coupé-Décalé, yet failed to resonate with commentators. It’s not that the song lacked substance or didn’t serve its purpose, which was to make us dance; it is that the lack of awareness of the historical agenda behind regional sounds makes Nigerian artists’ attempt to fuse them with Afrobeats ultimately flop.

Wearing a beige suit and red tie, Asake waltzed onto the stage, the sound of his hit song ‘Why Love’ emanating from the 33-person orchestra flanking him. That historic night at Brooklyn’s King Theatre last year, Asake’s Red Bull Symphonic show would find him performing orchestral renditions of some of his biggest hits and trotting out stars like Wizkid, Tiakola, Central Cee, Gunna & Fridayy. By the middle of the show, however, the 31-year-old Afrobeats hegemon would take a detour from this thumping procession of hit songs, performing a mellow, introspective unreleased record. On Friday, the 20th of March, after five months of teasing the record during his many performances around the world, Asake finally released the single. Its title? ‘Worship.’

What’s especially remarkable about ‘Worship’ is how aptly it telegraphs Asake’s ascendancy. After years of relentless grind, of trudging ahead without the slightest hint of what the future held, of having to grapple with a fusillade of setbacks, he finds himself at the zenith of African music, having held the entire continent, and beyond, spellbound with three undeniable albums. “Alhamdulillah, praise be to God no matter your condition,” he offers in the song’s overture, as the production—replete with poignant keys and flamboyant horns—evokes the feeling of a church worship session.

In 2020, Asake, who had by then spent years chasing stardom, had his fresh brush with fame. ‘Mr Money’, a propulsive single he released that year, galvanised audiences in Nigeria, many of whom had been unnerved by the tightening lockdown restrictions and the attendant vagaries of the pandemic. TikTok and Instagram teemed with jaunty choreography by fans enthralled by its earworm melodies and skittering drums. But soon after, the song’s momentum would taper off precipitously, and he’d struggle without success for years to score another hit song. 

“Life humbled me,” he says of the incident in a recent interview with Nigerian YouTuber Korty EO. “Imagine God gives you a taste of something, and then takes it away. That’s what happened in 2020.” Two years later, however, the tide would turn when he signed to YBNL, a label owned by legendary Nigerian musician Olamide. Following his signing, Asake would display an unprecedented level of dominance in the industry, earning him sobriquets like "landlord," a cheeky allusion to his dominance on charts worldwide. 

Asake’s interview with Korty EO was released days before ‘Worship’ dropped and has played the crucial role of imbuing the song with a certain diaristic heft. The interview, conducted over five days, finds Asake steeped in a level of wealth and stardom that feels redolent of a different era. But even more poignantly, we see him swaddled with love, warmth, and adoration from his family and close circle. Watching the interview and then circling back to the song, in which he offers lyrics such as “You have to trust yourself and wait for results,” will almost certainly leave you feeling like you can take on the world, bet on yourself, and perhaps come out successful. 

The past few days have seen an outpouring of love towards the Mr Money crooner, often expressed in the form of emotion-sodden screeds posted on X. And the appetite for his hopefully imminent album M$NEY has never been higher. Last year, he relentlessly teased the project, taking us on a labyrinthine journey flush with countless evolutions of his personal style and a smorgasbord of snippets. Nonetheless, the project never materialized. What we got instead was ‘Real,’ a four-track collaborative project with Wizkid. But even that felt like a peace offering of sorts, something to hold on to before the main banquet arrives. Fans across Africa and the diaspora are waiting with bated breath. But with ‘Worship’ finally out, it appears that we’ve officially ventured into Asake’s M$NEY era.

In an era where musical "lanes" feel more like restrictive cages, DC The Don is busy tearing down the fencing. For the Milwaukee-born artist, moving from SoundCloud to the world stage wasn't just luck, it’s what happens when you refuse to dilute who you are. DC represents a rare breed of artist who successfully moved from the digital trenches to global market prominence without losing the "inner circle" intimacy that turned his fanbase into a literal movement.
His sound is a high-energy blend of fast, crashing rhythms and melancholy, synth-driven melodies. 
During our recent sit-down, Deeds Magazine explored his growth in 2026, which he describes as "astronomical". His latest EP, "THE RUMORS ARE TRUE", is a polished declaration of this evolution. It lives in that waiting room between two lives, the "in-between" where rising fame crashes into real life. Our conversation focuses on his journey, his dual personas, and why he’ll never fold.

Gloria for Deeds Magazine: You've described your 2024 album REBIRTH as your "official debut," but you've been a force in the scene since the SoundCloud era. Looking at the trajectory from Milwaukee to now, how would you describe the growth and refinement of your creative process in 2026?
DC: Astronomical.

Your music has famously orbited around two characters: Donny (representing rage and ego) and Rag3 Kidd (representing pain and depression). On your new EP, "THE RUMORS ARE TRUE", do these two still live in conflict, or have you found a way to fuse them into a singular, more powerful identity?
I found a resolution with them, but it's not answered until the next album. My next project, Heaven Offline, is a sequel to MOW3 (My Own Worst Enemy).

You've successfully blended everything from "breakbeat chaos" to "synth-pop sadness" into your work. For the fans who have been following your journey, what are some of the smaller details or influences in your "DC Sound" that you think people might still overlook?
There's a lot of small details in all of the shit that I do. But people don't know how involved I am in the entire process, how much attention I pay to the details. The people that do hear it, hear it.

You released an EP titled 2012 and frequently reference that era's culture. What is it about that specific point in time that remains a primary source of inspiration for you today?
2012 was a big year for me because that's when I fell in love with music. You can't take shit too seriously when it comes to making music these days.

"THE RUMORS ARE TRUE" is your first project under a major label partnership with Republic Records. As an artist who has always operated as a "chameleon" in full control of his palette, how has this new partnership empowered you to scale your original vision? 
It didn't really change anything. I didn't get validation from a record label. It's nice to feel celebrated and supported.

‍That track exploded with over 90 million streams as an independent release. What was the most surreal moment of seeing a song you fought so hard for become a global anthem? 
Beating out Taylor Swift, because I'm a Swiftie, on the trending music chart on Apple Music.

‍From short films to your "TRAT Burner" accounts, you've built a very specific aesthetic world. How does visual storytelling help you communicate the emotions of the music? 
I feel like the visuals come first to me you see something and it inspires a sound. That's always the first thing to me, the aesthetic.

‍You're hitting Chicago, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and LA this month. For those getting ready for a DC The Don show, what is the one thing they need to be prepared for? 
I think they should feel unprepared. I want them to experience this show as if it's their first time watching me live.

‍Your 2026 timeline mentions the launch of a "Burner" account. Why is it important for you to maintain that raw, direct line to your core fans? 
Sharing music and my life with my fans is what started this. Seeing how my music impacts other people's lives is the biggest part of music for me.

‍Beyond the upcom2012 was a big year for me because that's when I fell in love with music. You can't take shit too seriously when it comes to making music these days. album in July, what does the "World of DC" look like in the near future? 
I'm tryna get a film at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm tryna take all of my dreams as a kid and make it a reality.

Direct Connection: Your 2026 timeline mentions the launch of a "Burner" account. Why is it important for you to maintain that raw, direct line to your core fans even as your profile continues to reach new heights?
Sharing music, my life etc with my fans is what started this. It’s not ‘GET NAKED’ or signing a deal with Republic (Records). The first thing that really gave me that extra battery pack was seeing how my music impacts other people’s lives. Not even on some O.D. serious shit, but the fact I’m making people's lives better and shit like that, that’s fire to me. That's the biggest part about music for me. So if I switched that up, I would not be DC anymore

Beyond the upcoming Heaven Offline album in July, what does the "World of DC" look like in the near future? Are there other creative mediums like film or fashion that you are looking to conquer next?
I’m tryna get a film at the Sundance (Film) Festival. I got a short film coming out for ‘Heaven Offline.’ I’m tryna take all of my dreams as a kid and make it a reality. I feel like a lot of people get to a certain point where they make so much money, they forget the things they would say when they were a kid. I never lost that. Everything I dreamed of doing as a kid, I’m gonna do, and it will be fire. ‍

What is one part of your daily life that would probably surprise even your most dedicated supporters? 
Like probably 95% of the time, I be trolling and shit.

When people look back at this specific era ten years from now, what is the lasting mark you want to have left behind? 
I care more about how I'm defined in people's personal journeys. It's about whose life did you positively impact.

‍How do you hope your journey inspires others to embrace their own complexity? 
By watching all of my mistakes and learning that nobody has it figured out. You can be whatever the fuck you want to be.

‍When you finally step back from all the noise, what's the one thing you hope people understand about your heart?
‍I never folded, and I never will. I'm never gonna change.

A Note on the "In-Between"

DC The Don’s story isn't just about streams or major label deals; it's a living blueprint for anyone who feels like they don't quite fit the mold. He is entirely himself, unapologetically authentic even in his flaws. That authenticity is exactly what will keep him around for years to come. As DC says, you can be whatever you want to be. Don't fold.

Photo credit: Dre Casseus

Picture this: a school bell rings and students scatter across a sun-baked compound. A senior prefect on patrol, juniors walking in single file past the hostel, and somewhere in the distance a teacher's voice cutting through the noise for morning assembly. This is a scene that millions of Africans across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe and beyond lived for years. It is one of the most shared, most vivid, most dramatically rich experiences on the continent. And yet on the biggest screen available -  Netflix -  it has barely been told honestly.

The question is not whether Netflix wants African stories. The platform has made that investment clear. The question is a different, more uncomfortable one: why do producers keep reaching for the elite, sanitised version of that story when the majority of the audience grew up in something far more interesting?

The Proof of Appetite Is Already There

Before anyone commissions a single episode, YouTube has already made the case - with numbers that no pitch deck could argue with.

Neptune3Studios -  founded by sisters Jemima Damina, Jesimiel Damina and Jeiel Damina - built 'Best Friends In The World' from the ground up as a secondary school series that skips hyper-sexualisation and grotesque violence to present an honest view of mid-teens finding their identity in a Nigerian school setting. The Senior Year premiere hit one million views within four days of release, trending simultaneously in Nigeria and Ghana. The total view count on the first episode of Best Friends In The World has since crossed 12 million. That is not just a Nigerian audience. That is a Pan-African one.

Then there is Justin Chukwudi Ugonna, better known as Justin UG -  multidisciplinary artist, content creator, actor, DJ and founder of dating app Tova. His secondary school content draws from lived experience; those experiences became the foundation of his creative work. His series'High School Chronicles' - featuring Layiwasabi, Maraji and Gilmore - went viral across African X, sparking a conversation that stretched far beyond Nigeria. Justin UG himself has spoken about working on an extended version of Road to High School Chronicles - 8 to 10 episodes of approximately 45 minutes each -  the big project he is currently developing, already in the scripting process. Comments poured in from different places -  all recognising something of themselves in the corridors, the hierarchies, the texture of the show.
The audience is Pan-African. The demand is proven. The only missing piece is a platform willing to back it at the scale it deserves.

What Netflix Gave Us Instead

When Netflix released 'Far From Home' in 2022 - its first Nigerian Young Adult original series, produced by Inkblot Productions -  the anticipation was enormous. It was Netflix's millionth Young Adult series about scholarship kids in an elite school, except this time set in Lagos, Nigeria. The potential was there.

What followed was a show that, as critics quickly noted, did not know what it wanted to be. Far From Home had an identity crisis -  it didn't know whether to be a breezy high school story in the vein of similar stories from developed countries, or a commentary on the stark difference between the rich and the poor in Nigeria. In trying to be both, it captured neither. There was a football match sequence accompanied by a cheer squad and a chant that sounded straight out of Hollywood - so similar to High School Musical that it came off as foreign and out of touch to the Nigerian majority who were not privileged to attend schools like Wilmer. For a show meant to appeal to Nigerians, it whitewashed the culture down to the mere pronunciation of the protagonist's name. 
It was, in the most precise sense of the phrase, far from home.

NdaniTV's Schooled came considerably closer -  a series with real texture and stakes that felt recognisably Nigerian. But it was limited by platform and budget in ways that a Netflix production would never have to be. The gap between Schooled's ambition and its resources tells its own story about where the money flows and where it doesn't.

South Africa Proved the Template Works

While Nigerian productions have been reaching for the elite and missing the real, South Africa has been quietly building the model.

Youngins - the South African series set at a Johannesburg boarding school has subplots. Forbidden romance, family tension, abuse of power. The drama is complex and the characters are layered. But those subplots live inside a school that feels recognisably African. The boarding house dynamics are right. The social hierarchies are right. The language and the world are right. The subplots do not sanitise the container and that is the entire difference. South Africa proved that complexity and authenticity are not in competition. The show won Best South African Streaming Series at the Behind The Scenes Awards proof that authentic storytelling within an African school setting does not just resonate, it gets recognised.
Nigerian producers should be taking notes.

The Class Problem Nobody Is Talking About

Who is making the decisions about what gets produced?
Every major depiction of African secondary school life on a major platform was created for the elite. The scholarship kid infiltrates the rich school. The prestige academy. The one-percenters. And while class tension is a legitimate story worth telling, it is not the only one and it is certainly not the most widely shared. The majority of Africans who went to secondary school did not attend Wilmer Academy. They went to schools with broken ceiling fans and understaffed classrooms, provision boxes from home, inter-house sports that felt like the most important day of the year, WAEC anxiety sitting in the chest for months before results.

When the people commissioning and producing these stories come predominantly from the elite end of that experience, the stories they tell reflect that narrow vantage point. The result is a version of African adolescence that the majority of the audience watches and does not recognise and a version of African storytelling that keeps performing for an imagined global gaze rather than reflecting itself back to the people who actually lived it.‍

What the Real Story Looks Like‍

What Skam did for Norway, what Sex Education did for Britain, what Never Have I Ever did for the Indian-American experience, that is what African secondary school deserve. A show that is not afraid of the mess of it. The assembly line at 7:30am. The senior who makes a junior's life miserable for no reason other than hierarchy. The boarding house at night when the generator goes off and everyone is talking in the dark. The visiting day when some parents show up and others don't. The first crush. The rival. The teacher who actually changed things.

These are not small stories. They are the stories that shaped an entire continent's adults. And they are sitting there, largely untold at scale, while producers keep building prestige academies that the majority never attended.

Justin UG built 'High School Chronicles' without a Netflix budget and the internet responded across multiple African countries. Neptune3Studios built 'Best Friends In The World' from the ground up and Ghana was watching alongside Nigeria. The proof of concept does not need to be made - it already exists, on YouTube, with millions of views and no major platform behind it.

@ffeistyhuman

New Project ‘JOŸA’ is Set to Drop on May 15th

When Julien Franck Bouadjie Kamgang, better known to the world as Tayc, first announced the coming of his second album ‘JOŸA’ at the Red Bull Symphony, a glimmer of hope filled the Parisian cold air. What most music critics would have described as the peak of Tayc’s career, the French-Cameroon Afropop singer suddenly quit music mid-performance after he had endured the dolorous passing of his late brother a year prior.

"This is Tayc's last summer. The road will end in 2025" was Julien’s last words on stage, and we swallowed every second of his final appearance with great chagrin, while convinced we would never hear from our favourite artist again. For months, Julien stayed off eye-sight, fueling the internet's wildest exchanges of mainly confusion and also empathy, before revealing to his supporters in December that it was only the beginning of a new chapter. And all of the stars in the skies seemed to align and point towards his newly-released single, ‘Super-Héros.’

‘Super-Héros’ feels like Tayc’s love letter to Cameroon. Accompanied by fragmented visuals of the ‘Forévà’ artist’s personal journey in the motherland, the sound truly lives up to its name; a new chapter of self-discovery and reconnecting with one’s African roots. Although Julien has always been known for singing about love to multiple significant others in different phases of a relationship’s cycle, some may accuse him of having been superficial in the past. However, the message behind this song feels deeply intentional, in which Tayc can be addressing an entire generation, his country, or maybe a blend of both, drenched in the history of a bloody battlefield and the reason his mother left her homeland for the Occident.

In the core of reflection, Tayc harmonizes in the most vulnerable state: “Joya, tell me where to go / Tell me where to go”, and we’re brought back to ‘TESTIMONY,’ a 2024 EP dedicated to Julien’s late brother. It goes without saying that, even by the first listen, we can sense that his pain still derives from this tragic passing and draw parallels to the familiar tone and lyricism Julien displayed in his previous project. “I heard all of the screams / and I felt the pain of your life” sings Tayc in the pre-chorus without sugarcoating. Is Julien now attempting to stretch a hand to his long-lost heritage through ‘Super-Héros’? It certainly is the case.

The Tayc you’ve seen before is not the Tayc you’re seeing now. God might have taken what’s most dearest to him, but he also gave him new life, as Julien is now a father of two children. Those are all new elements of his life, years apart from the person he was when Tayc first started his career in 2012. Some might say that he is experiencing an existential crisis, very common amongst men in their late 20s; however, it is far more complex than that. Take his mother shaving off his hair, for example, in ‘Il s’appelait Tayc’, what Julien is going through is an ego death. This is because he has no more use for his past self, who focused on all the sweetness that life offers, but now he is seeking something deeper, something more real, a spiritual awakening, per se, that encapsulates a man of substance rather than his materialistic gain.

Despite the simple build of the track, ‘Super-Héros’ is the perfect introduction to the new universe Tayc is trying to paint. One that is introspective, urges you to reflect and hypnotises you with its soft resonance. Words of Bamenda (One of Cameroon’s 250 native tongues) and instruments such as the glistening piano and saxophone outro-play only reinforce the galactic transition to a new beginning. Tayc’s different branding is a stage of agape, healing, and looking from within, but most importantly, we can expect ‘JOŸA’ to be a project of hope.

You may listen to Tayc’s new single here.

As a consummate music lover, very few things fire me up as much as an exciting album rollout. As much as an album is a compendium of tightly woven songs exploring a set of topics or advancing a sonic argument, albums also function as chapters in an artist’s career, making the case that the artist in question has undergone a significant evolution and now has something to offer the world. It's revealing that today in pop culture, the dawn of a new album is commonly referred to as a “new era.” 

Over the years I’ve watched and lived through the rollouts of a great many albums. I've, however, noticed that the ones that have stuck with me have been chaotic and unrelenting. Cue up that infamous clip from Kanye West’s ‘Donda.’ Surrounded by producers and acolytes such as Rick Rubin and framed by a whiteboard covered with song titles and barely intelligible musings, he crows: “Play Off The Grid!" The rollout for Rema’s ‘Heis’ had a familiar ring and triggered hysterical theories claiming he had joined the Illuminati. Watching Omah Lay drum up anticipation for his imminent album “Clarity of Mind,” with a topsy-turvy rollout has evoked the same snarling excitement. 

In this installment of Pop Takes—an original column in which I interrogate some of the most culturally relevant topics in Pop Culture—Omah Lay’s blistering rollout, alongside topics such as the Oscars and Jack Harlow’s ‘Monica,’ are at the heart of my inquiry. 

Timothy Chalamet’s Oscar Loss Divides The Internet

Michael B. Jordan had hardly run through his acceptance speech for winning the Best Actor in a Leading Role honor at the 98th Academy Awards when the memes started rolling in. In the months leading up to the Oscars, the Ryan Coogler-directed ‘Sinners,’ and Paul Thompson Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another,’ emerged as the clear favorites this year, picking up 16 and 13 Oscar nominations respectively. The Best Actor category, however, found ‘Sinners’’ poster boy Michael B. Jordan in a fierce battle with Timothy Chalamet, who plays the lead character, Marty Mauser, in Josh Safdie’s ‘Marty Supreme.’ And while Jordan would lead the kind of subtle, if decorous, Oscars campaign that the mostly stodgy Academy members tend to favor; Chalemet delivered a sweltering and often incendiary campaign. Towards the end of his relentless Oscar bid, the 30-year-old seemed to have embodied the glib arrogance of his character Marty Mauser. In a widely circulated interview with Matthew McConaughey, Chalamet seemingly punches down at Opera and Ballet, claiming “no one cares” about these art forms. 

Given his imperious disposition in the lead-up to the Oscars night, Chalamet’s loss has generated a welter of joy in certain quarters of social media. Expectedly, trolls have also had a field day spinning taunting memes. Amidst all of this, however, a few key concerns emerge: Did Chalamet lose because of his comments on Opera? Did the Academy vote to teach him a lesson in humility?

Despite the widespread perception that Chalamet’s comments on Opera torpedoed his chances at the Oscars, that assessment seems unlikely as the voting was almost complete by the time those comments became a topic on social media. There's, however, a point to be made about the Academy’s pattern of making preening actors—think Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, and Michael B. Jordan—wait until much later in their careers before winning an Oscar. Considering this pattern, it might benefit Chalamet to tone down his theatrics and affect the kind of humility the Academy favors.  

Jack Harlow’s Faces Backlash Over New Album ‘Monica’ 

Anyone who has kept tabs on the Louisville, Kentucky rapper Jack Harlow in the past two years has perhaps glimpsed his subtle evolution. He has quietly retreated from public glare, traded his former glitzy style for beige turtle necks and baggy tees that evoke 90s fashion, and taken to dispensing mawkish rhetoric about subjects like ego death and transcendence. In a recent interview with Popcast, a New York Times podcast covering music and culture, Harlow said: “As I’m getting older, I’m having more trouble reconciling being braggadocious on record.” Indeed this introspective sentiment threads through his latest album ‘Monica,’ which turns starkly away from his earlier works. In place of the pop samples, slick rapping, and thumping beats that defined his earlier projects, ‘Monica’ finds Harlow in Neo-Soul territory, luxuriating in sensual singing, supple keys, and buttery harmonies. In that episode of Popcast, he talks about becoming “Blacker” on this album, a comment that has not gone down well with everyone. Critics have called out his glib verbiage and the predatory undertones of his gambits with this album—over the years, many white musicians have co-opted Black music, passing it off as their invention. 

In a recent Pitchfork review, renowned African-American music critic Alphonse Pierre bitterly skewers the project, awarding it a score of 3.1/10. “Jack Harlow’s sexless new album demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of neo-soul. His coffee shop crooning is a transparent exercise in personal rebranding, he writes.” My view of the situation is less bleak. I think Jack Harlow is genuine in his desire to explore Neo-Soul and apparently tame his ego. I think he respects and is inspired by Black music legends. And ultimately, while the project is far from ground-breaking, it's mostly an enjoyable listen. Against the backdrop of an explosion of Rage Rap, the sensual grooves of the album feel like a welcome reprieve. But I also agree with Pierre in that the themes Harlow explores in the album feel a bit too tidy and lack the complexity that accompanies a conscientious exploration of self. 

Omah Lay’s Album Rollout Feels Like a Rollercoaster Ride 

Last week, as the world writhed over soaring oil prices from the ongoing war in Iran, clips from Omah Lay’s listening party for his imminent album ‘Clarity of Mind,’ began to float around on social media. Unless you've been desensitized by similarly chaotic album rollouts, watching these clips is certain to leave you in a tailspin. The cream-colored room where the listening party was held is conspicuously sparsely furnished. A beige sofa sits in the middle of the room, functioning as a lectern of sorts. In one clip, we see Omah Lay vigorously working out with a pair of dumbbells, as the crowd encircling him gawks excitedly. In another, he’s doing push-ups, as an unreleased track plays in the background. Later, he runs around the room for no discernible reason. 

The event seemingly climaxed with a Q&A session where he implied that the Yorubas dominate the Nigerian music industry and that Fela is the founder of Afrobeats (this is incorrect; the genre pioneered by Fela is Afrobeat, which is stylistically distinct.) 

Just when the fallout from his listening party had started to abate. A clip showing Omah Lay in the snowy mountains of Austria surfaced on social media. There are claims that the clips are from a private listening party for a billionaire fan who reportedly paid €700,000 for the listening experience. This has set off a new wave of arguments over the veracity of the claims and whether the amount paid is fitting for an artist of Omah Lay’s stature. 

I honestly think that all of this drama is engineered. There have been speculations that Omah Lay’s erratic rollout is emblematic of his troubled internal state and comparisons to Kanye West’s “Donda” rollout have come up frequently. A bit of this might be at play but ultimately, my take is that Omah Lay is an eccentric and an inveterate showman. He understands that his fans love a bit of theatrics, and as a showman, he has to give the fans what they want. Beyond this, the music industry is perhaps more saturated than ever; albums come and go every day without so much as affecting the zeitgeist. As such, any artist looking to cut through the noise needs to do something different, something explosive. It's why Wizkid leaned into sparring with his long-time rival Davido during the rollout for his ‘Morayo’ album; it's also why Rema leaned strongly into unorthodoxy during the rollout for his sophomore album ‘Heis.’ More than anyone else, Omah Lay understands this dynamic, having emerged in the heat of the pandemic with a delightfully off-kilter EP. Now, the question is whether ‘Clarity of Mind’ will live up to the promise of its bracingly exciting rollout. 

It started with concrete textures and stop signs. A mural stretched across the wall, sitting inside the strange familiarity of a West London street corner. The space felt nostalgic, almost tender, but the central mood of Survivor’s Remorse was something else entirely: bargaining.

Tolu Coker’s collection reads as a negotiation of identity; grief, loss, distance from cultural roots, and ultimately reclamation. Through structured silhouettes and geometric patterning, she builds a language that sits between worlds. What she presents is not just a collection, but a question: what does it cost to become British?

On February 19, 2026, she posted a short film, a prelude to the collection. At its core, it was a simple message: “Do not forget who you are.” For many Africans in the diaspora, that tension is constant. The pursuit of opportunity often comes with an unspoken exchange: proximity to success in return for distance from self.

Survivor’s Remorse sits inside that exchange. Drawing from her formative years in London, Coker constructs a world shaped by nostalgia. This is not memory as comfort. It is memory as something you have to actively hold onto. The cost of becoming is never simple. It begins with grief, not from entry to a better world, but from leaving the familiar and starting again. The excitement of a new world quickly meets the reality of unfamiliarity, and with it, the quiet pressure to become something else.

The set makes this clear before the clothes even arrive. A mural and nostalgic space that reminds you of unfamiliarity and the task of adapting, anchoring the room in memory. Coker is not just staging a show; she is staging absence. She reminds us that grief is not separate from creation; it is often what shapes it.

But grief does not sit alone. It shifts into aspiration.

The London Underground sign on set becomes more than scenery; it reads as a symbol of childhood longing. The city as a system, as a promise, as something you watch before you are fully inside it. Growing up on Mozart Street in Westminster means growing up close enough to power to recognise it, but far enough to understand that it is not yet yours. The presence of King Charles III in the room sharpens this tension. Power is no longer distant; it is watching. And in that moment, aspiration becomes something more complex. It is no longer just desire, but performance: learning how to speak, dress, and move in a way that allows entry.

And then comes assimilation.

The clothes take centre stage here. Yoruba and British fashion codes collide deliberately. Structured tailoring meets cultural patterning, creating something that feels distinctly Afro-modern.  “Reclaimed satins merge the vibrancy of Yoruba textiles with the tradition of British tartans. The palette, juxtaposed against the sharpness of the silhouettes, narrates a tale of migrating cultures and the contributions of the African and Black Diaspora to the makeup of Britain”- Tolu Coker. 

Each garment carries its own tension, whether it is British wool, denim or reclaimed satins. The clothes had a story that followed them. The designs are almost architectural, with the knitted jumpers and jerseys highlighting a sense of evolution. Each colour, fragment, shape and textile are designed to match what it means to assimilate into a new culture. School uniform silhouettes remain the common structure - pleated skirts, crisp shirting, tightly knotted ties - trace the early stages of this transformation. But assimilation never fully completes itself. It fractures.

This is seen in the details; the way British forms are interrupted by something older and culturally rooted. The collection does not resolve these tensions; it holds them. And within that, the real weight of survivor’s remorse emerges. Not guilt for leaving, but awareness of what had to be adjusted, softened, or set aside in order to stay.

And finally, within it all, Tolu chooses to remain herself. The colour shifts, and tomato reds, lime yellows, saturated tones take centre. The colours reflect her heritage as a presence. She is not merging identities into something more palatable but allowing them to exist fully, without compromise.

“I think the key is being honest and being yourself ” - Simz on Tolu Coker’s Instagram, Feb 2026.

Survivor’s Remorse offers coexistence rather than fusion. The cost of becoming British does not have to be fusion, but adaptation. Yoruba and British identities do not negotiate; they sit side by side. To become British is never just a moment of arrival. It is a process of exchange. Of adaptation. Of translation. Of holding parts of yourself closer while letting others slip just enough to be understood. What Tolu Coker does with Survivor’s Remorse is make that process visible. She turns it into fabric, into structure, into movement. She refuses to let it sit quietly beneath the surface. And in doing so, she expands what fashion can hold: not just clothes, not just aesthetics, but memory, tension, and inheritance. The full, complicated weight of becoming, and the quiet power of choosing, finally, what you get to keep.

Reminiscing on old family portrait photos—their grainy textures, tattered borders, pensive faces, stylistic poses, intricate backgrounds, and complex dispositions of memory—evokes a flurry of emotions, thoughts, stories, worlds. Within these vintage black and white pictorial worlds, we are transfixed across specific dimensions of time, taking us back into history’s nostalgia, through the present’s sense of familiarity, all the way to the future’s endless promise of novelty. Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, dissects the layered, multidimensional elements of portrait photography. 

At The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Oluremi manages the Museum’s holdings of over 35,000 photographs, which span the history of the medium. As a researcher and art historian, she holds a PhD in art history, a BA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in visual, material, and museum anthropology from Oxford University. Currently on view through July 25, 2026 at the MoMA, her new exhibition, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, examines the person behind the camera and the one in front of it—and how together, they work to craft an ongoing conversation on depth, political imagination, and African self-determination. Deeds Magazine sat down with Oluremi to learn more about her art historical research and curatorial work. 

“I encourage you to really think about how a photographic portrait is made. These are deliberately constructed compositions, and when we are attentive to those moves, we might see things anew. [Portraiture] is an act of creativity in front of and behind the lens for these specific image makers. These are not photographic portraits as identity documents; these are not photographic portraits that attest to a fixed truth, these are photographic portraits that are concerted conversations with people in front of a camera and the person behind the camera. These are deliberate, performative, imaginative images—and they’re being made at a moment when countries across the African continent are decolonizing.” 

—Oluremi C. Onabanjo

‍Your exhibition seems to engage the formation of Pan-African subjectivity between the US Civil Rights movement and the fight for independence across the African continent. Considering your conceptual influence by The Idea of Africa, the landmark publication by the late philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe (1941–2025), I’m interested to hear more about your process. How did you come to fully realize this project? What were some focal elements/drivers that inspired the beginning of your curatorial process?  

‍There are different ways to organize an exhibition. One way is to start from a specific topic, which provides the basis for a set of works that you locate and ultimately unite through an exhibition. Another is to begin with works in a collection, which is how Ideas of Africa began. I started by examining a set of mid-century works of West and Central African photographic portraiture in MoMA’s Collection, gifted in 2019 by the collector of modern and contemporary African Art, Jean Pigozzi. First, looking closely at these holdings, I then expanded towards a survey of all of the Museum’s holdings dealing with these regions during this period. As I looked, I realized there was an opportunity to not only spotlight works from the gift, but also demonstrate what a gift makes possible in an institution like MoMA—where one can engage in deep research, establish acquisition priorities, and consider further purchases and gifts that enliven what a specific set of works in the collection offer our understanding of this chapter in the history of photography. The year that I started working on the exhibition, The Idea of Africa (1994) celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, which occasioned my returning to the legacy of Mudimbe’s work in the 1990s—unapologetically ambitious in its intention, vastly interdisciplinary in its reach. This moment was also an important one for the history of African photography exhibitions in New York. In returning to these canonical works and words, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination emerged. Through this exhibition, I hope to demonstrate why these images and ideas remain relevant and what the current generation can learn from them. As always, artists are leading the way. 

“Ideas of Africa locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned new worlds…Rather than solely contesting Western monolithic formulations of Africa, Ideas of Africa is invested in mining incipient ideas of the continent— notions generated within, throughout, and beyond Africa as a geographic place, all rendered through the frame of the photographic portrait.”

—Oluremi C. Onabanjo

To quote historian and curator Giulia Paoletti, “There is often this tendency to flatten what is African modernity, and instead it’s important to show the variety of experiences and subjects at the time.” I think this folds really well with what you said regarding Black agency— dispensing with notions of representation in place for political imagination: not static affirmation of identity, but the ongoing work of becoming. I think we, as a society, are removing ourselves from the salvation that representation is presumed to hold. Interested to hear your thoughts here on Black agency, and the ongoing work of becoming across the diaspora. 

In this exhibition, you’ll see many ideas of Africa. The exhibition offers a consideration of the African continent that is expansive and capacious, exceeding geographic bounds and reverberating through time. This is a pan-African vision of the continent, which importantly holds a strong relationship to the African Diaspora. As a result, while Ideas of Africa is situated within contexts that extend beyond New York, it locates the city within a larger global set of networks. In 1960 alone, 17 African countries became independent. They are preceded by some, and they are definitely followed by many. This extended moment of liberation, which scholars have termed  “the long 1960s” continues to sit with us. In Ideas of Africa, you’ll see images that are full of possibility, but also haunted, in ways. What happens in the African continent in the 70s and 80s may not live up to that imaginative space of potential or possibility, but nevertheless this period continues to feed into a sense of possibility that circulates across space and time. This oscillation between continuity and fractures, spaces of disconnection and reconnection, continues to be felt across the African continent and Diaspora.  

I really like the political imagination and self-determination framing that is prevalent throughout this exhibit. How do you think this notion of imagination and solidarity from the 60s/70s connects with our political world today? 

‍Ideas of Africa encourages a consideration of the photographic portrait that moves away from the image as an index of fixed identity categories, and more as a site of performance—a place of creative negotiation, conversation, between the person in front of the lens and the person behind the lens. While the photographic medium has its seductive truth claims, I find it important for us to remember the fact of that dialogue between the person in front of and behind the camera for all of these pictures—even if that person behind the camera is the very subject, in the case of self-portraits. Within this context, self-determination is super important on a sociopolitical level, but also for understanding how the photographic medium can function. A photographic portrait is not going to tell you every single truth—it will give you an aspect of experience. It is something that is continually unfolding. 

What do you hope for with this exhibition? 

Ideas of Africa revels in the political and discursive possibilities of the photographic portrait. My hope is that the show encourages people to look closely, look long, and look again and again. Importantly, the majority of the work featured in the exhibition is held in MoMA’s Collection. 

Yes, I noticed that you have also recent acquisitions on view, such as Silvia Rosi’s Disintegrata (2024). In your Artist Talk: Reflecting on History with Silvia Rosi, she gave a beautiful set of entry points for understanding the project.

“I was really looking at the journey that my parents made from West Africa to Italy where I was born, where I grew up. The work really looks at building an image of my parents based on the stories that come, specifically from my mother and from her point of view. I create portraits of them, but use my own self and my own body. Here the studio is a space of possibilities where I could create this image of them coming from those references and those stories that my mom told me. Reflecting on the styles of portraiture that come from the moment of independence, you have really this positive, imaginative way of building identity. What I was really trying to do was to build an image of the diaspora, which is not always positive. I hope to bring in those images and really dignify the representation of those experiences. They have many positive resonances with the different works in the exhibition, really reflecting on how photography tells the truth, building an honest stage.”

—Silvia Rosi

Silvia is so gifted, a true thinker of the photographic image and its relationship to memory and migration. It was an honor to bring her work into MoMA’s collection, and in this context, her pictures serve as the perfect example of knitting recent acquisitions with an exhibition program. Unlike New York’s major exhibitions of African photography the 1990s and 2000s, which were organized by teams of inventive, resourceful guest curators—such as In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim or Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the ICP—Ideas of Africa is a nimble, expansive exhibition that begins with MoMA’s Collection and is organized by a curator from within the institution. As such, I hope for this exhibition to be the first of many shows to engage substantively with these works in the Museum’s collection, and to be among many exhibitions at MoMA to argue for the necessity of regarding the African continent and Diaspora within stories of modern and contemporary art. 

‍Did you always know that this was something you wanted to do? Curatorial work?

I learned what curatorial work was while completing my B.A. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Before I knew it was possible to do this kind of work, I thought I was going to be an intellectual historian. On this journey, I have benefitted from the guidance of many mentors, such as Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), Bisi Silva (1962–2019), and Thelma Golden—with whom I ultimately organized my first show at MoMA, Projects: Ming Smith. Curating is a unique way of working and thinking. The pleasure of doing curatorial work within a Museum is that you are both an art historian and an active participant in the making of art history. I am continually working with, listening to, and learning from artists’ work, in order to thoughtfully introduce that work to various audiences. In the case of MoMA, this means the thousands of people who pass through the Museum’s doors each day and engage our platforms online. This awareness that you are accountable to past, present, and future encounters with an artform—that you are accountable to artist and audience member alike—is extremely humbling. I am very fortunate to do this work. It’s difficult, of course, but as are all things that are worthwhile.

A richly illustrated catalogue is published in tandem with Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination. In her essay, Onabanjo notes that this is the first exhibition that MoMA’s Department of Photography has organized that has a substantive engagement with photographic portraiture from the African Continent. In our conversation, she emphasized though, that this show, “Will not be the last. This work is in the collection, and I hope there is continued engagement— with more generations of artists, scholars, visitors, who are excited about the mission that this museum was founded on: To tell the stories of the art of our time. Emphasis on our.”

Emem-Esther U. Ikpot 
@ememIK46
(Instagram/Substack/ememikpot.com)

Photography: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York 
https://press.moma.org/exhibition/ideas-of-africa/ 

Ugandan Music Artist Trailblazing with Hit Song ‘Morocco’

When you think of the new cool kid in town, who is the first person to come to mind? Congo? South Africa? Kenya? Well, if your answer was anyone but Ugandan recording artist and music producer Joshua Baraka, then you clearly missed the plot here. His eclectic voice coupled with an Afrocentric emblem makes him a distinguishable African musician in his field. Since the AFCON season and the release of single ‘Morocco,’ Joshua has slowly slid in our capsule and you guessed it; his strategy is working.

Don’t be mistaken; Joshua is no newcomer in this music game. With parents from Kenyan and Rwandese roots, Joshua represents Uganda by birth. We can trace his first banger to ‘NANA,’ a song that perhaps many of you would have heard through its remix with Joeboy and King Promise. Ever since, Joshua’s reign has only risen throughout the years. One could say that a key factor to his growing success, aside from multiple versions to singles including dance videos and acoustics, is his collaboration catalogue. True to his multi-ethnic background, Joshua is able to vibe with anyone on a song. And when we state anybody, we truly mean anybody.

It is evident that Joshua is not only a student to the game; but he also wholeheartedly supports and participates in it. His records will resonate to crowds in Nigeria, South Africa, even as far as the Caribbean and the UK. In fact, you name it! And we are convinced that in due time, Joshua will come up with his own version to the region he occupies sonically. Not only does it make him one of the most versatile artists to come out of the continent lately, but also, a force to reckon with.

To be completely transparent, Joshua’s sound isn’t complex by any means and doesn’t tackle hard topics. Au contraire, his songs are digestible, it is feel good music and that makes him compatible with so many markets. It doesn’t take one to be of a specific corner in the world to relate to Joshua’s shared sentiments, and we imagine that this is why his sound has been able to travel as far as it does. That je ne sais quoi so many artists seek but fail to ignite is what Joshua portrays to the world naturally. And his footprint across the African continent has only grown what appears to be organically.

What is next for Joshua Baraka, you may ask? It is abundantly apparent to us that Joshua is one of these few artists that every once in a lifetime, can transcend their regional audience, broaden their reach and be equally loved and listened to by anyone who seeks refuge in good music. Not only does he have the potential to represent East Africa to the world stage, but he can unite us through his music. Of course, it is too early to predict the future of Joshua Baraka, but we can be sure that he is on the right path and we will continue to pay attention.

When Edna Mmbali Ombakho went missing on the 1st of February, 2026, a series of alarm bells went off and questions were raised. The first, and perhaps most obvious, was how. How did a 31-year-old woman just disappear on leaving her home for a walk? The second being who. Who was responsible? Who was going to find her? And the third being when. When would she be found? When would there be justice? When would her story be told?

In the two weeks after her disappearance, family and friends reached out to police in search of her, to no avail. On March 8th, a body believed to be hers was found in a river in Berkshire, bringing the search to a tragic end. Despite the discovery of the body over a week ago, to date, there remains no major news outlet in the United Kingdom that has reported on Ombakho's tragedy.
This brought the final alarm bell to ring. Is what has long looked like ignorance really censorship?
The topic of prejudice in the British press is nothing new. The sentiments may in fact be well redundant at this point. Public figures like Meghan Markle, and sports players like Bukayo Saka have all found themselves cut by the sharp tip of the press’ pen. Even then, those considered to be ‘hometown heroes’ like David Beckham or Princess Diana have all gone toe-to-toe with paparazzi and tabloids alike. What continues to be proven, though, is the disregard for black people in the UK when it comes to their safety, care, or success.
A series of black people have disappeared and been found dead in and around rivers in England since 2020. Blessing Olusegun, Richard Okorogheye, Taiwo Balogun, Kayon Williams, Joy Morgan, and Samaria Ayanle are all among that number. Many of whom hailed from diasporic communities as well.

In the case of Richard Okorogheye, the 19-year-old went missing from his home in Ladbroke Grove, West London, on March 22, 2021. When his mother, Evidence Joel, called Met Police to report him missing and without medication for sickle cell anaemia, she was dismissed by multiple members of staff and his case wasn’t escalated until March 24th. Two weeks later, his body was found in Epping Forest, Essex, 20 miles from his home, where police claimed Okorogheye’s cause of death was consistent with drowning.
An inquest into the case by the Independent Office for Police Conduct found the Met Police’s response “substandard” and led to two officers facing misconduct probes at the time.
Since the inquest results and appeals, many cases like Okorogheye’s have still been ruled “non-suspicious” or have been quickly ruled drownings, to the disapproval and discontentment of the victim’s families. This rush to take cases at face value alludes to the consistent trope of bias expressed towards Black-British and Black diasporic people and communities, uncovering the systemic disregard for authority and press’ possess.
Okorogheye’s death has not been the only one to inspire inquiries into the system itself. Blessing Olusegun’s case received little to no media coverage and a dismissal that led to a petition with over 50,000 signatures, motioning to reopen the case. Ombakho’s lack of media coverage is consistent with that of Samaria Ayanle, Taiwo Balogun, and many more.
Perhaps, a more worrying thought is that the blatant bias is as public as it is private.  
At this year’s BAFTA Film Awards in late February, controversy almost outshone the night as two actors, Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, addressed the crowd as they presented the award for Best Visual Effects. As they stood on the stage, a member of the audience known to have Tourette’s Syndrome, shouted a racial slur that was recorded and broadcast to the world. 

While much of the attention has been turned toward John Davidson, the member of the audience who shouted the slur, the attention can also and should be turned toward the BBC for allowing the slur to be broadcasted internationally, on a pre-recorded, edited distribution of the ceremony. 
All while other incidents, including mention of “Free Palestine” by filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr., were either unheard or edited out of the show’s broadcast. This, alongside ITV’s censorship of Geese drummer Max Bessin’s political statements during the BRIT Awards, broach the influence of right-leaning rhetoric and conservative values spreading through Western society.
The incident is almost an addendum to the racial bias found in sports reporting, made prominent after the 2020 EUROS, and continued well into the present day.

Another glaring example is the lack of press about Cynthia Erivo, an England-born actress and singer, during her homecoming premiere for the first film of Wicked, which broke box office records worldwide and featured Erivo in one of the titular roles.

The silence in success and symphony in struggle maintains an echo chamber in which the voices of those in power are the only ones in control. A symphony still made incomplete by the lack of mainstream reporting about key issues like Ombakho’s disappearance and death. 
The censorship of reality and convenient extension of narratives suits propagandic rhetoric that black people exist in an ideal of entertainment, but not intimacy. It creates a spectacle of abuse or fragility for sales or, simply, bias. All while negating the truth of journalism and the identity of the country’s black community, in all of its intersections. 
As the story of Edna Mmbali Ombakho goes unreported so to, does the awareness, the inquiries, the stories, and the lives of those who endure or have endured. 
The quest to make a community become obsolete and seem inconsequential, requires a response to which we must be all the louder, shine all the brighter, and remain engaged in those who are not easily or willingly platformed.
So, in remembrance of Edna Mmbali Ombakho, may this shine a light as bright and as loud as the ignorance. May it break free of the vortex where these voices struggle to exist.

When the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were announced, one film immediately dominated the conversation: Sinners. It led the race with an unprecedented 16 nominations–the most any film had ever received in the history of the Academy. In most years, that kind of recognition would simply signal a frontrunner. But the discussion surrounding Sinners has since gone beyond that of award momentum. It’s been about expectations.

Films by Black filmmakers have rarely existed in the Oscars race as just films. They have more often than not carried a broader cultural significance, representing progress, recognition and sometimes even the idea of Hollywood evolving. As the industry gathers for its 98th awards ceremony, the attention around the Sinners raises a question that has lingered around the Academy for decades: when Black films succeed at the Oscars, are they being celebrated as achievements in cinema, or as “symbols of Black progress”?
Directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan, it arrives with enormous expectations. Coogler’s own career has already shaped Hollywood in important ways. From Fruitvale Station to Creed to the https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKGxHflevukhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/bKGxHflevuk  films, he has consistently demonstrated that culturally specific stories can reach global audiences while maintaining artistic depth. Sinners represents another chapter in that trajectory, a film that critics and industry voters alike have embraced.

Yet the reaction to the film reveals a familiar pattern in awards season discourse. Black Oscar contenders often carry a cultural weight that few other films are asked to bear. Expected to represent Black progress–not simply artistic excellence.

That dynamic has appeared in previous awards seasons. When Moonlight won Best Picture in 2017, the victory was widely framed as a historic moment. The recognition of Get Out marked another turning point for horror genre films and Black filmmakers. And when Black Panther became the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture, the achievement was celebrated as a breakthrough for blockbuster storytelling and a reminder of how overlooked similar films before them were. Each of these moments felt historic. But the word ‘historic’ appears so frequently in conversations about Black cinema.

The broader cultural climate only amplifies that tension. In the United States, political battles over how Black history is taught have intensified recently, with some lawmakers pushing to restrict discussions about race and systemic inequality in schools. In that climate, institutions including Hollywood can begin to feel like stand-ins for larger conversations about whose stories are allowed to be told. 

Even the awards season itself has not been immune to those tensions. During the BAFTAs this year, a controversy erupted after a guest used a racial slur when Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominees Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo respectively, were on stage presenting an award at the ceremony. The moment quickly sparked outrage, but served as a reminder that the film’s industry relationship with race remains deeply complicated.

All of which brings the focus back to Sinners and its record-breaking sixteen nominations. The Oscars’ enthusiastic embrace of the film invites a complicated question. Is the Academy preparing to reward the film with the same enthusiasm it displayed during the nomination process or are the nominations themselves the reward? Hollywood has a long history of celebrating diversity figuratively while moving cautiously when it comes to the industry’s highest honors. 

That possibility creates a strange paradox. If Sinners sweeps the Oscars, it will likely be heralded as another landmark moment for both Coogler and the Academy. But if the film walks away with only a handful of awards–or none of the night’s biggest ones, critics may wonder whether the nominations themselves functioned as a symbolic gesture of progress. 

Regardless of the final outcome, the Sinners Oscars race reveals how complicated the relationship between representation and recognition can be. For Black filmmakers, awards season is more than just recognition for craft or performance, rather it is about whether these spaces are truly changing or simply learning new ways to appear as though they are. 

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