Do we like Yemi Alade?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on harm with real advocacy work, held back from higher only because her own words on LGBTQ+ rights are thin.
Yemi Alade is one of the biggest female names in African pop, and her career has been a long, steady climb rather than one big bang. Her first solo Grammy nomination came in the Best African Music Performance category for the song Tomorrow. She told CNN it felt “surreal”, and that she'd almost thought the moment might never come.
Her philosophy shows in how she talks about the knockers: she says she looks away from opinions that don't resonate and keeps moving. In a mid-2024 chat she brushed off a viral claim about her career as “stupidity at its peak”. That's a woman who doesn't feed the rumour mill, which is handy in a business that runs on it.
Her one proper public blow-up was in November 2024, when she accused Cool FM and its sister brand of keeping her songs off air for a year after she skipped one of their events. She said she'd apologised and called their boss, and told them they were not gatekeepers. The article carries no reply from the stations, so it's one side of a spat, and a fairly human one.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty from her: no slide into conspiracy theories, no culture-war grifting, no dodgy company. She was announced as a headliner at Global Black Pride in Atlanta in 2024, billed as the first African music artist to headline a US Pride festival. One critic argued mainstream stars on that bill had no public record of queer advocacy, so she gets a pass, not a gold star.
Away from the stage she was named a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador in 2020, with a focus on gender equality and inequality. Spotify also picked her as an EQUAL Africa artist, a programme that boosts female artists, in September 2024. For a woman working in a male-dominated scene, that's putting the platform to use.
The recent news is mostly music. Shawa Shawa, released in November 2025, was written by Alade and leads into her seventh album, a project she says is meant to tell stories. There's no fresh scandal, and we left out gossip-site chatter about her personal life.