I remember being 10, sitting in the backseat of my uncle’s light green Benz, the fabric seats already sticky from the day’s heat. The cassette deck crackled with some high-pitched, nasal melody—Benin music. My uncle sang along in a blend of pidgin and something older, deeper: words I didn’t understand as I don’t speak Benin, but the Ika language.

I had no idea that decades later this music, this energy, would resurface in my playlist, not through old tapes but through Spotify’s algorithm, disguised in trap drums and 808s. Yet here we are: Benin music is back, retooled, remixed, and reimagined by a new generation of artists like Rema and Shallipopi.

Rema has always been a mystery to the mainstream. You can’t quite box him in: not fully Afrobeats, not fully alté, not pop in the traditional sense. And, buried within his genre-bending sound is a spiritual fidelity to Benin heritage. Listen closely to “Woman” or “Azaman,” and you’ll hear the cadence, the syncopated rhythms that echo the traditional Benin festivals. The voice modulation, the chants, they are not accidents. They are echoes of ivory masks and coral beads.

But it is Shallipopi, or Crown Uzama, if we are calling royalty by name, who wears Benin like regalia. He doesn’t just make music; he makes street anthems baptized in Oba bloodlines. Words like evian on “Elon Musk” and “Laho” aren’t mere slang, they’re sonic fingerprints of a cultural resurgence. Aza, which many now recognize as shorthand for account numbers, has a deeper, older Benin etymology. It’s a reminder that our language has always traveled, often without our permission, and is now quietly inserting itself into Nigeria’s wider cultural lexicon.

Shallipopi’s success, his rise from TikTok snippets to nationwide acclaim, is also an ethnographic case study. For the first time in years, street culture is looking southward, beyond Lagos, past the Yoruba mainstream, into the spiritual and linguistic reservoirs of Edo State. Unlike older iterations of regional pride that stayed hyperlocal, this one is unapologetically national.

Interestingly, the resurgence isn’t only happening at the top. Enter 2Rymce, the newest voice on the block, whose most popular track, “Respect Your Elders,” plays like both a demand and a confession. The beat carries the DNA of traditional Benin drumming but is layered with futuristic synths. There’s an urgency in his voice, a reminder that youth doesn’t mean amnesia. He sings like someone who knows history is both a burden and a blueprint.

When I first heard “Respect Your Elders,” I paused. Not simply because of the beat, but because of the audacity. In an age where virality is often purchased through parody or profanity, here was someone invoking tradition, not as nostalgia, but as confrontation. The song reminded me of something beautiful and buoyant. It reminded me that culture isn’t static; it adapts, it shapeshifts. And, in music it roars back to life.

This new wave: Rema’s haunting falsettos, Shallipopi’s coated tongue, 2Rymce’s ancestral militancy, is not just musical. It’s a cultural restoration. It’s a rejection of the idea that only Lagos or Accra, or Jozi has the right to narrate urban cool. It is Benin City standing tall, not with borrowed sounds but with its lexicon and lore.

Language is always the first to go when cultures are colonized or forgotten. Interestingly, our words are returning. Azaman is no longer just a street chant; it’s being echoed in Twitter spaces. Laho, once an inside joke, is now a viral TikTok sound across continents and influencer captions. We’re witnessing a linguistic osmosis; Benin words slipping through the seams of Nigerian pop culture like smoke under a door.

And maybe that’s what makes this moment beautiful. It’s not loud or performative. It’s not a government-sponsored rebrand or a heritage campaign. It’s kids in Uselu making beats with FL Studio. It’s producers blending ancestral percussion with Western plugins. It’s street boys in secondhand drip rapping in proverbs their fathers spoke. It’s culture, surviving not in museums but in clubs and car speakers.

I’m not romanticizing the past. Benin music of old wasn’t always accessible. The tapes were long. The production was thin. The messages, heavy, but there was dignity in it; dignity in singing your mother tongue, dignity in naming your gods. That dignity is returning.

And so, when I see Shallipopi on stage at Homecoming Festival or hear Rema get a crowd in Berlin to chant Benin slang, I smile, because maybe, just maybe, the child in the backseat of the Benz knew this would happen. That someday, his city’s sound would no longer need validation. It would simply be.