After Alté

Chidinma Iwu on Afrodrill as the genre of recalcitrance.

In 2010 or so, Alté music was created by a rap group of now thirty-somethings, DRB Lasgidi, as a genre that fuses indie music, dancehall, reggae, and Afrobeats. At the time, I embraced it for being different—trying a little too hard to be different, sure, but in a way that was still cool. No matter how bizarre you sounded—even in ways that piss people off—it was okay. Alté was a niche genre with barely a culture and fanbase. Just young Nigerian millennials playing with sounds that would normally not appeal to a lot of music lovers.

But I saw this quickly change in 2019 when the Old Nolly aesthetic peaked globally and African Gen Zers wanted to dance to songs that felt as unconventional as they thought the Y2K style to be. To reintroduce audacious fashion from decades ago meant identifying with music that considered itself daring. I could not blame my peers, I was somewhat into the trends too. And so the obscure, lurking-in-the-shadows Alté genre developed a culture that pushed it to popularity. The problem is: Alté refused—and still refuses—to be criticized as a mainstream genre. For me, this is the height of its lack of appeal. Put side-by-side with other popular genres like Afrobeat, highlife, and Amapiano, I think of it as the rowdy African sister who shuffled too many bad decisions till she caught the eye of the richest man in town and touched gold.

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