Alté, Nigeria's emancipated pop scene: 'People aren't used to being free'
Just after the release of his debut album, Mandy and the Jungle, 26-year old Santi is relieved. “I feel like I gave birth,” he says. “I don’t know how that feels, but if I could I’m sure it would kinda feel like that.”
We’re in his flat in Victoria Island, an affluent area in Lagos. The near constant stream of visitors on a weekday afternoon reflects his position as one of the pioneers of alté: not a music genre, but a whole mindset in Nigerian music. Artists who align themselves with the scene are known for blending and fusing a variety of sounds, from R&B, soul and rap to Afrobeats and indie guitar music. Alté (which stands for alternative) draws heavily on western and Nigerian influences, and puts creativity, individuality and a sense of rebellion are at its core – qualities at odds with Nigeria’s conservative culture, where, in a country dominated by Christian and Muslim values, those who go against the grain are often treated with suspicion, derision or bewilderment.
Santi, who describes his own sound as “every genre of music with an alternative twist”, released a series of successful singles before dropping his album. Freaky is a slow and moody R&B song about a cheating woman; midtempo tracks Rapid Fire and Sparky both combine Santi’s ragga-infused flow with silky R&B vocals.
Producers, stylists and artists pop in and out of Santi’s flat, all dressed in the same distinctive style associated with Lagos’s current crop of cool kids: the men in baggy trousers, trainers and T-shirts, the women in miniskirts and crop tops. If hair isn’t hidden under a baseball cap or a bucket hat, it’s either closely cropped, dyed brightly or, like Santi’s, locked. Then there are the alté staples: jewellery, layered necklaces, the occasional septum or nostril piercing, and sunglasses; the smaller the frame, the better.
They greet each other with the affection of people who have known each other for years – most of them have and frequently collaborate, something that is key to the scene’s success. “They’re all just trying to be free,” says Santi as he settles down on the couch. “They will stop at nothing to keep creating.”
Santi says they’ve been inspired by the 90s music scene in Nigeria, artists such as Lagbaja and Baba Fryo. “They were on some next shit – there was no formula to anything.” But as the Afropop sound began to dominate the music scene in Nigeria – and has since gone global with artists like Wizkid, Davido, Runtown and Tiwa Savage – some artists felt there was little room for those who embraced different types of music.
“If you want to express yourself so much, and no one is giving you what you want, you just do it yourself,” says 22-year-old singer and producer Odunsi, whose sound is a heady mix of R&B, funk and Nigerian Afrobeat; his recent single Tipsy was a collaboration with UK pop success Raye. “I think that’s what’s happening: the kids outgrew a lot of the things that were being offered to them.”
Enter the internet and SoundCloud, where many alté artists got their start. They were able to bypass the major blogs and radio stations that typically pave the route to success, and release the music they wanted, whenever they wanted. “The charts would be split into ‘SoundCloud artist’ and ‘mainstream artist,’” says 22-year-old Lady Donli, a longtime fixture on the alté scene. “But now you can be a SoundCloud artist and be popping. You can be selling out shows in Lagos, you can be doing tours in England, America. It’s a shift in the industry.”
SoundCloud also meant that people outside Nigeria, particularly Nigerians in the diaspora, could access and embrace their sound. “The first set of people that were receptive to it were Nigerians outside Nigeria,” says Odunsi. “They directly saw the value in us. You speak to a lot of young people and they’d be like, ‘I’ve not been listening to Nigerian music for a while and I just started listening again.’”
But this proximity to the diaspora, often thought of as wealthy in comparison to the population back home, and the middle-class upbringing of some of the scene’s leading voices, has led to criticism. Some have labelled the artists as privileged rich kids and derided the scene as pretentious and elitist, something Odunsi rejects. “If anything is classist music, it’s Nigerian pop,” he says. “They talk about things the average Nigerian is never going to attain. The aim [of alté] is not to isolate anything, it’s to let more people be expressive. People aren’t used to being free, they aren’t used to seeing expression, so they don’t know how to react to it.”
Lady Donli understands why some might think of alté as elitist, but says it’s not the scene’s intention, which is to include anyone open-minded. “If you’re about expressing yourself and not conforming to the norm, no one [in the scene] is going to be like, ‘You’re not alté enough’,” she says. Instead, she says, the lack of inclusion is a result of the focus on Lagos as the country’s entertainment hub. “You have people making music in Port Harcourt, but the greater Nigerian scene doesn’t know them because they’re not in Lagos,” she says. “If only one state is representing what the music industry is, that in itself is exclusionary.”
As for the future of the scene, who knows? Santi sees it “going crazy”, Odunsi sees it ushering in an “evolution of expression” in Nigerian music, and Donli thinks there may be another rebellion afoot, one that will in turn sweep alté aside. “I’d be happy if that happens, because there’s another set of people trying to do great things.”