Asake

Both of Asake's parents played fuji pioneer Ayinde Barrister's records at home, and by his own account it left him no choice: "if both of your parents liked Michael Jackson," he told Office Magazine, "there's no way... you won't end up liking Michael Jackson." Barrister is still the singer Asake names first. "I love Barrister a lot, because of the soul in his voice," he told Rolling Stone. "When you talk about music, real music, it is Barrister's for me." The debt runs past the ear, too: Asake's 2022 song "Dull" pulls a sample directly from Barrister's 1980 record "Oke Agba."

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Asake on Success, Spirituality, and Searching for Peace Amid the Chaos (bio, Ayinde Barrister quote) ↗share

1980

Oke AgbaAyinde Barrister

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2022

DullAsake

listen forBarrister's "Oke Agba" rides on the talking drum and sakara hand percussion of classic fuji, his voice sliding into a rough, praise-singing chant. Listen for that same grain sampled inside "Dull," where the older recording's chant surfaces underneath Asake's own hook, a saxophone, and a modern Afrobeats low end — the fuji original literally embedded in the newer track, not just recalled in its style.

Asake spent two years asking the Lagos rapper and label boss Olamide to sign him to YBNL Nation before Olamide called him to his house in February 2022 and simply asked if he wanted in. Asked what that moment meant for his career, Asake didn't reach for a modest answer: "Olamide is like the lift and the stairs for me to get to the top," he told CNN. The two recorded "Omo Ope" together that year — Olamide's own verse riding the same beat — and it became the single that carried Asake into the mainstream.

listen: upstream & heresource: CNN — How Asake developed a boundary-pushing sound (Olamide quote, genre-blend quote) ↗share

2017

Wo!!Olamide

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2022

Omo OpeAsake

listen forOlamide's "Wo!!" is built almost entirely on one barked, repeated Yoruba word, "wo," punched over a stripped, hard-edged street beat — a hook that trusts a single chant to carry a whole song. "Omo Ope," the single that got Asake signed, borrows that same chant-first construction, its chorus built the same way, and Olamide himself is on it, dropping ad-libs and a verse over the amapiano-inflected beat that made the song a hit.

No interview has Asake naming King Sunny Adé, the singer and bandleader who carried jùjú music — a talking-drum tradition just upstream of the fuji Asake grew up on — to Island Records and the world in the 1980s. But Nigerian critics keep drawing the line anyway. "The continuation of indigenous music has been his major success," the journalist Ayomide Tayo told OkayAfrica, arguing that Asake took jùjú and fuji's vocal style "and put it on a new sonic template for a newer audience to understand" — the same job Adé once did for a different generation.

listen: upstream & heresource: OkayAfrica — Op-Ed ↗share

1982

MaajoKing Sunny Ade

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2022

TrabayeAsake

listen forKing Sunny Adé's 1982 "Maajo" carries its melancholy in the backing vocals, a choral hum sitting underneath his own laid-back, unhurried lead. The critic Chinonyelum Iwu heard the same combination on Asake's 2022 "Trabaye," writing that it "regurgitates Adé's peculiarly laid back, yet compelling drowsy pitch" over "multi layered orchestration," its backing vocals carrying a similar "familiar melancholia" — the older jùjú record's patient, choral hum resurfacing inside Asake's own arrangement forty years on.