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Tems tops the first-ever year-end Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs Artists ranking, representing the best-performing acts on the genre’s song charts for 2022. The singer-songwriter’s victory parade extends to the year’s Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs recap, where she shares top honors with Wizkid for “Essence” and claims three more songs in the year-end top 10.
The Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart launched for the chart dated April 2, 2022, and ranks the 50 most popular Afrobeats songs in the U.S., ranked by a weighted formula incorporating official streams on both subscription and ad-supported tiers of leading audio and video music services, plus download sales from top music retailers, as compiled by Luminate.
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Behind Tems, Burna Boy finishes second on the year-end artist recap, spurred by 27 charting songs during the chart year, the most of any act. Among the haul is the genre giant’s “Last Last,” which became his first No. 1 on the U.S. Afrobeats chart in July. The song’s appeal, though, crossed barriers: It also topped the U.S.-based Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart and was likely familiar to listeners thanks to its sample of “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” a 2001 hit for Toni Braxton. “Last,” meanwhile, is far from that on the year-end songs recap, where it places at No. 5.
Rounding out the top five artists, CKay comes in third, with Wizkid next in line and Asake taking fifth place.
Billboard’s year-end music recaps represent aggregated metrics for each artist, title, label and music contributor on the weekly charts dated Nov. 20, 2021 through Nov. 12, 2022. The rankings for Luminate-based recaps reflect equivalent album units, airplay, sales or streaming during the weeks that the titles appeared on a respective chart during the tracking year. Any activity registered before or after a title’s chart run isn’t considered in these rankings. That methodology details, and the November-November time period, account for some of the difference between these lists and the calendar-year recaps that are independently compiled by Luminate.
Crossover Hits Capture Songs Crown: As mentioned, Wizkid’s “Essence,” featuring Tems, is the first year-end Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs champ. In a testament to its endurance, the smash ruled for two weeks in July this year, despite a 2021 release and peak on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in October 2021. The global hit bowed at No. 3 on the first edition of the U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart and spent its first 34 weeks inside the top five.
Fireboy DML and Ed Sheeran’s “Peru” ranks second on the year-end songs recap. Like “Essence,” the popular remix too became a crossover smash stateside, with a No. 7 peak on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart and No. 53 high on the Hot 100.
Crossover hits fill out the remaining top spots on the inaugural songs recap, with CKay’s “Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah)” – the first No. 1 hit on the weekly chart upon its April launch – at No. 3. The tune rolled to a No. 26 best on the Hot 100 and captured the No. 1 perch on both the weekly Rhythmic Airplay and Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay lists in the year.
Tems’ “Free Mind” wraps 2022 in fourth place on year-end U.S. Afrobeats Songs. The track, which originally appeared on the singer’s For Broken Ears EP in 2020, found a renewed audience and buzz in 2022 in the wake of “Essence” and she and Drake’s featured spot on Future’s “Wait for U,” a No. 1 Hot 100 hit this year. Thanks to that revival, “Mind” climbed to No. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart this year and No. 46 on the Hot 100.
In addition to “Essence” and “Free Mind,” Tems lands two more tracks in the year-end top 10: “Higher” at No. 7 and “Found,” featuring Brent Faiyaz, at No. 10. She, Burna Boy and Ed Sheeran are the only acts with multiple entries in the top tier. In addition to his “Last Last” smash, Burna Boy closes at No. 10 with “For My Hand,” featuring Ed Sheeran.
Twenty years ago, Red Hot released the album Red Hot + Riot: The Music and Spirit of Fela Kuti, a tribute to the great Nigerian musician Fela Kuti who succumbed to complications related to AIDS five years earlier in 1997 at the age of 58. Fela was more than a musician. He was an activist and spiritual leader who fused American funk with African rhythms to create Afrobeat, which is more popular today than it was during his lifetime. Red Hot was invited by the Kuti family to produce the album with access to his publishing and master recordings (courtesy of Knitting Factory Records who had recently acquired his catalog).
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The project kicked off with a superstar session brought together by Questlove led by D’Angelo and Fela’s son Femi Kuti. The musicians were a mix of Femi’s band Positive Force and the Soulquarians who often backed D’Angelo and Questlove (notably James Posner and Pino Palladino) along with Nile Rodgers, Macy Gray and others covering the song “Water No Get Enemy.” The idea for the project began with a conversation with Questlove at sessions for an earlier album – Red Hot + Rhapsody – where the Roots were collaborating with Bobby Womack on “Summertime.” Quest suggested that Red Hot should do a tribute album – track by track – to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, but we couldn’t clear the rights. Fela’s death and music was in our head, so we went back and suggested taking the Riot title and making an album raising awareness about AIDS in Africa.
The next session we produced after “Water No Get Enemy” was Baaba Maal covering Fela’s “Trouble Sleep.” We had built a studio, Fun Machine, run by Andres Levin, in the office on Spring Street where Red Hot’s sister company had grown to be a successful digital studio. You could see the World Trade Towers from the studio the day we recorded: September 10, 2001. They weren’t there the next day. Because of the struggle keeping the company going in the aftermath of 9/11, Andres copied the sessions onto disc so I could listen to them at home. I carefully saved all of them as well as the ProTools sessions. Because of that, the 20th anniversary release of Red Hot + Riot not only puts it on streaming platforms for the first time but also two hours of bonus material — including the acoustic Baaba Maal session and a cover of “Sorrow Tears and Blood” by Bilal, Common and Zap Mama that was never finished back then, but completes the album twenty years later.
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From the first Red Hot album, Red Hot + Blue, we included African musicians and talked about the terrible impact of the HIV pandemic on the Continent. But it was hard getting people to pay attention to the issue and to African music at the time. A Fela tribute wasn’t the obvious choice back then that it is now. It was an uphill struggle to get label support and the right mix of artists to do it. But we did.
Red Hot projects have always been hard to pull off. The music industry is charitable but doesn’t often support charity records that compete with commercial releases. When we did Red Hot + Dance, we got caught up in the struggle between George Michael and his label. It was hard to get Nirvana to donate a track to No Alternative and even more difficult to deal with their label, who didn’t let us use the band’s name on the packaging or marketing materials. Ironically that became our best marketing strategy of all time: the album with the hidden Nirvana track. But our struggles are nothing really compared to what it has been like for people with AIDS or the LGBTQ+ community.
Fortunately, over the past few decades, things have improved in the U.S. Medication allows people to live with HIV (thanks in large part to activists at ACT UP and TAG that that Red Hot helped fund in the early 1990s) and just recently two people who identify as lesbians were elected governors for the first time. But sadly, that’s not the case in much of the Global South. It’s shocking that HIV infection in sub-Saharan African remains at roughly the same level as when we released Red Hot + Riot in 1992. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 71% of people living with HIV, a devastating reality where 75% of global HIV related deaths and 65% of new infections occur. Of the 38.3 million people living with HIV worldwide, 27.3 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa; 7.8 million of the 27.3 million infected people are in South Africa including about 6.3 million young adults and children. To put that in context, 11% of humans live in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it accounts for over 71% of the global impact of AIDS in terms of infections and mortality.
The stigma around men who have sex with other men, women’s lack of resources and agency and the vilification of sex workers and drug addicts has inhibited progress to aid the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Often ignorance is used to distance the culture from topics like intimate partner violence, sex education, the LGBTQ+ community and women’s lack of agency and access to care. Unfortunately, young women and girls bear the brunt of the impact from cultural silence and their pain and misfortune is passed onto future generations. The HIV/AIDS epidemic’s root is the intersection of structural and cultural setbacks in awareness, acceptance, understanding and treatment. Music hasn’t been able to change that – even supercharged with Fela’s Afrobeats and activism – but it remains a powerful force to raise awareness and make people reflect on the devastation of this preventable disease around the world.
According to the CDC, AIDS in Africa peaked in 2002, the year Red Hot + Riot was released, at 4.69 million people infected the prior year. Now, 20 years later there remains over 25 million people infected with HIV on the Continent. To put that in context, the total number of COVID cases in Africa is projected to be about 4 million, with around a hundred thousand deaths. The estimated annual deaths from AIDS in Africa in 2018 was 470,000. In a global context, worldwide deaths from COVID to date is the tragic number of 6.61 million people. Over 40 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses.
In “Water No Get Enemy,” Fela Kuti embodied a philosophy larger than his music. “If your child dey grow, a water he go use/ If water kill your child, na water you go use.” Fela symbolically compares an institution to a parent who continues to use water after their child drowns. Regardless of setbacks, the community must continue to provide solutions for our social ailments. Fela conveys that living necessities are non-negotiable regardless of circumstance. The charge to support vulnerable people fighting against global pandemics is non-negotiable.
We cannot let the silent continue to suffer. “Ko s’ohun to’le se k’o ma lo’mi o,” Fela writes. “There is nothing you can do without water.”
Afrobeat star Davido‘s three-year-old son, Ifeanyi Adeleke, died on Monday (Oct. 31) at the Nigerian singer’s Lagos home in what appears to be a drowning. According to BBC News, a police spokesperson confirmed the child’s death, which Davido and his fiancé, chef/influencer Chioma Rowland, have not yet commented on publicly. At press time a spokesperson for the singer had no official comment on the incident.
A police spokesperson told BBC News that one of the couple’s domestic staff called police at 10 p.m. local time on Monday about the incident; the officer also reportedly confirmed that 8 members of Davido’s staff have been invited in for questioning. “We are reviewing the CCTV cameras to get additional information about the circumstances of his death,” police spokesperson Benjamin Hundeyin said.
“His body has been deposited in the morgue. We are in touch with his parents. In fact they were with us last night.” Neither Davido (born David Adeleke) — one of Africa’s biggest cross-over pop stars — nor Rowland were home at the time of their son’s death according to an Associated Press report.
Davido’s 2018 single “Fall” became the longest-charting Nigerian song in history in 2019 and in the years since the Atlanta-born star has branched out with a number of high-profile collaborations with everyone from Stefflon Don (“Fia”), Popcaan (“Risky”), Chris Brown (“Blow My Mind”), Brown and Young Thug (“Shopping Spress”), Lil Baby (“So Crazy”), Nicki Minaj (“Holy Ground”) and Nas and Hit-Boy (“Birthday Cake”); the latter four appeared on Davido’s cameo-packed 2020 collection A Better Time.
Burna Boy lands his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart as “Last Last” captures first place on the chart dated Oct. 15. The single climbs from the runner-up spot after a 9% increase in weekly plays made it the most-played song on U.S. monitored R&B/hip-hop stations in the week ending Oct. 9, according to Luminate.
“Last Last” gives Burna Boy his first Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart-topper with his second career entry. He previously reached a No. 26 best with “Ye” in 2019. With its ascent, “Last” also halts the record-breaking stay of Future’s “Wait for U,” featuring Drake and Tems, which logged an unprecedented 14th week at No. 1 on the chart last week.
Plus, the new champ brings a former R&B hit to the summit via a sample. “Last” prominently samples Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” which reached No. 6 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay in 2001.
The new champ adds to the Afrobeats genre’s mounting presence on R&B/hip-hop radio. It’s the genre’s third No. 1 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay in the past year, after the 10-week reign of Wizkid’s “Essence,” featuring Tems, beginning last November and a one-week visit for CKay’s “Love Nwantiti” in February. “Last Last” also retains its status as one of the top Afrobeats songs in the U.S., ranking at No. 2 on the latest Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart. The track previously clocked eight weeks at No. 1 from July to September.
Elsewhere, “Last” repeats at its No. 3 peak thus far on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, which ranks songs by combined audience at adult and mainstream R&B/hip-hop radio stations. There, the single adds 8% in weekly audience to reach 14.6 million in the week ending Oct. 9. Similarly, “Last” holds at its current No. 8 peak on Rhythmic Airplay, with a 9% improvement in weekly plays.
Thanks to its strength at R&B/hip-hop and rhythmic radio, “Last” advances 29-24 on the all-genre Radio Songs chart. There, it surges 18% to 22.3 million in total radio audience. Radio airplay, in turn, helps the track lift 49-44 on the Billboard Hot 100, which combines radio airplay with sales and streams to arrive at its rankings.
