A few days ago, one of Nigeria’s most exciting diss tracks since the beef between M.I Abaga and Vector in 2019 arrived courtesy of Wavestar, an underground rapper who fired a salvo of scathing insults at Raheem Okoya, otherwise known as SiRaheem. The video, posted on X, is supremely hilarious. In it, he and a supporting cast stationed behind him don fiery orange polos—the uniform of the factory workers at Eleganza, owned by SiRaheem’s father—in mock solidarity. More hilariously, the cast behind him hoists plastic chairs, swaying jauntily to the beat.
The diss track probably isn’t the diss track Hip Hop connoisseurs imagined would make such an impact this year. It’s lacking in technical prowess and finesse. Its bars are trotted out casually as opposed to being lacquered in metaphor or double entendres. But it has resonated deeply with audiences. It currently has 4.7 million views on X. This is mostly because it echoes sentiments that a vast swath of people share but have until now been coy to voice out.
The track opens with the lines “You not like us/ you ain’t a music (expletive).” This line, as emphatic as a full stop, embodies the directness and brazen contempt that underpins the track. In the first half of the line, Wavestar references Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us, where he positions Drake as an interloper in Black culture. It’s one of the few clever moments of the track; what he does here is: delineate boundaries on the music industry, placing his adversary—SiRaheem—outside.
Having undermined the music credibility of his target, he launches into a litany of his grievances: your music is ass; your acclaim is due to your father’s influence; your dad is ugly; you’re a mummy’s boy; “Sampled P Square on that (expletive), look at the (expletive) disrespect.” His biggest gripe however is with stakeholders in the industry and public figures who have furnished SiRaheem—who he views as untalented—with a platform. “Fuck NATIVE/ gave a platform to a trash artist/ all you (expletive) do is eye service.” He raps. “Fuck this industry” He continues exasperatedly.
It’s this portion of the track that is most stirring. Here we see a young striving artist who has spent years building in the background—organizing pop-up events; participating in ciphers; spamming social media comments sections with song links—with little to show for it, lashing out at an industry that has platformed a rich kid of questionable talent. It’s a story we’ve seen countless times: the rich kid who saunters into an industry, skipping several levels, gliding past the customary woodshedding period, instead vaulting straight to the center of the public gaze; not for his talent or hard work but as a result of the resources at his disposal. It’s also a feeling everyone can relate to; indignance, resentment, discontent, umbrage. If you’ve ever worked hard at passing an exam, spent nights hunched over a mound of books, only to see someone else pay their way to a passing grade, you know the feeling. If you’ve reached into the depths of your soul to conjure romantic gestures to impress a girl, only for an older man with more money to swoop down like a hawk and steal her with grand displays of wealth, you know the feeling. If you’ve ever had to chafe against the current of nepotism or privilege and lost, you know the feeling; the sense of powerlessness in the face of a system devoid of justice.
On why this diss track has resonated so emphatically with the youth, once you consider the current state of Nigerian society, where nepotism reigns supreme, it starts to make sense. Every year, a deluge of graduates is funneled out of the university system into a labor market ruled by extreme nepotism. Connected kids land favorable opportunities and quickly rise through the ranks, while others are left to scramble for scraps. The same problem has existed in the Nigerian music industry for a while now and has started to fester. Nascent artists are no longer confident that their talent offers them a fighting chance at success; financial buoyancy instead appears to be a stronger indicator. Young Nigerians have come to view this diss as a metaphor for their lived experience, and throwing their weight behind it functions as an act of defiance.
Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology and neuroscience, in his seminal book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, explores how universal the concept of justice is within the animal kingdom. Through experiments and hermetic arguments, he challenges the notion that justice and fairness are purely cultural constructs, instead showing that all animals, through a version of game theory, establish a sense of justice. For example, primates reject unequal rewards for the same task, displaying frustration when a peer receives a better reward for the same task. With his research, he establishes justice as an almost universal principle, showing how undermining justice has fomented revolutions and dissent in human civilization since time immemorial.
Wavestar’s diss, for all its technical lapses, shines because it taps into the collective indignation of young people. Where other attempts at dissing—Wizkid’s shots at Davido and the row between Odumodublvck and Prettyboy DO for example—have amounted to a little more than subliminal shots on social media, Wavestar’s diss is both intrepid and lucid about his grievances. However, a lot of these grievances are misplaced. He dissed several influencers for propping SiRaheem up, forgetting that these influencers earn a living from promoting people and products. Are they supposed to turn down his money because some people think he’s not talented? Similarly, his criticism of THE NATIVE ignores the fact that they spotlight talented underground acts every month—Rigo Kamp, Toye, and Azanti being some of the alumni of their uNder series. Pop culture journalism sometimes requires commenting on individuals who are relevant to the pop culture scene, regardless of their prowess. But still, his diss embodies the distinctive quality of every successful diss track: fearless honesty in stating one’s opinions.
