TEMS’ Last Year Has Been Historic, The Afrobeat Star Is Just Getting Started

June 15, 2022

TEMS first came on my radar in 2020 during the pandemic. I heard her 2019 song, “Try Me” and was drawn in by the uniqueness of her tone and her look. Her features immediately reflected her African heritage and when I did more research, I found out she was a part of a wave of Nigerian artists making “alte” or alternative music for the next generation. As polished as she is, TEMS still operated in a field and in a country where male artists and in this case black male artists dominate the landscape. Tiwa Savage, the first African artist to win Best African Act at Europe’s Music Award was the biggest female African artist on the planet at one point, and despite it all, still found herself marginalized behind her male counterparts.

TEMS climb to the top resembles Tiwa’s in some ways. She too has to solidify her presence in an industry that capitalizes on women’s beauty while also trying to hypersexualize them. But then that’s what makes TEMS story so different. Despite how over-sexualized music is right now, TEMS’ music and her biggest singles play the middle, embracing her natural beauty while also centering the attention on her lyrics and vocal range. Songs like “Free Mind”, and “The Key” focus on the struggles of self-doubt and self-care while her 2020 and 2021 album covers centers the listener on the most important person which is her. Her career ‌has shown how talent and authenticity steer listeners toward artists and drives the artists toward success.

Her appearance on Drake’s 2021, Certified Lover Boy, on “Fountains” carries on the tradition of The 6 God’s collabs with Afrobeats the way he did with Wizkid, but beyond that, it added to the fire she generated that year. All of her guest appearances along with her EP proved powerful, but in the end, she got her biggest success from a sample of one of her solo performances on Genius’s Open Mic segment. In roughly 30 seconds, TEMS used her voice to catapult listeners to a different place.

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