Remembering Afrobeats’ EDM Origins

My first ever rave was the April 4th, 2025 edition of Ibadan’s Red Light Fashion Room. Memory places it as nothing exceptional. But my notes reveal something different. At 12:30 AM, the DJ on deck, Abiodun, transitioned seamlessly from a House mix of Bayanni’s Ta Ta Ta into Chudy K’s Gaga Crazy in a manner I described as a “Thriller somehow…sick.” At 2:07 AM, the next DJ spun Weird MC’s 2007 hit, Ijoya. Notes read: “My God, what an efficient use of the intro and verse 1 of Ijo yà. With hindsight, I can taste the dance upon which Jazzy built it.” Passive voice. A dead giveaway for the sentiments I felt in those moments. You would too, if embraced by Bacchanalian nostalgia atop Mokola Hill. 

I’ve attended a couple more raves in the months since, including the landmark Green Light Fashion Room – in partnership with Group Therapy. Without fail, one or more DJs’ set-lists would contain a hit record from the early 2010s. Sometimes with a few adjustments in tempo or pitch, but mostly as they were when the Alaba magnate still handled distribution. Listen closely — preferably with the comfort of softer speakers — and you’d notice the same features running through those older records as others played throughout the function. The prominent basslines, distorted synths, anthemic choruses, and immersive build-ups and beat drops can be found earlier in our musical genealogy, before the first-ever “Dlala Thukzin!” We just happen to be so ridden with nostalgia’s tinge that we fail to consciously acknowledge what our bodies instinctually grasp: that Electronic Dance Music (EDM) has been here far longer — and with wider spread acceptance —than we give credit for. 

When Amapiano, the South African mega-phenomenon, first emerged on the Nigerian scene in 2020, there was a faint sense of familiarity. The grooviness of Kabza De Small’s Sponono (featuring both Burna Boy and Wizkid), Rema’s Woman, Zinoleesky’s Kilofeshe, Mayorkun’s Of Lagos, and any of La La, Heaven, I’ve Got A Friend off of Davido’s A Better Time rang back five years before, when Niniola’s Sarz-produced Soke took over the radio waves. In time, we’d come to recognise that Nini’s sound, Afro-House, was a not-so-distant fruit of the same loins as Amapiano. Both are House sub-genres. The difference is that Amapiano’s tightly contested origin leads to Gauteng and Johannesburg and Soweto townships, with Deep House, Jazz, 2000s Kwaito, and Bacardi as influences, while Afro-House can be traced back to the machinations of a post-Project Fame Niniola and Sarz, the producer ‘at the top of the list when she checked Google.’ Right? Well, not at all. 

There’s the not-so-tiny matter of Afro-House’s actual older origins. Sarz’s 2012 Wizkid-assisted cult classic Beat of Life predates all of his other Afro-House work with Nini. It also predates the dominance of Uhuru, Mafikizolo, R2Bees, and DJ Maphorisa in the years that followed. Tchelete, In My Bed, Dance Go (Eau de Vie), and others in that 2013-2015 window followed a formula of intracontinental cross-pollination that a younger Sarz simply couldn’t have predicted.  

With this, we have three questions. One, was there a critical mass of EDM production before Afro-House? Two, was it internally influenced? Three, how and why did it disappear – if at all, it did?

To answer the first question: Yes, there was a critical mass. First, we must understand that EDM is an umbrella term for a diverse array of music characterised by minimal live instrumentation and vocals, strong rhythms, synthetic ‘electronic’ sounds and timbres, harsh tempos, and the features mentioned earlier (synths, anthemic choruses, immersive buildups, and beat drops, etc.). So, while a song like 9ice’s Gongo Aso houses an iconic xylophone-synth intro that would sound at home on a techno record, it’s inherently Afro-pop thanks to elements like the arrangement, chorus, and percussion. Similarly, a song like Ijoya fuses gan gan with heavy drum ‘n’ bass and shows just enough structural variation to qualify as a fusion. But try this with Dr. Sid’s When This Song Comes On and its summation as anything other than a Pop EDM-Disco hybrid would be nigh fallacious. The determiner for all three is the extent of the EDM components. 

This distinction is key to understanding that, while much early aughts Afrobeats fused EDM production — as was the trend for Reggae, R&B, and basically everything produced on the boards— this wasn’t true of all of it. Yet there were enough of these standout EDM records to characterise a fully-fledged movement indicating the points where Afrobeats transitioned from traditional forms to EDM style. A stance culture journalist Blossom Maduafokwa explains in “The New Age of Nigerian Electronic Music”. Mapping out industry-wide acceptance to illustrate this is rather lumbering, so instead, let’s speed-run through the initial Big Three’s discographies, i.e. P-Square, 2Baba, and D’banj. 

P-Square’s earliest EDM-influenced record would be Igbedu off their debut LP, Last Nite (2003). Chord stabs, kick drums, supersaw synths, and an excruciating rap verse marks it as hip-hop. By 2009’s Danger, they had four EDM-influenced records, including Super Fans, an R&B number with Progressive House production (think mid-career Usher). But it was on 2011’s The Invasion that they worshipped at the foot of dance, replete with harsh records like Jeje and Player and Euro-Pop hits like Chop My Money and Bunieya Enu, which, at the time — and even now — tore up dance floors. Surprisingly, P-Square produced all but one out of 9/12 records with EDM elements. This became eight out of sixteen on 2014’s Double Trouble (Shekini, Ejeajo (feat. TI), Personally, and the hallmark Alingo) – Vtek and Charles Duke dominated the boards here.

D’Banj’s trajectory is similar. From a debatable two of seventeen on RunDown Funk U Up (2006) to a remarkable twelve of twenty on 2013’s D’Kings Men (including Don’t Tell Me Nonsense, Finally, rock-adjacent Top of The World, and Afrobeats-to-the-world curtain raiser Oliver Twist). Think about that for a second; the implication that Afrobeats’ first true crossover hit is a few lyric changes away from being termed ‘dance.’ D’Kings Men was helmed by foundational architects of Naija EDM, Don Jazzy and Jay Sleek, and a younger Dee Vee who later signed to Akon’s Konvict Music. 

2Baba (fka Tuface Idibia) was not as experimental as the other two, but even he couldn’t escape EDM’s gravitas. His first adventure into electronic territory was on his third solo album, 2008’s The Unstoppable; a paltry two entries – Jungle Done Mature (feat. Rocksteady) and the mega hit Enter the Place featuring the late Sound Sultan. On the follow-up, The Unstoppable International Edition (2010), that number became six, including one of the Federation’s most recognisable party bangers, Implication, and the Cobhams and Omawumi-assisted Power of Naija – the last Super Eagles anthem not called Issa Goal. In a way, this album was Jay Sleek’s magnum opus. 

Like P’Square, 2Baba’s EDM peak spanned two albums. Released in 2012, Away and Beyond featured roughly 9 of 15 songs with EDM influences, including pockets of synths, antsy beat drops, and dance progressions. Cue in Ihe Neme for the daddies and mummies.  One insightful tidbit about this era is that one of the songs on the LP, Chemical Reaction feat. Naeto C was made into a four-track EDM Remix EP. 

With this, one gains a clearer sense of the direction of Nigerian music at the time. There was a tangible consolidation of electronic dance music between 2010 and 2015, culminating in Afro-House. Producers like Samklef (Nonilizing), DJ Zeez (Fokasibe, Bobbie FC, In Ya Mind), OJB Jezreel, Jesse Jagz (Oleku), and Jay Pizzle (Run Mad, Shake Body) dished out hits and bubbling-under pop singles in quick succession. Some like Legendury Beatz (Ara, Azonto Freestyle), D’Tunes (Sexy Mama, Ur Waist), Masterkraft (Ukwu, Fine Fine Lady), and Spellz (Gaga Crazy) transitioned as Afrobeats got slower, maximising the dynamism that’s defined newer offerings. It goes without saying that the songs and albums on here do not give a complete picture of the obtainable effervescence.  We haven’t addressed the magic on Dr Sid’s Headies Album of the Year winning record, Turning Point (2010), or Naeto C’s number-titled hits, Ten Over Ten and 5 and 6. Or May D’s waist-cavorting Chapter 1 (2013). People danced! Bodies came together and were rent apart. The vivacity that’s now absent at regular clubs was all you expected on Friday Nights — from nightclubs to boarding schools’ social nights. 

This leads to the question of influence. The EDM wave was shaped by both internal and external influences. ‘Internal’ being our love for dance as a people and desire for music that fulfilled this, squarely. Indigenous genres like fuji, juju, apala, highlife, waka, palmwine, obito, were, and ogene abate our thirst with their percussion and melodies, suitable for ceremonial gatherings and mournful soliloquy alike. We dance. As such, at every point where we’ve adapted new technology to suit our music, whether that’s the use of the bass guitar in juju music or pseudo-choral stacking for Asake’s neo-fuji, ‘grooviness’ is always in consideration. The concept of ‘dance’ as a genre in Afrobeats’ home countries is as humorous as it is not. Even our fusions depend heavily on the foreign genre’s ability to inspire motion and emotion. 

As a matter of fact, the precursors to EDM— disco, psychedelic rock, synth funk, and boogie —were widely accepted due to their dance roots. It might be a stretch, but I’d like to believe that every Nigerian music sojourner eventually arrives at the doorstep of Williams Onyeabor. In writing, listening, or hearsay, we encounter the genius as he was: a fine artist who wove complexity into rhythm and dance in service of the bon vivant lifestyle of his listeners. Others before (The Funkees, Ofege) and after (Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, The Lijadu Sisters) him, who occupied similar strata, did the same. They took the West’s boogie, ensured our soul stayed at the fore, and wove new languages into being. The class of 2010-2015 might not have been as in tune as this 70s – 80s generation in terms of depth and consciousness, but they at least knew that, primarily, our people want a good time. And they utilised the sound to meet that need. 

Of course, there were the external factors. It’s no coincidence that the rise in EDM elements in Afrobeats corresponds with the rise of Euro-pop, progressive house, electro-pop, deep house, dubstep, and other sub-genres. Avicii, David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Deadmau5, Skrillex, Martin Garrix, DJ Snake, and Major Lazer are among the more prominent names in the vanguard of artists who brought the genre into pop radio and large venues worldwide. They were the inevitable pop culture monsters who directed the flow of music for a hot minute. Our acts listened and imbibed what they needed, stripping away the hyper-technicality for the mother genre’s juicier aspects. 

From an external standpoint, it also coincides with the proliferation of a specific production software: Fruity Loops. Microsoft’s Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) had just begun to gain prominence in the late 2000s. By the 2010s, it was everywhere, popularised by Hip-Hop producers — a genre Afrobeats also draws heavily from — and embraced for its simple user interface. There’s a famous anecdote from a VICE interview with Jean-Marie Cannie, the founder of FL Studio’s parent company, Image Line, that explains the rush better: “We tricked people into thinking they have musical skills”. I’ll rephrase that and espouse the idea that the skills already were. Our producers simply needed the right tools. Years later, and FL remains the DAW of choice for producers like Sarz and Kel P. Go figure!

The final question concerning how and why this EDM base disappeared is self-explanatory. The genre needed to evolve. Its dependence on production, at the risk of songwriting and diversity death, was proving costly; the same concern seen in older genres like rock and hip-hop. Consider that Legendury Beatz, who produced the second major crossover record, Ojuelegba (2014), made Azonto Freestyle a year earlier. There’s little doubt what sound was more sustainable over a longer stretch. 

To our credit, EDM didn’t die off altogether on the local scene. Artist-producers like Sigag Lauren, Sensei Lo, TMXO, Maze x MXtreme, Bigfoot, and the beautiful minds of Nocturne Music pushed Afro-EDM as a fresh take on the sound. Over in Ghana, Fokn Bois (M3nsa and Wanlov the Kubolor), AFROLEKTRA, Lali x Lola, Keyzuz, Kayso, Excuse Our Music (Drvmroll, ProdbyYngFly, LXXVIImusic) distilled their own version of Afro-EDM, heavily influenced by indigenous styles. Mara could take up an entire essay of its own; a sub-genre that is part sound, part dance, part movement. Mara is our EDM divorced of Western heritage and metamorphosing in the true sense of the term ’viral.’ Besides, every once in a while, our mainstream acts take us back in time, and we get a track like Asake’s Uhh Yeah (Sarz at the crime scene yet again). 

As Narmwali Serpell said, “The dullard cousin of the repetition family is redundancy”. Afrobeats avoided becoming a straggler of a genre by shedding its EDM base when needed, killing off the plague of redundancy through repetition. It’s a cycle already in effect. And while much of the ongoing inundating experimentation has come under deserved scrutiny, we’re shielded by the existence of a broader soundscape. There’s something for everybody. We might not have as many resonant hits anymore, but at least the sonic regression that accompanied Afrobeats’ search for foreign acceptance has begun to ease up.