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Olamide- Uy Scuti

Twelve tracks from an album named after a hypergiant star. Olamide has been the most important figure in Nigerian rap for fifteen years, and he is still finding new things to do.

UY Scuti, 2021

Olamide Adedeji is from Bariga, Lagos, and has had two careers running simultaneously. As an artist he is one of the most successful rappers in Nigerian history, and the leading figure in rapping in Yoruba rather than English — a choice that reshaped what the Nigerian mainstream sounded like.

As a label head, his YBNL Nation has developed an extraordinary run of talent: Fireboy DML, Asake, Adekunle Gold, Lil Kesh and others. Very few artists anywhere can point to a comparable record as a talent developer while still releasing their own albums.

UY Scuti takes its name from one of the largest known stars, and it is a deliberately relaxed, unhurried record — less concerned with hits than with mood.

What to listen for

"Rock" is the biggest and the most immediate — a warm, melodic record that shows how far he has moved from the hard street rap he started with.

"Want" and "PonPon" both feature FAVE, and she is the discovery worth chasing here — a young Nigerian singer with a distinctive, slightly raspy delivery.

"Somebody" with Phyno is the collaboration that matters most. Phyno raps in Igbo, Olamide in Yoruba, and the two of them together represent one of the most important partnerships in Nigerian music — a deliberate statement about regional languages in a country where English dominates the mainstream.

"ZaZoo Zehh" with Poco Lee and Portable is the outlier and became a phenomenon — a raw, street-level record from the Lagos underground that Olamide amplified.

"So Much More" and "Cup of Tea" are the most reflective, and "Julie" and "Need For Speed" the loosest.

Go deeper

Baddest Guy Ever Liveth (2013) and The Glory (2016) are the essential earlier albums, and Carpe Diem (2020) is the pivot toward the current sound.

The YBNL roster is the real legacy: start with Asake's Mr. Money With The Vibe, which is one of the most confident debuts anywhere in recent years.

Phyno deserves following for the Igbo-language rap tradition, which has a whole scene behind it in the southeast.

A closing note on the language question. Rapping in Yoruba rather than English was, when Olamide started, a commercial risk in a country whose media defaults to English. That it is now unremarkable is largely his doing, and the consequences run well beyond his own catalogue — Asake, Portable and a generation of street-pop artists are working in a lane he made viable.

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