Asake’s first commercial releases, beginning with the song Lady in 2020, didn’t really portend a seismic shift in Nigeria’s teeming Afrobeats scene. The 27-year-old genre-blending Nigerian singer and rapper has a tongue-in-cheek delivery and jocular persona. He writes nonsensical, self-deprecating rhymes with hip-hop influenced consumerist themes and could easily be mistaken for a less threatening Naira Marley – a street savvy Afrobeats mainstay-wannabe.
And then, in September 2022, came his scorching 30-minute long album, Mr. Money With The Vibe. It’s an engrossing potpourri of music styles, voices and attitudes that reveal a breadth of ambition that music lovers have not seen in a long time. His rise to global reckoning was sealed by sold out shows in Atlanta and London and a collaboration with Nigerian singer Tiwa Savage on the hit Loaded.
