Listening To: Lungu Boy by Asake
Finally an excuse to write about Afrobeats
Lately, I’ve been listening to Lungu Boy by Asake.
I didn’t really know about African popular music until I went there. I spent two months in rural Uganda for an internship in 2021, and one of the internship coordinators put together a playlist of African music to soundtrack our (there were 24 of us) experience. The playlist, titled Mukwano (the Luganda word for “friend”), featured music from mainly Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Nigeria. Any time our internship cohort was together, whether at the office headquarters, on an excursion to Sipi Falls or the Nile, or around a campfire in one of the villages, there was a Bluetooth speaker somewhere in the background playing songs that now conjure within me vivid memories of village life and feeling very out of my element. A part of why I’ve written so little about Uganda is because of how, even after two months in the country, I was still very in the thick of it with culture shock when I left. I learned a lot, and I loved the novelty of the experience. But I also felt like, no matter how much I learned, I could never truly adapt enough to let my guard down. So my memories are mostly bittersweet, which makes them all the more intense to navigate. Anyway, wasn’t this post supposed to be about music?
One of my favorite songs from Mukwano was Bounce by Rema. I love the dark, harmonic minor melody and the orchestral strings in the background of the second chorus. During my last year of college, post-Uganda, I developed a reputation for playing Bounce at every party where I could get my hands on the aux. I followed Rema on Spotify, and listened to his album Rave and Roses when it came out the following spring. The album’s lead single, Calm Down, wasn’t my cup of tea at first, but to my surprise, I began to hear it around campus every now and then – even at parties I wasn’t invited to. And during my last couple weeks on campus, a group of students filmed a music video cover for the song, which they debuted with a projector on an outside wall of the campus chapel.
All this happened in the immediate aftermath of covid, so epidemiology was on everyone’s mind, and I wondered how it applied to culture. This Nigerian song made its way to New York, where my classmates had heard it on the subway, and those classmates brought it to Middlebury, Vermont. And after another year of steady growth and spread, aided by a (tasteful) Selena Gomez remix, it peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became the 6th biggest hit in the country last year (and my inability to shut up about the song was one of the reasons I started this Substack).
But Calm Down’s path to success was already fairly well trodden. During my internship, Essence by Wizkid and Tems became the first Nigerian song ever to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, and after a (distasteful) Justin Bieber remix, it also peaked in the top 10. And a song that was in the original Mukwano playlist, Peru by Fireboy DML, was later remixed with Ed Sheeran to become a number 2 hit in the UK.
In the three years since I visited Uganda, African music - and Nigerian music in particular - has boomed, and the emergence of Lagos as a global music city is one of my favorite things that’s happened since I began watching the charts. It’s also been fascinating how Afrobeats (an umbrella term to describe the contemporary West African genres that artists like Rema draw from) has changed as well, generally pivoting from a more natural, dancehall-oriented sound toward amapiano, a South African deep house subgenre. In the States, amapiano is most associated with Water by Tyla, but even before Water crossed the Atlantic, amapiano’s log drums and shaker beats were integral parts of Nigerian Afrobeats hits by artists like Davido, CKay, and Omah Lay.
But perhaps none are as known for the Afrobeats-amapiano crossover as Asake, whose 2023 album Work of Art featured a song named for the genre. I listened to Work of Art when it came out last year, and while I enjoyed it overall (especially 2:30 and the aforementioned Amapiano), I found it a little samey. Nearly every song had the same formula of amapiano shakers and log drums, Afrobeats rhythms, pentatonic choral vocals, fiddle backings, and medium tempos. Pleasant, but nothing to knock my socks off.
But when Asake released Wave, the lead single to his then-upcoming, now-released album Lungu Boy, earlier this year, my socks were thoroughly knocked off and I still haven’t found them. The tempo on Wave is picked up a bit from where this style of music usually sits, and the backbeat synths and quick, syncopated, leaping log drum hits keep the energy at a ten from start to finish. It captures the same fiery energy that attracted me to Bounce from my Mukwano days. But unlike Bounce, the choral vocal echoes keep the song more fun and less dark. It is still very distinctly Asake, but expands quite a bit on that formula. It also has a Central Cee feature. I don’t typically care for Central Cee, but he keeps up the pace for his verse, and his punctuated delivery contrasts nicely with Asake’s more melodic approach.
The next single to come out, Active, was by contrast, much more laid-back, but still very fun. Whereas Wave is bold and energetic, Active is funky and cool. To riff on how Tyla has described her sound as “popiano”, Active could maybe be described as “pop-rapiano”. We have, of course, the log drum and shaker beat we’ve come to expect from Asake, but also some chopped-up vocal samples and cowbell, as well as a Travis Scott feature. It’s a mix I hadn’t really heard before, but it works nicely. And Travis Scott is a great addition too, taking a similar approach here as he does on a song like Modern Jam. After Wave and now this, I was eager for the album.
The album is decent. Good even. But few songs stood out to me quite like the singles, and a couple of the more daring choices Asake makes don’t quite pan out for me (particularly Skating, which despite the interesting production has some of the worst songwriting I’ve ever heard). But one such standout on the album is Whine, with its Mary J Blige sample and feature from Brazilian singer Ludmilla. If a Brazilian feature on a Nigerian album surprises you, well, it surprised me too. But cross-cultural collaboration has been the driving force getting Afrobeats into ears abroad this whole time. It was Selena Gomez that got Calm Down on American radio, Ed Sheeran that got Peru to chart in the US at all, and Justin Bieber that got Essence into the top 10 here. Two of the biggest African albums this year were The Year I Turned 21 by Ayra Starr and Tyla’s self-titled, which contain between them collaborators from Nigeria of course, but also Travis Scott, Coco Jones, and Giveon (American), Becky G (Mexican American but appeals to Spanish-speaking audience), Rauw Alejandro and Rvssian (Puerto Rican), Skillibeng (Jamaican), and Anitta (Brazilian). Ayra Starr recently even featured on an Afrobeats-inspired track by AP Dhillon, a Punjabi-Canadian artist whose song With You reached the top 5 on Spotify in Pakistan, India, and the UAE, and reached the top 50 globally (which is fairly rare for Desi artists).
These collaborations are exciting, in part because of what happens when you bring together artists from different styles and backgrounds. Bora Bora, the AP Dhillon and Ayra Starr collab, sounds pretty unlike anything I’ve heard before and it’s wonderful. But I’m also slowing growing uneasy about them. As a fan of both Afrobeats and the American pop charts, it frustrates me that the only time the two overlap is when there’s an American or Brit opening the door, regardless of whether that American or Brit is adding anything to the song. With few exceptions (mainly TikTok hits like Water or Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah) by CKay), African songs haven’t gained much traction in the US without such a remix gambit, and among the big hits, more often than not the western featured Artist has been tacked on at the end, resulting in features that sound unnecessary at best and downright offensive at worst. It’s gotten slightly better over time – I personally wouldn’t have given Travis Scott a second chance after what he did to Water – but still, the things that allow Afrobeats hits to chart in the US aren’t what draw me to the genre in the first place.
Maybe that’s why Fuji Vibe is such a highlight for me. Lungu Boy’s closer has no features and holds nothing back from the listener. It begins sounding just like many other songs on the album – syncopated percussion, intermittent horns and keys, a melodic pop-rap vocal cadence. But a beat switch halfway through removes all but the drums, which kick off into a frenzy. The percussion speeds up, and even as the other instruments return, they now function primarily to augment the dashing and wildly syncopated drum line. The only vocals at all in the album’s last three minutes are cheers and chants from a crowd that sound like they’re coming from a stadium rather than a studio. It’s fast, frenetic, and forceful, and easily among top 5 musical moments of the year.
It reminds me of To Last by Tyla, her album’s closing song which ends with an amapiano instrumental. I originally thought the Fuji Vibe beat switch was a similar tactic, but as I did more research, I realized that this isn’t amapiano at all, but a different genre, fuji – an indigenous genre known for its quick percussion that dates back to the 60s. This maybe should have been obvious in retrospect. Fuji is right there in the name, and the live chanting and cheering in Fuji Vibe wouldn’t make much sense on a house track. But now that I know, I’m eager to listen to more fuji, and listen for it in other songs.
If it’s not clear, I’m far from an expert on any of this. A respectable Afrobeats critic would have already known what fuji was (and would probably use more specific terms than “Afrobeats”). My music writing is usually just repeating terms I’ve heard from Anthony Fantano, Pitchfork, and Wikipedia, and trying my best to understand and articulate what I hear. But I like music, and I like this music in particular. I like how it sounds, I like the underdog story it presents on the US charts, and I like how it reminds me of a particular moment in my life.