Afro-Adura: On Defining the Music of Prayer

The first time I heard a Seyi Vibez song was in 2020. I had stopped by Boboye’s hair saloon for a haircut somewhere in Oyo town. Boboye had been my barber for years and apart from being skilled at cutting hair, he was also passionate about music. As customers, we often doubled as Boboye’s live audience as he would sing along, and sometimes pause to dance, to music playing from his loudspeakers as he cut hair. It was during one of these visits that I first heard Seyi Vibez. According to Boboye, he was the next big thing in the streets.

Three years later, I’m in the front seat of a bus from Obalende to Falomo. I randomly start singing the hook from Seyi Vibez’s Billion dollar off his Billion Dollar Baby album,

“ Atiko pe ma’la mo de gbodo la

As I dey work fun mi l’owo bi Billion Dollars”

“It is written that I will be successful so I must be successful,

As I work, give money like billions of dollars”

The driver soon takes over the song from me with a passion I had last seen in that saloon in Oyo. Boboye was right.

Between December 2022 and January 2023, Seyi Vibez was at the center of the conversation on the internet. From the comparison of his musical style with fellow musician Asake to Grammy-award winner, Burna Boy, passionately singing along to his fast-tempo hit, Chance. However, his most impactful contribution during the period might just be the awakening of more people to an interesting subgenre, one that had previously existed but was only just gaining some form. Twitter Nigeria named it Afro-Adura and the rest of us didn’t contest, at least until recently.

Veteran critic, Dami Ajayi, in a recent exploration of the Afro-Adura sub-genre, posits that it just might be yet another needless stint at branding- renaming what already has a name. Dr. Ajayi makes a fine case for his position. He reminds any careful reader that the kind of music classified under this subgenre (as defined by the few authors that have tried) could as well be called Street hop. But can they?

The Afro in Afro-Adura is obtained from Afrobeats, the mother genre. The interesting part of the name is in its suffix. ‘Adura’ is a Yoruba word that literally translates to ‘Prayer’. So what then is this Afrobeats of prayer?

When the name ‘Afro-Adura’ first came up, many of us almost immediately knew the kind of music it described yet we couldn’t define it clearly. Wisdom Mudasiru, in his piece for Culture Custodian, correctly describes it as a subgenre of Afro-beats characterized by aspirational lyrics and occasional chants mostly sung in Yoruba. This definition contains three criteria;

· Lyrical content (aspirational),

· Language (Yoruba)

· and form (solemn chants)

A simple probe reveals that several songs characterized in the subgenre do not always meet all three criteria e.g. Victor AD’s Wetin We Gain is primarily sung in pidgin English and Chinko Ekun’s Able God has a high tempo.

Another peculiarity of Afro-Adura is its target audience. By virtue of its form and content, it appeals mostly to the ‘streets’. Its language is crude and littered with slang and its form is malleable- often a hybrid of afrobeats and a religious sound: gospel, sakara, fuji etc.

In a society that credits the divine for success regardless of the morality (or legality) of the effort involved, it’s easy to understand why lofty aspiration is a good premise for motivation. And from Oritshe Femi’s Mercies of the Lord to Areezy’s Ori to Seyi Vibez’s Bank of America, Afro-Adura has evolved with trends. Nowadays, the songs are mostly unrepentant justifications for cybercrime (Bella Shmurda’s Vision 2020, Mohbad’s Sorry, etc.) merged with soulful prayers for divine favour.

Seyi’s domination of the Afro-Adura subgenre is not surprising. His music ticks all the boxes and does even more. Adedayo Agarau tries to capture the essence of Seyi’s Billion Dollar Baby in his review for The Lagos Review. He describes the album as, “a body of work that will resonate with the working-class demographic in suburban Lagos seeking escape from their daily travails, latching on to anything that remotely resembles motivation.” But the thing about motivation is that we all need it and if Burna Boy can find it in ‘Chance’, who says the rest of us can’t?