The Afropop Girls Making This Summer Sexy

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On Friday, July 26, the day of the week new music drops regularly, three of the hottest pop stars out of Africa doled out the steamiest trifecta of releases this year. Nigerian singer Ayra Starr's latest song is literally about being hot. South African star Tyla came with a four-pack EP called WWP, short for We Wanna Party. And Ghanaian-American shapeshifter Amaarae broke barriers with her new single 'Girlie-Pop!' and its steamy, queer-coded music video. It was a day that crystallized a pattern that had been forming all year: the women of Afropop are bringing sexy back.
Much of their movement, like others across media right now, is Y2K-indebted. Skirts and tops have gotten microscopic, bottoms are being slung below the waist again, and lots of producers seem to be doing their best impressions of early Pharrell. But that time also came with some trends in how women's sexuality was marketed and received that we now find disturbing, to say the least. We can see that Britney Spears, the queen of Y2K, was someone whose personhood and sexuality was often devoured and exploited as she explored both as a young girl (her iconic and controversial 1999 Rolling Stone cover is an emblem of how complicated it is to make a teenager a sex symbol). We now know Janet Jackson was unfairly shamed and punished after Justin Timberlake exposed her pasty-covered breast during their 2004 Super Bowl performance. Today, while some of the cultural relics of that time have rolled back around, many young women may have more agency about why, when, and how they want to participate.
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It feels like that agency is what we're witnessing in Afropop. Ayra Starr — who emerged in 2021 as a cunning 19-year-old surrounded by cartoon butterflies and broken hearts — has grown more edgy in her dress and performance as she's gotten older. In May, she inched towards summer with the fiery 'Gimme Dat,' video featuring Wizkid, and last week, she finally released her much-anticipated new single 'Hot Body.' 'Body be dancing/Slow wine/Summer body/So fine,' she sings on the strip tease of a song. As she breadcrumbed the track on social media over the past few weeks, she could be seen hitting a seductive, TikTok ready dance to it with her girlfriends, and it truly looks like she's having a blast. Just a few days ago, on July 27, she giddily celebrated performing the song with Coldplay, who she's touring with as an opening act this summer. Before she took the stage, Chris Martin, who eagerly accompanied her on acoustic guitar, told the crowd, 'Ok, everybody, listen. We will do something special because this is Ayra Starr from Nigeria. She is going to be the world's biggest pop star soon and she has a new song called 'Hot Body' which I think is amazing. So please indulge us and join us for a big dance party.'
Dancing, of course, has been Tyla's thing since she captivated the mainstream with 'Water' in 2023. (Cute Y2K fashion has become a bit of a calling card for her, as it has for Starr. They've been friendly collaborators, both 23 years old.) The rollout and name of Tyla's new EP, WWP, takes cues from the popular nightlife chant '[Insert name of DJ or performer leading the crowd here], we wanna party!' That makes perfect sense for a girl who's always been about partying so hard you're soaked, whether with sweat or the contents of your plastic bottle. Tyla's WWP features 'Bliss,' a track whose music video spawned an excellent meme about being sexy and sad at once. It takes the quick cut between a scene of the singer fighting tears and another of her grinding against a silver sculpture in desert sand. 'Idk if we're supposed to shake ass or cry' one YouTube commenter wrote to the tune of 15,000 likes.
The full WWP EP includes two songs that debuted this month, one being 'Dynamite,' an energizing collaboration with Wizkid (it's the pair's first and feels reminiscent of Ayra Starr hopping on Star Boy's '2 Sugar' earlier in her rise). The song that really cements the sexy, though, is 'Mr. Media.' While the track lambasts the voyeuristic sensationalism she's faced in the public eye, she uses the second verse to remind herself why she shouldn't care: 'Bad bitch, I ain't always got time to talk/Too bad, yeah, I know I'm difficult/You'd be too if you had my visuals/You'd be too if you had material.'
Amaarae seems to be channeling a similar devil-may-care confidence as she gears up to release Black Star, her third studio album set to drop August 8. On Friday, she shared the second single, 'Girlie-Pop!' following the erotic 'S.M.O.' (for 'Slut Me Out'). 'Girlie-Pop!' ushers in this new era of Amaarae's powerfully, honing a familiar balance of softness, urgency, and cleverly sensual songwriting with a righteously queer arc. Using music as an extended allegory, she coos, 'I want you to take me from the top/Kiss me 'til I tell you, 'Make it soft'/One of us gotta bring this to a stop/Flip positions, switching genres 'til you make it pop.' In the moody video, Amaarae nearly sings into the mouth of another woman, the camera lingering on their lips. In other moments, their heads swirl around each other's face and neck. When that's not happening, the woman is DJing, potentially another bit of innuendo.
Amaarae's imagery and music has sometimes teetered towards homoerotic (in the 'S.M.O.' video, for example, one might say she's literally waxing a beautiful woman's ass) but 'Girlie-Pop!' marks a bold embrace of queerness for a Ghanaian artist of her magnitude. For years, Ghanaian lawmakers have notoriously been pushing virulent anti-LGBTQ legislation and now they have a president reportedly committed to passing them. Amaarae declaring that the video was shot in Ghana 'with loveeeeee' is a radical act. 'My real mission is for us to not think about sexuality, or to subvert it so much to the point where it subconsciously takes people away from that,' she told Galore about her last album, Fountain Baby, in 2023. 'I wanted to make the music so sexy and captivating that you kind of wouldn't think about what pronouns I was using, no matter if you are straight, gay, pansexual, whatever. That was my way of trying to slowly break that boundary that things have to be in boxes and confined and defined.'
So much of this Summer of Sexy has actually been brewing since 2024. Moliy's 'Shake It to the Max (Fly)' is currently one of the biggest songs in the world, and the Ghanaian singer first teased it back in October with a short snippet on TikTok. Today there have been 4.5 million videos made with a remix featuring dancehall stars Skillibeng and Shenseea on the app. In fact, there's been five remixes total, including versions with Sean Paul and Major Lazer. Though Moliy is African, 'Shake It to the Max' has always been a dancehall song, produced by Silent Addy and Disco Neal of the DJ duo Bashment Sound. On July 29, Billboard announced that the song had hit Number One on their Rhythmic Airplay chart, meaning it's a certified smash on American radio. It's also been sitting at Number One on the U.S. Afrobeats Song chart for 12 consecutive weeks, too. 'Shake It to the Max' has reached these heights as a viral anthem for baddies to let loose and whine their waists. Make sure you get out there and heed Moliy's call over the next month.
Loosies: More music to move to summer
Rema's 'Kelebu' and Theodora's 'Kongolese Sous BBL': So, in honor of the Summer of Sexy, I'm writing about these two at once, as Francophone singer Theodora's burgeoning hit is, in a way, an energetic ancestor to 'Kelebu,' Rema's excellent new party-starter. 'Kelebu' seems inspired by Bouyon, a high-octane dance music from Dominica, as well as Makossa from Cameroon and Coupé-décalé from Côte d'Ivoire (Theodora was born in Switzerland to Congolese parents and has lived all over the world). These are all threads Theodora has been pulling from the past few years, with the excellent 'Kongolese Sous BBL' becoming her biggest hit with well over 47 million streams on Spotify. Rema's closest collaborator, the producer London, also worked with Theodora on her song 'Massoko Na Mabele' from this past May.
Darkoo, 'Right Now' featuring Rvssian and Davido: Intuitively, Nigerian hitmaker Darkoo titled her June EP $exy Girl $ummer. 'A lot of the top people in the game who are making music aren't making music for girls,' she told Apple Music. 'They are making music that women like, but it's not about them, and that's what I'm doing. I want them to feel like the sexiest women in the world.' This song definitely does it as the openly queer Darkoo and enthusiastic Davido promise to give some fortunate ladies the world. The song samples Gyptian's Jamaican hit 'Whine Slow,' which Rvssian himself produced.
Daddy Lumba, 'Se Sumye Kasa A': This last Loosie is a tribute to Ghanaian legend Daddy Lumba, who died at age 60 on July 26. While he's known as a highlife maven, his music had diverse influences, from gospel to hip-hop, like you can hear on 2002's 'Se Sumye Kasa A.' 'Daddy Lumba really is a risk taker of his time,' Amaarae said in 2023, part of an interview she re-shared in memoriam of Lumba. She had praised his affinity for 'Bad bitches,' adding, 'At a time where male highlife artists were taking very romantic approaches to the way they were writing their music, Daddy Lumba said 'Look, I love the hoes and the hoes love me'.'
Made in Africa is a monthly column by Rolling Stone staff writer Mankaprr Conteh that celebrates and interrogates the lives, concerns, and innovations of African musicians from their vantage point. Don't forget to check out the songs we covered this month and more in the Made In Africa playlist.
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