Nina Simone, the American singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist, once said that an artist’s duty, as far as she was concerned, was to reflect the times. It’s a line that has outlived her and is quoted so often, but it keeps resurfacing because every generation of musicians eventually has to answer the question it poses. Do they speak, or do they sing past the noise?
The British pop singer Ed Sheeran is the latest to face that question, and his answer, or perhaps his reaction to the controversy, has drawn criticism. After Macklemore was removed from the U.S. leg of Sheeran's Loop Tour following a pro-Palestinian speech he delivered onstage, Sheeran said the tour promoter made the decision. He defended his choice to keep his own platform out of politics.
Sheeran has said he doesn't use his platform for politics because his audience includes children and people from different backgrounds, and he doesn't see it as his place to steer them toward a political position. It's a defensible instinct on its face. But the backlash, since he made the statement, has been immediate and unforgiving.
The criticism raised a broader question: even when an artist chooses not to take a political position, can that choice ever be entirely separate from politics?
But this conversation goes beyond the global pop scene. Nigerian music has its own long history of artistes using, avoiding, or negotiating the political weight of their platforms. Fela Kuti represents one end of that spectrum, building his music and public identity around political confrontation.
Songs like “Zombie” and “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” directly confronted a military state, delivered with enough force that the government responded with real violence. The 1977 raid on his Kalakuta Republic compound remains one of the starkest reminders of what it could cost an artiste to refuse silence.
Beyond Fela, other Nigerian musicians also turned their attention to the country’s politics. William Onyeabor, the reclusive funk musician whose sound has only recently found a global audience, used his 1982 album “Hypertension” to address Nigeria’s leaders directly. On “Politicians,” he pleaded with party leaders and their supporters to abandon the era's dirty tactics and think, for once, about the country’s future rather than the next election cycle.
It’s a strikingly direct ask for a song built on synths and groove, and it is easy to forget, listening to Onyeabor’s catalogue today, how much of it was quietly preoccupied with the state of the nation. Sonny Okosun, too, spent much of the 1970s and 80s writing songs that took direct aim at apartheid and colonial exploitation across the continent, treating Nigerian music as a genuinely pan-African political instrument rather than a strictly domestic one.
As Nigeria's problems multiplied through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, that instinct didn't disappear; it learned to share space with the music's other, more commercial ambitions. Artistes of that era rarely built entire albums around protest the way Fela had, but they found room for it anyway, often within the same project that was built on the themes of love, romance and good times.
2Baba’s debut album, Face 2 Face, is the clearest example. “African Queen” off the album made him a continental star and remains one of the most beloved love songs in Nigerian pop history, but the same album carried “Police Skit,” a pointed, unflinching account of police brutality.
Wande Coal did something similar a few years later: an artiste capable of writing “Ololufe,” tender enough to romanticise the smallest gesture between lovers, also recorded “Se Na Like This” on his debut album, Mushin 2 Mo' Hits, where he turned his attention to the country's dysfunction and asked, plainly, whether this was really what Nigeria was supposed to look like.
What these examples demonstrate, though, is not one correct model for the Nigerian artiste. Fela made political confrontation central to his art. Onyeabor folded political criticism into funk. 2Baba and Wande Coal moved between romance, entertainment and social commentary. Their differences matter because they show that political expression in music has never had a single format or obligation.
That distinction becomes more important as Afrobeats has grown into a global commercial force. The music increasingly travels across markets, and some artistes have built careers around subjects that require little cultural translation: love, nightlife, aspiration, success. Political specificity can be harder to export. That does not mean globalisation has made Nigerian music apolitical, or that commercial ambition automatically produces silence.
It does, however, create another tension for artistes whose music now has to move between very different audiences and markets. Falz and Burna Boy offer two different examples of how Nigerian artistes have approached political expression as their careers have grown. Falz has built a meaningful part of his identity around direct commentary, from “This Is Nigeria” to his visible presence during the #EndSARS protests.
For a stretch, Burna Boy seemed to position himself as an heir to Fela's tradition, invoking him directly and writing with direct political criticism, before becoming less consistently political in his public output in recent years. Their trajectories, one sustained and one more intermittent, say something about how different artistes negotiate the relationship between music, politics and the expectations attached to their platforms.
None of this means every artiste owes the public a political stance. But it would also be too easy to pretend that silence has no meaning simply because it is voluntary. When an artiste with millions of listeners chooses not to speak about an issue, audiences are free to interpret that choice, question it and decide what it says to them.
An artiste's duty to reflect the times is real, but duty and mandate are not the same thing. The moment speaking up becomes compulsory, it stops functioning as conviction and starts functioning as a box ticked to satisfy an audience that has grown accustomed to treating silence as evidence of guilt.
That instinct has only sharpened in the age of social media, where an artiste's every caption is parsed for political implications and neutrality is punished as cowardice within hours, whether or not the artiste has anything genuine to say.
An artiste can make a political statement because they genuinely believe in it, because their management believes it is strategically useful, or because they feel pressured to say something. Likewise, an artiste can remain silent because they are indifferent, disagree with the dominant position around them, do not understand the issue well enough to speak responsibly, or believe their professional platform is not the place for it. From the outside, those motives can be difficult to distinguish.
The better standard, ultimately, is that the choice has to remain a choice. Artistes should feel free to reflect the times when the times move them to, without an industry or an online audience deciding for them what that reflection must look like or when it must arrive.
As Nigeria approaches the 2027 general election, the question of where public figures stand will inevitably return. Some artistes will speak, others will lend their platforms to candidates or causes, and some will choose to stay out of the conversation. Their audiences may agree or disagree with those choices, but the expectation that every artiste must speak should not become a measure of their worth or the sincerity of their work.
