Top 10 Best Nigerian Musicians of All Time

The oldest artists on this list — King Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey — built juju music from Yoruba traditions in the 1960s and 70s, taking it international through the 1980s. Fela Kuti was doing something different in the same decades: fusing highlife with jazz and funk into Afrobeat, using it explicitly as protest music against military rule. Sade Adu found a global audience in the 1980s through a completely different lane, sophisti-pop, largely outside Nigeria's domestic music scene. What connects Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, Tiwa Savage, Tems, and 2Baba today is that modern Afrobeats absorbed pieces of all of those traditions — the political edge, the guitar-driven rhythms, the international polish — into one sound built from the start for a global streaming audience rather than a domestic one.

Listeners discovering Nigerian music through today's Afrobeats stars often assume the genre is a recent invention. It isn't — Afrobeats is the latest expression of a lineage that runs through highlife, juju, and Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, each of which was itself already a fusion of West African rhythm with outside influences (jazz, funk, Western pop). The artists at the top of this list earned their place by originating a sound others then built on, not simply by being the most commercially successful in their moment — which is why a figure like Fela Kuti, who never had a Billboard Hot 100 hit, ranks above artists who did.