lagos, nigeria
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Fans of Nigerian artist CKay received a welcome gift in late January. It was that the singer released his latest song “Badminton”. This is a high-energy, melodic track with an infectious sound. The song, which has been gaining traction online, continues his signature emo Afrobeat style that CKay is widely credited with pioneering.
“When you use emotional chords, a lot of minor scales, and instruments like very warm ambient synthesizers and guitars (electric or acoustic) keyboards, and combine all of this with very poetic, deep, emotional lyrics, you get emo afro beats,” he told CNN’s Larry Madowo in an interview in Lagos, Nigeria.
Bringing a different sound to Afrobeats isn’t the only thing the Nigerian star is doing. Like many of his colleagues, he wants to move beyond the “Afrobeat” label. “Afrobeat is a useful term. I wouldn’t say I love the term, but I think over time we’ve started to see the effects of its overgeneralization,” he says.
Artists argue that the term has its limitations. Burna Boy, who fuses Afrobeats, reggae, dancehall, pop and hip-hop, says he prefers to classify his music as ‘Afrofusion’. Wizkid, who fuses his music with R&B and Afropop, also expressed his dissatisfaction.
CKay equates the broad Afrobeats label with simply calling Western music “Western music.” “It’s like you can’t just call Western music white music, American beat, European beat, right? There’s rock, there’s jazz, there’s dancehall, there’s all kinds of things, all kinds of sounds. So that’s the same way I feel about African music,” he says.
“I think there are over 50 countries in Africa and over 50 cultures,” he added. “In Nigeria alone, we have over 36 ethnic groups with different languages, food, music, rhythms. Along with music, we also have our own musical instruments… So to come to an entire continent and just call everything Afrobeats, you know, when you think about it, that’s not the most appropriate.”
How emo Afrobeats star CKay helped carve his own path to breaking world records.
By continuing to raise his voice and release music that blends genres, CKay hopes to help people better understand the diversity of African music. “For the Western world… this is the beginning of understanding African music, and of course as people learn more, they’ll probably learn about the different subgenres as well,” he says.
The songwriter and producer hopes to repeat his past success by continuing to introduce these subgenres. In 2021, his now smash hit ‘Love Nuwantiti’ became a global phenomenon after fans started making videos to the instrumental chorus of the 2019 song during the Covid-19 pandemic. This makes him the first artist to top the inaugural Billboard Afrobeats Songs Chart in April 2022.
The love ballad spent over 52 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 list, peaking at number three. Its success reached its peak in December 2025 when the song was streamed over 1 billion times on Spotify, making CKay the first Nigerian solo artist to reach that milestone. “I knew it would be successful, but I never expected it to be this successful,” he said. “The scale of the success…I can say we were very pleasantly surprised.”
Only 30 years old, CKay is already on the rise and has no plans to slow down. “I think it’s about consistency and being fully committed to the journey. And I just want to embrace and accept the responsibility of being a pioneer. I’m not following trends, I’m trying to create trends. I’m trying to create sounds, not copies. I’m trying to build on the heritage and history that our ancestors built and take it to the next level,” he says.
And as he continues down that path, the trendsetter says he wants to be remembered as someone who “innovated sound, advanced culture, and left the world a better place than I found it.” By all appearances, he’s doing well.
