How Rema Became an Afrobeats Visionary

F
or Rema, the best part of his first trip to the Grammy Awards was getting dressed for it. The Nigerian superstar wore a mound of custom diamonds over snakeskin and leather in his customary black, an outfit that landed him on Vogue’s list of best-dressed stars at the February ceremony. He didn’t win the award he was up for — Best Global Music Album, which went to Chicago native Matt B, alongside London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — but he didn’t really mind. “I was just taking every moment in,” he tells me when I meet him at Interscope Studios in L.A. a few days later. “I was celebrating people walking up that stage. I had my fingers crossed that I’d walk up the stage too, and when it didn’t happen … it happens. It’s not the first award that I got nominated for and didn’t get.” 

That outfit — or, rather, what it signified — was much more important. The crown jewel of his look that night, which can also be seen on the cover of this magazine, was a thick-linked chain that drops portraits of his late father and brother on the center of his chest, emblazoned on a bed of precious stones. His brother wears a green dashiki and gazes to the left, while his dad, in a jacket and tie, looks to the right. “I feel like their eyes can see everywhere I go,” Rema says. “So if I was going to be on that Grammy stage, they’re going to see how far I walked, all the way up. It feels like they’re there with me.”

Ambitious and ultra-local, with pummeling percussion and fierce taunts in Nigerian pidgin, the album Rema was nominated for — last year’s Heis — boldly honored his roots and commanded respect. Rema joined Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and Tems as the only Afrobeats acts to earn album nominations in the history of the Grammys. At 24, he’s the youngest of them.

Afrobeats can be thought of as modern Nigerian and Ghanaian pop that employs local styles like highlife or fuji, some signature polyrhythmic drum patterns, and often other Black music like hip-hop, R&B, and dancehall. As the genre supercharged dance floors, playlists, radio, music festivals, and arenas around the world in the past few years, Rema has become synonymous with it. 

Drake offered a co-sign early in his career, and FKA Twigs, Ice Spice, and Justine Skye have all tapped Rema for his sensual charm. Occasionally, he’s pulled U.S. acts into his world, like Chris Brown on “Time N Affection” from his debut album, 2022’s Rave & Roses — and, of course, Selena Gomez on the remix of “Calm Down,” which earned a billion streams on Spotify alone, making Rema the first leading African act to achieve the milestone. 

That was a Rave & Roses single too: lilting game from a young Casanova, written after wooing a stuck-up girl wearing yellow at a party. Rema quickly fell for the beat when budding producer Andre Vibez — son of Victor Uwaifo, a late highlife legend from Rema’s hometown of Benin City — let him hear it. Meanwhile, Rema and Gomez had been forming a friendship from afar, after Gomez reached out as a fan. Rema, in turn, shared that he’d watched her on TV since he was a kid. When he decided “Calm Down” could use a version with a woman’s take on it, he knew who to ask. “I am completely impressed with Rema as an artist,” Gomez tells me. “I believe the future for him is truly endless of what he can achieve. I was a fan of the song even before I jumped onto the remix. What really stands out for me is how the song continued to grow even a year after it was first released.”

Though “Calm Down” had been doing well on its own, it exploded with Gomez on it. It got nominated for a slew of awards, winning the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards’ inaugural Afrobeats prize (one likely created due to the song’s immense success). It peaked at Number Three on Billboard’s Hot 100, where it lived for over a year, making it the highest-charting song led by an Afrobeats artist — and the most successful Afropop crossover record ever. “I’ve been able to view good heights to get that kind of success by God’s grace,” Rema told me last summer. “I would also say, when I was making ‘Calm Down,’ I never thought the rest of the world would vibe to that.”

The success of “Calm Down” raised some questions: Does Afrobeats need Western artists like Gomez to succeed on the American pop charts? Would the genre be co-opted? Should it be gatekept? Though he spent years ahead of the hit making a name for himself, the breezy song that introduced him to mainstream America camouflaged the real Rema — wholly carnal, slightly tortured, and laser-focused on life back home. 

WHEN REMA’S FATHER was alive, things were good. His dad was a rising ­politician in Nigeria’s Peoples Democratic Party who at one time managed a government-funded publishing house. He did well enough to fund his wife’s fashion fixes — a predilection that may inform Rema’s own sharp style. “Even when we were not rich, my mom was like, ‘I have to look good,’” says Rema, who was born Divine Ikubor. She’d take Rema, his older brother, and his two sisters shopping. “She took us to the market to buy us big-ass shoes, big-ass jeans that we’d wear for the next three years as we grow. She was the only person switching up the fits. She gave off so much aura in church.”

Rema prefers to keep his family members’ names private, and would rather not discuss the way his father died when he was eight. It’s been reported, though, that Justice Ikubor was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a hotel room in Benin City. In 2020, when Rema was more active on Twitter, he called on the Peoples Democratic Party to explain his father’s death. “Justice Ikubor’s son has risen,” he declared. (The party appears not to have publicly responded.) He also tweeted that his brother had passed away from a botched surgery about seven years after his dad died. “It’s dark,” says Rema, tugging on his necklace. “Just a dark moment that changed my life, so I always wear this chain, mostly because I never want to forget. While any craziness or any fantastic shit is happening, I always remind myself, ‘Know the struggles you came from,’ because for real, people be forgetting.”

After his dad passed, the Ikubors were shunned by most of their extended family, thanks to a cultural superstition that held that his mom was somehow to blame. “Was it like a ‘Oh, she did witchcraft’-type beat?” I ask. “Type shit,” he confirms. “We took all the backlash for it, and then we lost everything.” Unable to make rent without his father, Rema and his family were evicted from their apartment. They moved to his mother’s village, five hours away from Benin City. “We’re talking about huts,” he says. “A mud house with mad boxes, mad mosquitoes, sun flies. When they bite you, if you scratch one [bump], you get 10. It can go all the way to your face.”

When Rema was 17, his mom became pregnant with his stepbrother, and things grew untenable for him. “You’re pregnant, and you’re still crying because you know that there’s no money to even take care of this kid,” he remembers thinking. “And I couldn’t go to university. I was actually just angry at the whole situation. Talking will not help. Doing will.” So, without saying goodbye, Rema made his way to Ghana, where he knew he could make money to support his family. His mom thought he had died. “There was no number to reach me. I was a ghost,” he says. “She thought I just went somewhere and committed suicide because it was a lot going on.” 

On his way to Ghana, he stopped in the Republic of Benin, where he had to scrape and beg for change for a few days to continue his journey. In Ghana, he got a job as a server at a beach bar where the owner let him sleep on a small mat. Rema thinks he inherited his dad’s work ethic. Eventually, he returned to Nigeria. “I went home a big boy, and I bought my mom a car and set everything up,” he says. His family had earned the support of Benin City’s Christ Embassy church, too, which urged them back and provided a new apartment and a small shop for Rema’s mom to sell groceries from. 

“When I was making ‘Calm Down,’ I never thought the rest of the world would vibe to that.”

Rema had learned about artists like Burna Boy from his brother, but he listened to a lot of rock, gospel, and hip-hop, too. At 14, he had started rapping over free beats he’d download on his first phone. When the family returned to Benin City, he was charged with leading a rap fellowship for the church congregation. Around then, Rema recorded himself rocking the front seat of a sedan, rapping to “Gucci Gang,” a tinny Afrobeats song by D’Prince, his brother Don Jazzy, and Davido, one of the genre’s first international icons. After the video made its way to D’Prince, he found Rema, and signed him to Jonzing World, his imprint under Jazzy’s renowned Mavin Records. 

Under Mavin’s tutelage, Rema taught himself to sing. Eventually, he learned to wield his playful, hip-hop lyricism with a soft and brassy trill unlike anything in Afro­beats. His swirly vibratos actually resemble gamakas, popular inflections in Bollywood music, even though Rema had never heard anything like that when he started writing songs to sing. But they made his sound unforgettable. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Calm Down” hit Number One in India, where he’s become beloved.) 

Don Jazzy, who’s spent two decades shaping Nigerian pop, saw Rema’s drive clearly. “You come across a lot of artists in this part of the world that are shortsighted,” he says. “They know that they want to make music, but just in the African terrain. But from day one, he has always had his eyes set on the global stage.”

And though his first year’s work — an EP threepeat that spawned the neo-classic “Dumebi” — set Rema on the path there, the pandemic threatened to throw him off course. To his surprise, Drake reached out to offer encouragement, and from that came two of his most triumphant singles. “I’m just a kid in 2020,” Rema says. “The year was not going great. Getting a DM from Drake telling you ‘Keep going, you’re doing amazing,’ that inspired me to get back in the studio and be like, ‘OK, I want to go make ‘Ginger Me.’ I want to make ‘Woman.’” 

In Drake’s behind-the-scenes data dump 100 Gigs, released during a lull in his beef with Kendrick Lamar, he included footage of himself vibing to “Mention Me,” an unreleased track of his and Rema’s. Rema says he appreciated the sport of beef between Lamar and Drake, but empathizes with the latter as a casualty of pop culture’s wantonness. “Any story can be made up,” he says. “Random ­stories have been made up about me being Illuminati, worshiping the devil, drinking blood. I would definitely lose some fans who just believe in anything they see.” He’d still make a song with Drake, he says, despite his slipping cachet.

“Happily,” he adds.

WHEN WE SIT DOWN to talk at Interscope Studios, Rema has settled into the posh suite he’s occupying for the day. The space is lined in sandy wood and onyx marble and tucked behind a wall of 60 vinyl covers by label icons like Lamar, Eminem, and Tupac, reimagined by elite artists like Kehinde Wiley and Takashi Murakami. (Rema works with both Mavin and Interscope these days.) Rema launches himself to the top of the sitting room’s thick, layered couch and stretches his long legs, the tongues of his brassy Jaded London combat boots wagging and a pillowy Rick Owens clutch stocked with incense strapped to his side. He compliments me on my similar bag and asks me where I got it. Forever 21, I tell him, embarrassed. Luckily, he’s never heard of it. “All this shit is just overhyped,” he says of his much more expensive one.

Rema is calm and measured as we talk for nearly three hours, often treating himself to a few beats to think before he speaks. His baby face keeps him from seeming too intense as he maintains eye contact. He occasionally fidgets with his phone or pops some sea salt Miss Vickie’s potato chips into his mouth. “It’s cool if I’m eating, right?” he asks. “I’m starving.” 

It’s about 3:30 p.m., but he hasn’t eaten yet, he says, because he’s been busy since 4 a.m. promoting his first single of the year, the sexy, Sade-sampling “Baby (Is It a Crime).” Fans online had clamored for the song since he teased a snippet in November, and today’s long hours were not for naught. “I just had the biggest debut in my career,” he says calmly. And he’s right: It earned nearly 3 million streams on its first day, and has racked up 27.2 million streams as of March 2. (Rema adds that while he hasn’t yet been in touch with Sade personally, he was given the soul luminary’s address to thank her with flowers.) 

“I didn’t really spend much time on the comments or reception, trying to feed my ego or something,” he tells me, mid-munch. “I’m that guy who’ll post something and just go to bed.” This detachment from social media hype has been a hard-won skill for Rema, who sits at the upper echelon of Afrobeats’ young, passionate, and chronically online fan base. These days, he prefers to spend his time on Pinterest, where he tracks his style evolution in the shadows. 

“Baby (Is It a Crime)” is Rema’s first solo single since the success of Heis, and it’s uber-cool and nonchalant compared with the ­frenetic, brooding album. Heis was Rema’s ode to the origins of what’s now Nigeria’s biggest cultural export. To tap into an undoubtedly homegrown brand of Afro­beats in the wake of Western crossover madness, Rema pulled from the hyper-percussive and crudely electronic era of forebears like early Wizkid, P-Square, and Don Jazzy himself. 

“My mind had so much weight that I needed to disperse,” he tells me of the Heis process. “I had different concepts for that project. One, culturally, about the foundation of Afrobeats — paying respect and trying to keep the home sound going. Two was about my personal state, how I want to express so much dark energy that I just kept suppressing to put [out] love songs. It’s just like a stack of emotion that I needed to let go of.” 

“I always remind myself, ‘know the struggles you came from,’ because people be forgetting.”

Of an album filled with cutthroat quips, one of Rema’s favorite lyrics comes from a bar in Nigerian pidgin on the title track: “Remy say, ‘Big four,’ oya, now who get mind, make e talk am.” In it, he’s claiming a spot next to Afro­beats’ venerated “Big Three” — Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid — and, he implies, if anyone else thinks they’re worthy, they should speak up. Rema tells me he meant it, but grew a bit distressed by the backlash that followed, as he saw people interpret it as him trying to dethrone Afrobeats royalty: “So on Heis, I was talking a lot of shit. “It is not cocky. It’s like, ‘What stops you from saying you’re the best? You can say it and stand your ground.’  

“It’s even humble to say four,” he continues. “I didn’t pull down the two, I didn’t pull down the three. I just see myself as one of the greats, and it’s a problem. I’m not saying, ‘Oh, fuck everybody.’ It is different from what Kendrick said: ‘It’s just big me.’ I really vouch for the unity of Afrobeats.” 

In fact, Rema has often paid homage to those predecessors. Today, he ponders a bit regretfully after bringing it up, frustrated that he’s being perceived as rash. “It’s not just [for] me; there’s a kid looking at every move that I’m making,” he reasons. “I don’t think anyone has blown up across Nigeria from Benin City. It’s me making the most of the moment, trying to put my chest out so that when the next person from that city comes up, he should be able to stand his ground just as much. Fans prefer, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky to be here.’ I’m supposed to be here by the grace of God because that’s where I envisioned myself to be.” 

Rema’s towering stature in the genre is evidenced by the massive shows his fans flock to, from headlining London’s famed O2 Arena in 2023 to concerts for more than 25,000 homegrown fans in Lagos and Abuja in December, or his homecoming in Benin City last August that brought out 20,000 people. To do the concerts in Nigeria at a rate fans in the impoverished country could potentially afford and a level he thinks they deserve, he flew in professionals and equipment from all over the world, spending, as he puts it, “a shit ton.” 

Rema hopes that excellent and accessible shows can be the norm in Nigeria, not the exception. Especially after a stage collapsed at the Nativeland music festival in Lagos in December, the state of concert production in Nigeria seems dire. Meanwhile, Lagos faces what’s likely more tourism than ever for the live events that fill the holidays. Fortunately, there were no deaths reported at Nativeland, though some sustained injuries. “We’re all trying to make it work,” he says, “but in the long run, it’s going to break. The reason why we still thug it out is because this has happened to a lot of genres that have come and go. It is because they failed to build the institutions back home.”

Rema thinks that he, other entertainers, and government officials can help build the music infrastructure they need — a tall order in the fraught nation. “I’m very, very, very hopeful,” he tells me. “A lot of people are giving up in Nigeria. A lot of people are angry at Nigeria. But I keep hope. There’s not a lot of people who would carry Afrobeats like this so much, carry culture. It makes me look like a blabber. It makes me look like I talk too much, or care too much, or I’m trying to be a fucking messiah. I don’t want to do much. I just want to do what I need to do.”

In August, ahead of that homecoming concert, Rema joined the governor of Edo State, to which Benin City belongs, in the groundbreaking of the Edo Arena, which the leader christened “Rema’s Dome.” Local reports boasted the 6,000-capacity venue as a state-of-the-art endeavor. 

Still, in the midst of Nigeria’s political fragility — marked by coups, violence, and widespread distrust among citizens who protested bad governance again last summer — Rema is being strategic about his allegiances. He’s been openly critical of the country’s leadership — like when he joined Lagos’ 2020 End SARS movement against police brutality. The protests left at least 12 dead, allegedly killed by security forces. In response, he recorded the song “Peace of Mind,” bemoaning the nation’s instability. On 2022’s “Are You There,” he called out former President Muhammadu Buhari as inept. And he’s been attempting to help retrieve the Benin Bronzes, intricate sculptures looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin, today’s Benin City. They’ve been divvied up by European museums, and Rema says he’s joined conversations to get them back home; a few weeks after we talk, the Netherlands announces that it will return more than 100 of them to Nigeria.

“Fans prefer, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky to be here.’ I’m supposed to be here by the grace of God. I envisioned myself to be here.”

I ask if he has any positive feelings about Nigerian politics. “I don’t like to involve myself, especially because my mom said I shouldn’t. Whatever I do, it should be a Rema thing,” he says of working with local officials. “I don’t want it to be a government project. It’s a Rema project being assisted by the government. ‘Thank you, but I don’t want to owe you.’ I don’t roll with political agendas. I’m moving with my personal agenda.” 

ONE OF REMA’S PROUDEST accomplishments has been being able to provide homes for his mother. “I have multiple houses across different countries in Africa, so she travels anywhere she wants,” he says. Two are in Kenya and Ghana, but his favorite is his Moroccan-style Lagos abode. “That was my big brother’s goal, that was my father’s goal,” he says of homeownership. “My dad made much effort to just have the land and properties, but all of that was taken from us.” He spent December in Lagos with his mom, often chatting in the smoky kitchen while she and their staff cooked. “We just gossip,” he says. “My friends come through and steal some chicken. I’m Divine in my house.” 

That wasn’t all Rema did in December. Don Jazzy tells me that while most of the industry gallivanted over the festive season, Rema was recording, too. “He has over 15 newly recorded songs,” he says. “I’ve heard some global smashes in there.” 

Rema is cagey with me about his new music, though his representatives tell me he’s working on a project that’s expected to be released in the next year. He’s gearing up for a spate of tour dates — a Coachella appearance and a series of international shows to follow — but he’s also been in the studio constantly, and his team is ecstatic. “I think this project that we have coming out is a massive step towards him being one of the biggest artists in the world, not necessarily [just one of] the biggest Afrobeats artists in the world,” says Interscope’s VP of A&R, Emerson Redd. 

One of Rema’s closest collaborators is Mavin’s Senior VP of A&R, Rima Tahini Ighodaro, who says she can’t get the new music she’s heard out of her head. “He’s always had the ability to blend different genres into one, right?” she says. “But it’s getting crazier. I think one of the guys had said in the studio, ‘He has to be an AI,’ [like] when you put in a prompt in ChatGPT and it brings you something. For me, that’s mind-blowing. How do you come up with stuff like this? He’s super involved, by the way, with the backup singers, with the production, with just every single thing. He writes all his songs. It’s crazy that I never get used to what he does next.” For his part, Rema tells me that he’s just having fun in the studio right now: “Sometimes I’m bored, sometimes I feel guilty for not working.” 

He’s rarely seen out actually having fun, though in December he was spotted partying with label mate Ayra Starr, as well as Tems and Tyla, at Lagos’ hottest party, Obi’s House. He was also seen at the luxe strip club Secret’s Palace with Tems and Ayra, too. “Ayra’s family for sure,” he says. “Tyla’s family. We’re good friends because I’ve been friends with Tyla even before everything.” Tyla and he are not dating and never have, he assures me, contrary to some rumors and shipping. 

Despite his hardened outlook on Heis, Rema remains a lover at heart. Since his debut in 2019, Rema says he’s had three girlfriends, with his longest relationship lasting two and a half years. He’s mostly dated in Africa. He’s not with anybody right now. Despite being a lothario on wax, he’s kept a low-key romantic profile. “I’m just happy my name’s not out in the streets, it seems like,” he says. A lot of his love songs are about real people: “‘Reason You’ was a gift,” he notes. The cheeky “Soundgasm” was too. “It was a freaky gift. I recorded that on Valentine’s Day. So that was a very freaky day for everybody,” he admits, laughing.

He’s dead set on getting married and having kids — maybe three or four. I ask him when. “The timeline matters, but I don’t specifically have a time. But I feel like it’s very important, especially because I am not in a big family,” he says, recalling the way he and his immediate relatives were ostracized after his dad’s death. “I feel like there’s a need for us to get bigger and become a whole empire if we can. And then neither do I want to wait for it to become a mistake before I decide to be a father. I’m very particular and I don’t really be hoeing around.”

Rema has gotten into investing lately, which reminds him that all of this — the ­hitmaking, the bridge-building, the land-buying, the politicking — may be for naught if there aren’t people to pass those dividends down to. Family, like most things with Rema, is a matter of legacy. “Those are the things that make you think, like, ‘Yo, you need to actually make a family.’ If I stop, all this is gonna stop.”