Wizkid’s Made In Lagos Gold Status: The Real Music Travelling With No Visa
At the height of his super-stardom, Nigerian pop legend Dbanj began to refer to himself as “African Michael Jackson.” Their styles couldn’t have been more different – Dbanj wasn’t a vocalist like Michael Jackson; he did not sell nearly as many records as MJ did, not to talk of breaking records, nor did he have the world eating off his palms as Michael did. But then, he didn’t say he was Michael Jackson; in fairness, if one considered the chokehold Dbanj had on the African music scene during his run in the mid-2000s, there was nobody like him in terms of dominance in African music. The only other act that came close was PSquare, and as much as their talent and stardom were immense, Dbanj had that slight edge – that Je ne sais qoui. He was the first to do certain things on a specific scale. Think collabos with Snoop, Kanye, et al. However, in this era; for the past decade or so; the biggest name in African music, who is also the most significant African act in the world – can for all intents and purposes be compared on the African scale to Michael Jackson, is none other than Wizkid. No surprise then that his most recent album, Made In Lagos, was certified gold in the United States. For those who don’t speak the music industry jargon, the album has sold 500,000 copies in that country alone. At this moment in history, Wizkid is the only Nigerian and African artiste to have achieved this.
Several factors make this feat excellent no matter which FC you support: for one, we live in the streaming era where music consumption is so passive that most songs have only a few weeks of reign before the audience’s attention is directed in other directions. The methodology by which streams are counted has forced many artists to condense their music in just a little over two minutes so that the listener might have played more than half of the song. Again, consider how, in this streaming era, counting units of music sold is not as simple as going to a CD shop where the cashier adds how many physical discs were sold. To make this equation, the Recording Industry Association of America came up with the formula of counting to 1500 streams making one album sale. That means, for Made In Lagos to be counted as one unit sold, it must have been streamed one thousand five hundred times. Selling five hundred thousand units of the album means it had been streamed nearly eight hundred million times. Not one track o, the whole album 800 million times.
More importantly, the album’s impact is such that it is – at least to me – the culmination of all the work that Nigerian music and its practitioners have been putting in for the past three decades. Twenty years ago, when the wave that is currently known as Afrobeats began, artistes could only dream of travelling abroad. When 2face released the eternal classic African Queen in 2004 and became the toast of the world, it was an anomaly. It was something that 2Baba himself did not envisage. All he wanted to do was make music with his friends, drink stout and have a good time. He became the yardstick by which African artistes now dreamt, and throughout the years, several musicians and performers have pushed the culture forward and forward. Compare it now to when Nigerian music is the soundtrack of the world. You begin to see why it’s a huge deal when an artiste like Wizkid can get radio play in mainstream America and sell commercially at that level.
It becomes even more astounding that, for whatever reason, Wizkid is not known to do a lot of promo runs or tours. Yes, he did get around a bit when Made In Lagos came out, and Essence took the world by storm. But compare with when artistes like Ed Sheeran or Bruno Mars release albums and tour for upwards of a year. Wizkid hasn’t done that. It’s almost as if he is confident that the music will travel further than he can physically – just like he sang in 2011, “My music travel, no visa…”. Indeed the music has.
However, the thing about record makers is that they create new standards for everybody. They become the height to which all others aspire. The Nigerian music industry is now flush with talent, and we see them daily. Those not yet at Wizkid level can now look at him and put in their prayer point. His peers can also look at him and be inspired to go even further. It’s not a mistake that African music is the most significant export and cultural influence that the continent is taking to the whole world. The music has been good for centuries: the natural phenomenon of now and the existential privilege of living in this era only means that the world can now enjoy what Africa has to offer. And as fate will have it, artistes and the music ecosystem will benefit significantly from their excellent work. The existence of Wizkid is proof that it can be done, and the fact that he has done it is proof that like George Weah when he won the FIFA World Best Player in 1995, Wizkid is the world’s most incredible musician of African extraction right now.
Jide Taiwo is a writer and media executive. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria and tweets via @thejidetaiwo.
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