Yemi Alade Has Always Been Rebelling — You Just Didn’t Know

When Alade started releasing music professionally in the early 2010s, she was especially interested in the visual and performance aspects of music. Her energetic records demanded stirring, hands-on depictions. For inspiration, she turned to Beyoncé.

“She was everything I wanted to be,” she says, “I would watch [her performances], I would score her, I would try to sing like her. I just loved her! And I also had a choir mistress in church who I really loved the way she rendered her music.”

In 2019, Alade was among the African artists who helped Beyoncé achieve a sprawling depiction of the continental sound on The Lion King: The Gift. She appeared on “My Power” and “Don’t Jealous Me,” being among the only artists to get multiple slots on the album, along with Mr Eazi. For a section of international listeners, it was an introduction to the powerful voice of Alade.

However, for the majority of the African and international fan base, it was another feather in a cap full of them. After releasing her debut album King of Queens in 2015, she’s released nine other projects — four being EPs — and the latest, Rebel Queen, which is out now.

Rebel Queen has been in the works for a while now. Some of its songs were created as far back as four years ago and some as recently as this year — a montage of Alade’s best selves through different periods. “I have been in the process of making and unmaking, even selecting the songs that made the project was so difficult because all the songs were so significant to me and to the project,” she says. “Eventually, the underlying focus of the album is to compile music that is nostalgic.”

Representing the guitar-laden sound of highlife was especially important, as it was a sound she often heard growing up in Abia state, where her mother is from. “The idea is for people to listen to the album and get a buffet of a few other sounds,” Alade says.

Her choice of features was also informed by this vision. Ziggy Marley’s team had reached out for a collaboration for a song titled “Look Who’s Dancing” and during the creation process, they sent another song to him. That latter record ended up being “Peace And Love,” whose stirring reggae production sets the base for a duet which promotes the positive values entrenched in its title. “Tell me why I need a visa when I wanna see my brother, going to Uganda and I need fifty dollars / Is this the price that we pay for love?” she asks in an inspired verse, quite timely considering how hard it is for Africans to travel around the continent, due to financial and legal constraints.

As an artist, Alade favors homage — to people, places and memories — each song and visual attuned to what happens elsewhere, particularly across the continent. This supplies the peerless support she gets from other parts of Africa, most especially across East and Central Africa, as she’s often sung in Swahili. A precedent for Alade in this direction is Angélique Kidjo, unarguably one of the greatest African musicians ever.

Both artists are frequent collaborators — Angélique first appeared in “Shekere,” a feel-good banger off Alade’s Woman of Steel album in 2019. Then two years later she got on the Grammy-winning Mother Nature, appearing on one of its more popular songs, “Dignity.” On Rebel Queen the duo have their third song together, “African Woman.” An effervescent collaboration, chants and vibrant affirmations swell within the production. “She’s my music mom [and] I love her dearly,” Alade says. “Which other African woman would be on the song if it’s not Angelique? It had to be her.”

On Rebel Queen, one hears a sustained maturity in Alade even as she touches on hallmarks she’s established throughout her career. For one, her stories have grown sharper, distilled into the sounds she’s choosing as much as the words she’s singing. The warm riffs in “Ije Love” unfurl like a wedding procession in Enugu or Owerri, in Southeastern Nigeria, close to the birthplace of this grand kind of highlife music. “Big Vibe” fuses svelte R&B sensibilities with an Afropop bounce that elicits a memorable Alade performance, a best-of-the-year, a ballad only she could create.

“The beautiful part is that most of my songs have stories in them,” she explains about the visual world of the album, “so it’s almost kind of easy for the director to go in that direction. On the Rebel Queen album I intend to do a lot of directing; I intend to bring the visuals to light in their unadulterated form. I want it to feel real.”

The evening before Alade spoke with us, she’d had a listening party in Lagos. It was the album’s fourth and final run, having been in Paris, London and New York, all in July. “It has been very eventful,” she says. “It’s the stuff made of dreams. People say it and they never do it, but we did it.”

In times like these, Alade has sometimes even created music through the activities, touching base with local musicians in cities she goes to. She does this to feel “the vibration,” she says. “What better way to leave an imprint on a society other than a collaboration with an indigene from that place?” And with a consistent demand for the best sound facilities, she’s been able to create magic on the road, her energy lighting up the world within and beyond Africa.

She’s been a first-class ticket holder to the flight of Afrobeats to global horizons, and her observation about the movement’s impact goes even beyond music. “Over the years, a lot of international media, whenever they focus on Africa, they key-in on poverty,” she says. “They key-in on buildings that are not exactly habitable, but people are actually living there. They key-in on a very low level of livelihood when it comes to Africa. That has been the norm for many years that it has made even the Africans in diaspora, who have never been to Africa, assume that Africa is nothing but dirt. But here is Afrobeats saving the day, giving a much clearer picture to the reality of Africa.”

The previous statement rendered in a dramatic lilt, Alade however recognizes that there is poverty, but there is also love, flash, dance — all of those things. Rebel Queen is her latest and, by critical metrics, her best album. “On this album, I am my own muse,” she says. “It is very personified, the idea of Rebel Queen. As I reflect on my journey so far, from day one till now, I find that I’ve always been one to rebel. And my rebellion is displayed in my choice of hairstyles, my choice of clothing, even the way my videos are put together.”