Aside from artistes displaying the lavish spoils of being rich and famous — exotic cars, parties, sporting clothes too thick for the hot Lagos sun — sex and sexuality are major themes that have dominated contemporary Nigerian music.
Male musicians have mastered the art, singing about all kinds of sexual activities that defy human abilities. “Fuck me till your body speaks to me again / I go respond when you don feel am for you belle oh / Underwear dey leak / She dey wet my bedsheet,” Victony cautions his lover in his hit, Risk.
On social media, there have been multiple campaigns for women to tap into their sexuality, express that they have desires, unabashedly and unafraid, sexually liberated in a modern world.
If you listen to any of the music by the female acts topping the charts, this has barely been the case. A few female musicians have tapped into sexual liberation, most notably Niniola, but only in the periphery. This was not always the case.
The reign of Omotoyosi Janet “Saint Janet” Ajilore in the 2010s is a classic “you had to be there” period in Southwest Nigeria. Those who had liberal parents or were exposed to secular underground music by their environment are likely to be familiar with the name. She’s a sonorous musician whose patron saint moniker would give a normie the expectation of a sanctimonious gospel artist. But her music would leave a chorister fervently singing more about the end times because of the sexual escapades she preaches in them. Some may argue that her music style models after Rosaline “Yaboskan” Iyabode, a UK-based female artist who reportedly debuted in 1980. Apart from writeups about Yaboskan’s remastered old albums, there are few of her songs online.
It’s no secret that conversations around sexuality in Nigeria are inconsistent, scarce, and largely close-minded. These conversations mostly exist within the “respected and accepted” context of marriage and gender. Anything out of the orthodoxy quickly gets the public’s side-eye, with participators branded immoral, perverse, and promiscuous. But unconfined by society’s moral standard, Saint Janet’s music casually invites listeners to talk about sex.
St. Janet needs no introduction to the members of St. Bottles Cathedral, an assembly of her music lovers who are characteristically liquor guzzlers anticipating their next gbana session. She sings mainly in Yorùbá, borrowing influences from Juju, Fuji, Highlife and Tungba, including church hymns and gospel songs. But there’s a twist in her music: she flips the Christian songs into obscene, jaw-dropping sexual narratives of lustful desires. Interestingly, at the beginning of every song and performance, she leads with slow-tempo praise-and-worship, acknowledging that a higher power gave her her talent and then welcomes her audience. Then, an introduction of herself, St. Janet, AKA the General Overseer of Sinners’ Chapel, before she bursts into her high-tempo erotic tunes.
On a keener observation, it’s easy to tie her gospel influence and the “saint” in her name to her religious background as a chorister in the Cherubim and Seraphim Church. But the name came from Los Kenge, her former boss and Juju musician, who observed she had a calm demeanour and always kept quiet, except when she got on the mic. After St. Janet ventured into her solo Juju career, she infused vulgarity to blow up and secure bigger bags. If an attribute of early Juju music was to use sexual innuendos to troll modesty, and a selling point of Fuji is to sketch euphemisms to court carnal desires, Saint Janet aims to distribute it everywhere, all up in faces like the posters of politicians. Call it flagrant, indecent, or blasphemous—you may not be wrong. But you’d also be correct to say there’s a heady sense of feminism and sexual liberty in her music.
There’s also a humourous side to her songs, from big booty worship and praise of aphrodisiacs that can help men dickmatise their wives, to the legend of Iya Lai, a neighbourhood adulteress. The song is a parody of the popular Christian song He’s Alive, Amen.
Even her switch from a devout female chorister to a singer of sexcapades is a reference point of freedom from our deeply conservative society. No wonder the Music Advertising Association of Nigeria (MAAN) and Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria (PMAN) placed a ban on her music after the release of her “Faaji Series” live audio CD in 2010, in which she also sings explicitly about sex, restricting her to only live performances. It’s hard to ignore the ban on her music as a hypocritical sexist move in a climate where barely-clothed female vixens have become a regular fixture in the music videos of male musicians.
Contemporary acts like Ayra Starr and Tems have been offered to the public as perfect examples of modern hypersexual women, rocking big hair, tiny clothes, cutting men off, flirting with men. But the flirtations of their lyrics pale in comparison with St. Janet, who is deeply rooted in the business of courting her partners. This is the form of female sexual liberation that’s missing.
For Chiamaka Dike, features editor at the women’s magazine Marie-Claire Nigeria, it’s the hypersexual branding that has sucked up the air and compelled women in music to shy away from talking about the sex they had and enjoyed in mainstream music. “Sex sells. Music companies and artists know this. It’s why these days, in the songs and music videos that babes put out, they sexually objectify themselves. So, it’s no longer natural for Nigerian female artists to express their sexuality and sex life as art,” she said.
But she acknowledges the role that a conservative society plays in making this the case. “It’s hard to see women that are unapologetically themselves and break away from the popular approach to music. The ripple effect of being sexually liberal in music is public criticism.”
St. Janet has addressed eroticism in her music as her butter and bread, and stated vulgarity isn’t new and peculiar to her alone. In an interview with ThisDay, she said: “In my music, I’ve not said anything that’s not been said before by the likes of Sir Shina Peters, Obesere and King Sunny Ade. The entire Hip-Hop generation of today’s about sex. So what have I done wrong? Is it because I am a woman? Women are the ones who’re used as mere toys for sexual appeasement of the male in many musical videos. Why does anyone not see anything wrong in that? I’m fighting for women.”
