Meet Obongjayar, the Afrobeat Innovator Who Can Rock a Stadium With No Fear

Y
ou wouldn’t quite call Obongjayar a rapper today, but back in 2016, he caught the eye of Richard Russell — the influential British producer who helped launch Adele’s career and heads the indie label XL Recordings — with a freestyle over Kendrick Lamar’s “u” from To Pimp a Butterfly. The song had been a breakthrough for Obongjayar, one where he began to untangle some identity crises from his youth in Calabar, Nigeria to his young adulthood in London. Born Steven Umoh, he took on the name Obongjayar as he began to drift away from hip-hop, putting together Obong — the word for “king” or “god” in Ibibio, his local language — with Jayar, a play on being a junior, named after his father. He liked the way the name combined the power of a ruler and the humility of a son.

Since his “u” freestyle, he leaned even more into multiplicity, wielding electronic music, rock, soul, and even country into a sort of new-age Afrobeat of his own making. You can hear remnants of Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti’s innovation and defiance in songs like “Message in a Hammer” from his expansive 2022 debut album Some Nights I Dream of Doors, which he wrote after Nigerian security forces shot at anti-police-brutality protesters in 2020. You can also hear a softer side across Doors and his four EPs, too. Though he’s retained a rapper’s bravado and way with words, he sings in a grovely croke as well as he does in an airy falsetto. His chameleonic approach has earned him a dedicated fanbase and one of the U.K.’s esteemed songwriting awards, an Ivor Novello. In November, he will headline his biggest show yet, at London’s O2 Kentish Town Forum, to support his sophomore album, Paradise Now, out May 30.

As a testament to his range, he’s also earned a fan in coveted dance producer Fred Again…, who remixed Obongjayar’s gentle ode to his younger brother, “I Wish It Was Me,” into the joyous new track, “Adore U.” Obongjayar had gone from being a stranger to Fred, moved to tears watching a set of his online, to performing “Adore U” with him at a sold-out stadium, Los Angeles’ Memorial Coliseum. Despite the massive crowd, he felt at ease. “I don’t get nervous because I know what I’m doing,” he says. “I know who I am. I don’t need to put on a thing, I’m not performing. I’m just being, because I love the songs.”

He wasn’t always so self-assured. When Obongjayar first started posting music to SoundCloud, he was making “terrible American rap,” he says, trying to be someone he was not. “If you grew up in Nigeria when I grew up in Nigeria, everyone had that identity crisis,” he says, having moved to London around 17 years old. His mother had left Nigeria for England after an abusive relationship with his father, leaving Obongjayar and his younger brother in their grandmother’s care until she was able to bring them over. 

“We were so fed American culture — American movies, American music, watching Jerry Springer, Cartoon Network — that being Nigerian was almost not as cool. What was seen as cool at that time was kids who had parents in America, kids who went to America for holiday. I didn’t have any of those things, but I was around kids who did, so I used to lie a lot. When we would go back from school holiday, me and my brother would lie through our teeth that we’d been to England. We put on a fake accent, but our accents were American accents,” he says.

Though he had stumbled upon a Fela Kuti bootleg CD as a child, he was more interested in 50 Cent, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne. He didn’t really appreciate Kuti until he was a graphic design student at Norwich University of the Arts in the east of England. His British friends, who played the Nigerian bandleader around Obongjayar, wrongly assumed he already knew all about him. “When you’re in a different place and you see how revered someone like a Fela Kuti is, you realize how important it is, him being as uniquely himself as he was across any geography,” says Obongjayar. “I thought that was so inspiring, because the music was just so Nigerian. His music being able to open up a window into what African life was, it’s like hip-hop opening the world up to the hood, to where that struggle came from. That made me realize, ‘Oh my God, my job as an artist is to open up that window to my world and show people clearly what I’m seeing.’”

To that point, Paradise Now, is emotional but direct. Obongjayar is 32 now, according to the Guardian (he playfully refuses to share his age with me. “I’m going to be 25,” he says) and particularly moved by hits by Bowie and Prince. His approach to Paradise Now was influenced by old interviews of theirs too, where their perspectives were incisive and clear. “There’s not too much fat,” he says of them. “It’s been distilled to a point where it’s so fine and understandable and also very unique, but it doesn’t scare you away because it’s too complex.” 

One of the Paradise Now tracks that does this best is “Talk Olympics,” which bears the album’s only vocal feature, rapper Little Simz, his close friend and frequent collaborator. The frenzied percussion on “Talk Olympic” excitingly elicits the commotion of a dense West African market, but mirrors the similarly incessant and overwhelming chatter that can spill from the internet into real life. “Trending topic psychologist, social media philanthropist, political biologists, talking, talking, talking rubbish,” he chants. “Everyone just pretends they know what the hell they’re talking about,” he tells me about the song’s inspiration. “Yesterday, you weren’t talking about this. You had no fucking clue until it became a thing.”

“Talk Olympics” stands out as the one of the most distinctly African-sounding song on Paradise Now, where Obongjayar weaves together highlife, electro-pop, all kinds of rock, and a touch of rap into a tapestry on which he grieves broken relationships, builds new ones, and asserts himself. Across the album and much of his music, he performs with more of a Nigerian accent than the British one he’s often heard speaking in. “When I speak to my parents, my family, my brother, I speak in my Nigerian accent,” he says. “But my saving grace is that when I think, I think in Nigerian, I think with my voice. The way I make music and the way I sing is very reflective of how I think rather than how I speak. It’s pure unfiltered.”

He intended to call the album Instant Animal, like the crashing, psychedelic jam session of a song on Paradise Now, thinking about what it means to really surrender to a moment. “If you’re dreaming and you fall down, your body’s reaction is to wake up, because it’s either you die in that dream or you wake up. That’s what ‘Instant Animal’ is. You become this thing because you’re forced into a corner.” 

While he was working on what would become the album though, he was hosting a series of parties called Paradise Now that also prioritized the immediate and instinctual, he and his friends being present with each other. It was also a place where he could test out the music with his collaborators. He had often gotten feedback that his songs sounded different live than on wax, and wanted to see if he could sap the dissonance. “Sometimes the music can be too complicated to replicate live,” he says. 

He chose a venue called Ormside to host Paradise Now, a South East London haunt of his with a 250 capacity. “We sold that out every single time,” he says. He loved the intimacy of it. “There’s no green room, so everyone’s just in the space. It’s got a small stage, there’s a bar in the corner, it’s quite dingy. Great sound system, great people that work there, it’s just perfect. You’re in the smoking area with everyone else. You’re talking to people who’ve come. It’s such a family environment. There’s no separation between anyone, so you get off-stage and you’re in the crowd.”

As the record progressed, he says, Instant Animal felt too brash. “It’s the aggressive cousin of Paradise Now,” he says. I mention that his Paradise Now parties reminded me of the ones Janelle Monáe and friends threw while they made her last Grammy-nominated album, The Age of Pleasure. They wanted to see how their records resonated on the dancefloor. In hindsight, Obongjayar thinks he may have unknowingly been a plus one at Monáe’s. Testing music at his parties, though, was even more personal. “It’s more about how it makes me feel,” he says, “because I need to be comfortable with how it moves me.”