Much Ado About Fuji? Rybeena’s Mr Bee and Oshamo’s IDRIS

As 2025 winds down, Nigeria’s music scene is already warming up for #DettyDecember. Artists line up shows, promoters push tickets, and creators curate moments. In the build-up, new music drops set the tempo. This year has been rich, and one thread keeps pulsing through recent conversations: Fuji’s past, present, and future. Adekunle Gold’s FUJI reopened the debate, and more think pieces have followed. The question lingers: how does the dominant sound of Western Nigeria from the 1970s secure its future rather than fade out?

Afrobeats is a vibrant music genre that sprang from Nigeria’s buzzing music scene in the early 2000s and exploded into a global phenomenon, especially post-COVID-19. Rooted in the Afrobeat rhythms pioneered by Fela Kuti. Most attempts to define afrobeats acknowledge that it is indeed a fusion of various parent genres, fuji inclusive. An interesting hypothesis around the expansive range of emerging subgenres of Afrobeats would then be that most of these substyles often reflect which parent sound is leading. For two young artists gaining attention in 2025, Rybeena and Oshamo, the guiding rhythm is Fuji.

Rybeena 'Mr Bee' album cover

Rybeena’s Mr Bee: A promise kept

Born Adewale Atanda, Rybeena is one name that has dominated both radio airwaves and TikTok sounds in 2025. Making a notable entry with Virtuoso, his debut album, the Dapper Music artist ended that project with a promise to go harder. He keeps that promise on his latest EP, Mr Bee. The seven-track project, released in October 2025, runs for about seventeen minutes and opens with a bold act of self-awareness: a Fuji collaboration. Rybeena brings on Fuji legend King Dr. Saheed Osupa on Dewale, a track delivered in Yoruba that leans on the language’s poetic depth to affirm that better days lie ahead. The dominant sounds are Fuji and reggae, woven together with refreshing ease. The collaboration reveals one of the most beautiful truths about evolution in music. The evolved is stronger. Rybeena outperforms the Fuji veteran here, not by force, but through instinct. While Dr. Osupa is a brilliant composer steeped in traditional Fuji, Rybeena’s natural sound and dominance in this collaboration is shaped by this evolution.

The next track, Adunni, pairs Rybeena with Joeboy to deliver one of 2025’s finest love songs. G-Wagon extends the romantic promises of Adunni, while Gaddem, featuring fellow 2025 showstopper Shoday, continues that emotional rhythm. Rain slows the tempo, Spaghetti lifts it again, and Ganja closes the project. The final track, an ode to the psychostimulant plant long associated with creative inspiration, confirms what Dewale first suggested: Rybeena’s mastery of Fuji.

Oshamo's IDRIS album cover

Oshamo’s IDRIS: Fuji in motion

Another artist who has gained significant attention in 2025 is Nigerian-born, London-based Oshamo. Born Idris Lawal Oluwadamilare, he released his eponymous EP IDRIS in October 2025, following his debut project First of My Kind under emPawa Music in 2024. Before the new EP, his single Superfuji (Gobe) had already gained wide traction, largely through an unconventional street-level marketing approach. Oshamo and his friends would walk through public spaces across the UK with a speaker playing the song, filming people’s spontaneous reactions. While most responses were warm, some were joyfully animated, often from people with roots in Southwestern Nigeria who instinctively recognized the Fuji undertones in the sound.

Oshamo grew up in Agege, Lagos, a neighbourhood steeped in Fuji music and Yoruba rhythm. Those influences are deeply present in his work. IDRIS opens with Halleluyah, a sober reflection on gratitude, before Magba shifts the mood with high-tempo percussion. Contour draws from Amapiano to deliver a smooth romantic groove, while Adun slows things down, borrowing lines from K1 De Ultimate’s I Can’t Just Stop. Both tracks explore love, though Oshamo adds his characteristic self-assured wit, slipping in references to the loverboy’s financial standing.

On Owo (Olomoge), he lets Fuji take center stage, reviving the familiar Olomoge Cinderella character and percussive motifs. Shekere closes with a prayer, and Superfuji rounds out the EP as perhaps the most practical representation of modern Fuji in 2025. It fuses Yoruba cadence with digital drums, affirming Oshamo’s place among younger artists reshaping the sound’s global direction.

Every time the conversation about a music genre fading out emerges, it is worth following closely. One truth remains: music never really dies, it evolves. When Afrobeats leans Fuji, you hear it in the precision of percussion, the chant-ready refrains, and the vocal cadence that traces directly to its parent sound. Among Fuji enthusiasts, there is a beloved video often cited when discussing legacy. It captures the progenitor of Fuji, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, performing live with two of his protégés, Saheed Osupa and Muritala “Muri Thunder” Salaudeen. In the clip, Barrister offers them prayers, then passes the microphone for each to perform in turn. The moment is timeless, symbolising the deliberate passing of rhythm, spirit, and tradition.

If that microphone were to be passed again today, guided by the evolution of sound and music of 2025, it would almost certainly find its way into the hands of Rybeena and Oshamo.