The Truth About "Lyrical Decline" We Forgot Afrobeats Was Always a Vibe First.
By Buchithebomb
Afrobeats Was Always a Vibe First
Every few months, someone resurrects the "Afrobeats lyrics are getting shallow" conversation, usually comparing today's street-pop hooks to Fela's political sermons or 2Baba's storytelling. But that comparison quietly assumes lyrics were always the genre's main event. They weren't. Afrobeats was built on rhythm section first, message second; highlife guitar lines, drums, call-and-response hooks designed to move a body before they move a mind.
These days listeners expect afrobeat records to do the lyrical or poetic justice that is meant for hiphop, we're judging a rhythm-first genre by lyrical standard, the hiphop folks are built to reward the bars, double entendres and literary device used on a record. Afrobeats in its entirety is built to reward close listening; the drum pattern, the syncopation, the vocal capability "that's why Wande Coal can be singing the best line you've ever heard in a decade and he switches to mumbling incoherent melodies and they still make sense to the ears". Calling it shallow for not doing hip-hop's job is a category error.
Moreso, playfulness is an integral aspect of afrobeat, Asake's chant like adlibs, Mavo's incoherent lyrics, Zanku's passionate but playful adlibs, none of that is lazy songwriting, in reality, the fact that listeners enjoy and look forward to hearing those adlibs, proves that it serves its purpose in the genre. It's a different discipline: writing a phrase that is instantly singable, rhythmically locked to the beat, and built to survive a thousand TikTok loops. That's harder to pull off well than it looks.
To be honest the depth never actually left, it just isn't everywhere, and that's fine. Seyi Vibez, Odumodublvck, and FOLA are proof there's still real lyrical weight in the genre when an artist wants to go there. The mistake is expecting every record to carry that weight. A genre this big is allowed to have both club records and confession records without one invalidating the other.
The perceived decline isn't in the lyrics, it's in our memory of what afrobeats was actually for, or maybe the industry's inability to breakout proper stars in the last year but that's a discussion we have to dig into another day. We also need to grow past our desperate need to blend into pop culture, our desperate need to appeal to foreign audiences and by that we tend to lose the actual sauce that afrobeats is. I'll close this with a little story of when I heard the term "gbese" on Victor Uwaifo's "Joromi" and I looked at my mom in surprise and she said "ehen, yes na, no be today nyash dey for back".