Nine times out of ten, when a Nigerian artist drops a new promotional video, the loudest debates online are about the beat, the styling, or who’s in it. But when Rema’s Oyo Oyo video hit X(formerly Twitter), the conversation took a different turn. Instead of just celebrating the visuals, people started arguing about whether the singer was guilty of appropriating Black American street culture.
It’s a serious accusation. Dressing a certain way, using certain slang, or leaning into specific aesthetics can quickly be labelled as theft in today’s cultural climate. But before we slap the appropriation tag on everything, it’s worth asking: what does it really mean to borrow from another culture, and where do we draw the line between inspiration and disrespect?
