People often say that Afrobeats has lost its heart — that the genre no longer made “real” love songs. While this may be true depending on how one conceptualises ‘love songs’, reducing these songs to one particular sound may not be the best way to think of such an expansive subject matter. What if the love songs never really left, and instead, simply changed form? From the soulful serenades of the 2000s to today’s genre-blending, mood-driven melodies, Nigerian music has always had room for romance, but you might not recognize this if you’re looking out for the old-school heartbreak and begging-in-the-rain ballads.
‘Love songs’, at least as far as Nigerian music is concerned, have historically been an area of music reserved for R&B, and as the sound of mainstream Nigerian R&B has evolved, so has the reflection of love in our music. This change in the genre is due to a variety of reasons including western influence and genre bending. There is also the growing presence of more nuanced, varied discussions of love in the mainstream. However, notwithstanding all these changes, Afrobeats still delivers love songs; a wide variety in fact, from the traditional yearning ‘love song’ to its more modern interpretations.
R&B music’s focus on ‘love songs’ stems from its core roots in expressing deep emotion and personal experiences. Known for its soulful lyrics and emotional depth, the genre’s primary purpose has always been expressing feelings of love, passion, and heartache. Its smooth beats, soulful melodies and rich vocals can evoke powerful emotions, making it the perfect choice for conveying complex and nuanced feelings. Anita Baker’s Sweet Love, Brandy’s Come A Little Closer, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On all have the distinct quality that enables them to channel passion which might be ineffectively communicated through any other genre.
As the Nigerian music scene developed, R&B alongside hip-hop made its way into the mainstream around the 1990s, courtesy of artists like Seyi Sodimu. By the 2000s, R&B had fully scaled into popular music, marked by the rise of artists like 2Baba, P-Square, and Styl-Plus, who incorporated elements of hip-hop, highlife, and other local genres to create the unique sound we now refer to as Afro-R&B.
This timeline presented Nigerian R&B in its most ‘traditional’ form till date, and it was around this time that we saw a prevalence of ‘love songs’ portrayed in the nostalgic way that audiences today imagine that they should be presented. The music video for African Queen opens with a strumming guitar, a montage of beautiful, blushing women basking in the attention of 2Baba who himself, is singing straight at the camera, hand on heart, wining and dining Annie Macaulay in a display of romantic affection. Olufunmi, the quintessential Nigerian ‘love song’, opens its music video with a short scene showing Olufunmi leaving her lover who then spends the entirety of the 5-minute track begging her to return.
By the 2010s, ‘love songs’ in the Nigerian mainstream had taken on a slightly different form, due to a mutation in the Afro-R&B sound which resulted in tracks with more upbeat production and more ‘Nigerianisms’. Thus, the traditional ‘yearning’ format started to dwindle around this time. With tracks such as Wizkid’s Love My Baby, Davido’s Aye, Flavour’s Ada Ada and Tiwa Savage’s Eminado dominating airwaves, love was still very much the centre of the music and these songs, while sonically different from their predecessors, still contained pointedly romantic lyrics; “I love my baby, that’s my baby,” “They say love is blind, but I dey see am for your eyes,” and the likes still conveyed the message of earlier love songs, notwithstanding the fact that the delivery had changed. Several factors influenced the change in sound, including positioning for airplay and the increasing focus on localising the sound of Nigerian music. This period also saw an influx of returnee artists, who had spent several years abroad, return home to further their music careers, seizing the opportunity that Nigeria’s young, burgeoning music industry provided them and creating music primed for Nigerian dance floors. Love is an evergreen topic and is always ripe for use in musical endeavours, but the presentation of the subject matter during this time targeted the local audience in a way that the traditional Afro-R&B of the 2000s, which was more rooted in its Western origins, was unable to fully realize.
While dance hit ‘love songs’ dominated the mainstream for most of the early 2010s, the last few years of the decade actually witnessed a resurgence of the slow jams — songs like Ma Lo, Like and Tonight. These songs embodied the echoing, contemporary R&B sound which was taking the world by storm and involved the incorporation of modern electronic trends from auto-tune to EDM. Although the yearning ‘love songs’ of the 2000s had long vacated mainstream airwaves, projects like Simi’s Simisola and Fireboy DML’s Laughter Tears and Goosebumps presented a heartfelt ode to ‘love songs’ past, with Need You in particular bringing to mind the desperate wails with which Styl Plus called after Olufunmi years earlier.
With the 2020s, we have seen Afrobeats go global. Genre-bending is the order of the day and even artists that brought back traditional Afro-R&B in the late 2010s have since evolved from the sound, building on its base to create a fuller, more fleshed out version. Love songs by mainstream artists characteristic of this period include tracks such as Ayra Starr’s Rhythm & Blues, Tems’ Love Me Jeje, Qing Madi’s American Love and Fave’s Baby Riddim to name a few.
Underground artists are increasingly influencing mainstream artists and as a result, alternative songwriting has altered the sound of Afro-R&B even further, with the effect that more nuanced discussions of love are being explored in Nigerian music, often through a fusion of genres. We see this, for instance, in Ajebo Hustlers (a rap duo) collaborating with Fave to create a song like In Love which might not be the traditional yearning love song, but nevertheless presents a picture of love from differing perspectives.
R&B singer and musician PJ Morton, whose catalog of love songs, including Say So, the 2019 Grammy winner for best R&B song, resides outside the popular mainstream points out that, “Art reflects life. I think both men and women now are having a hard time buying into love and long-lasting love. The music is just living out what we’re actually going through. People talk about how the rules of dating these days are out the window. I think we’re just in a different time, so I think the music, as it should, reflects what’s actually going on.”
So what we see more and more in recent times are songs exploring the complexities of love and dating, as opposed to songs where the artist is simply singing about falling in love. Good or bad, the surplus of or the scarcity of, falling in love or out of love, even the more lustful, physical parts of love are now commonplace in Nigerian ‘love songs’ and to those whose idea of what a love song should be is the most traditional and straightforward idea of the concept, of course it would seem as though love songs are missing from Afrobeats today.
One project which perfectly captures this nuanced exploration of love is Show Dem Camp’s Palm Wine Music 3, which digs into “all things concerning love, relationships … how it makes us, how it breaks us,” and delivers songs which express love in all its complexities. From breakup anthems to reflections on old flames, the love songs which may be less present in the music mainstream today are still being created by more alternative artists.
Boj’s Your Love (Mogbe) with Tiwa Savage, The Cavemen’s Fall and even the works of more underground artists like M3lon all offer differing renditions of the same concept. The songs are and have always been there for listeners who are willing to expand their conceptualization of what a love song should sound like and look beyond mainstream airwaves to find them.
Another notable feature of today’s love songs is the growing number of musicians embracing the ‘post R&B’ sensibility where the production does the heavy lifting, setting the mood for romance as opposed to the artists themselves singing romance into existence through their lyrics. While the lyrics of the song may not necessarily spell out love, the production will do so in their place. This is reflected in Melvitto’s work on Wait For You with Oxlade as well as Odeal’s Coffee (Don’t Read Signs) and Faceless’ Venus with Serotonin. The lyrics may be sparse and far between, perhaps even repetitive chants but the feeling of love is conveyed perfectly through the instrumentals, the work of the producers and sound engineers which are just as important as songwriting in creating a full-bodied record aimed at provoking deep emotion.
In truth, love songs in Nigerian music never disappeared — they simply evolved. From heartfelt serenades to dance-floor declarations, tender ballads to genre-fused experiments, the story of love continues to be told in new, dynamic ways. Rather than lamenting the loss of traditional ‘love songs,’ perhaps it’s time to embrace the rich, expanding vocabulary with which today’s artists express affection, longing, heartbreak, and desire. Love is still at the heart of the music — you just have to listen a little differently.
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