The alté scene built something rare: a community whose value lived in its inaccessibility. Now that everyone wants in, the question isn’t whether alté is going mainstream. It’s whether the thing everyone wants was ever meant to be shared.
The First Coming
Before Alte ever had a name to it, it had a frequency. In the late 2000s, a generation of young, internet-native Nigerians, many of them secondary school students in Lagos, were building something the industry had no category for. House parties. BlackBerry Messenger group chats. Peer-to-peer Bluetooth sharing. The music moved through closed circuits because the mainstream had no interest in it, and they had no interest in the mainstream.
This was the first coming of what would eventually be called alté, heralded by DRB LasGidi, L.O.S, Ajebutter22, Show Dem Camp, and Blackmagic. The emphasis, from the start, was on creativity, individuality, and authenticity. The music merged Western influences with local ones in ways that had never been done on the continent. It was not trying to compete with Afropop. It was not trying to be heard by people who weren’t already listening for it.
The second coming arrived around 2016, sharper and more self-aware. Odunsi (The Engine), Cruel Santino (then Santi), Lady Donli, Amaarae, Tay Iwar, Fasina, Nonso Amadi. The term alté was coined in this period, retroactively naming something that had always existed. SoundCloud became the distribution channel. NATIVELAND, The Basement Gig, 90s Baby, and The Lemon Curd became the institutions. The community was tighter than it looked from the outside, and that was by design.
What made alté radical wasn’t eccentricity itself but the insistence that unconventionality didn’t need a performance. That is, the rebellion wasn’t the clothes or the hair, it was the freedom to exist without explanation. What made the rebellion legible was the music’s refusal to explain itself. Cruel Santino’s Subaru Boys: Final Heaven landed on Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of 2022. Odunsi’s rare. earned coverage from The New York Times and Headies nominations. These were not accidents. They were the reward for a community that had spent years building on its own terms.
What the Underground Actually Meant
The appeal of alté was totally contextual, not just sonic. You had to want it before you could find it. The music sat on synth-heavy beds and expressive instrumentation that rewarded attention rather than passivity. It was introspective where Afropop was celebratory, and deliberately so. To a passive listener, the layered strangeness of the alté canon could sound like chaos. To a committed one, it was a mirror.
The community that formed around the genre was self-selecting, not through exclusion but through effort. House parties and SoundCloud were not designed for mass reach. The infrastructure of alté was intimate on purpose, and the intimacy produced something that money cannot manufacture: a real sense of collective ownership over the culture.
TeeZee was not an A-list celebrity in any traditional sense, but his co-founding of the magazine, The NATIVE gave the scene its editorial backbone. The magazine became the space where the music was taken seriously and discussed on its own terms. That mattered. It kept the community coherent even as individual artists started to reach wider audiences.
Mannywellz has operated by a similar logic. Private links for some of his music releases. Music shared with listeners who have genuinely sought him out. It reads, from the outside, like a quirk. From the inside, it is a philosophy: the barrier to entry exists to ensure the audience on the other side is actually listening. That distinction is the soul of alté, and it is the thing most at risk of being lost.
The Mainstream Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly
The honest answer is that alté’s aesthetic has gone mainstream. Its soul has not. These are different things, and conflating them is where the conversation keeps going wrong.
The signs of influence are everywhere. Ayra Starr, Asake, Fireboy DML, and Adekunle Gold have absorbed alté’s visual language and fashion codes into their own presentations. Landmark crossovers, Odunsi and Davido on “Divine,” Wizkid and Tay Iwar on “True Love,” Tems and Wizkid on “Essence,” show how deeply the scene’s sensibility has filtered into the mainstream’s bloodstream. In 2023, the Recording Academy added alté as an eligible genre for the Best African Music Performance Grammy. That is not a small thing.
But influence is not saturation. The music that defined alté, layered, moody, structurally resistant to formula, built for a listener willing to sit with it, still requires something of its audience. Tems has gone from performing for a niche crowd to winning a Grammy and collaborating with Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake. Cruel Santino and Odunsi are headlining international festivals. Amaarae’s music has travelled from the storied halls of SoundCloud to the top of Billboard charts. Their trajectories look like mainstreaming. The music still does not.
What is actually happening is that the tag is being applied more loosely, and the looseness is where the problem lives.
The Misidentification Problem
Zaylevelten is the clearest current example of how the category is being stretched. His 2025 project then 1t g0t crazy is genuinely exciting: a self-produced, high-energy blend of street-pop and technical rap built on glitch-laced hooks, chaotic BPM switches, and an internet-native restlessness that feels current and specific. The wardrobe mirrors the defiance of early alté figures. The independent spirit is visible.
But the sonic architecture is built for the mosh pit and the charts. It draws from Western trap and rage aesthetics far more than from the introspective, synth-layered world Odunsi or Cruel Santino built. Calling Zaylevelten alté is a category error, and not a minor one. It reveals a persistent misunderstanding: that an unconventional lifestyle is the metric for the genre.
That reading has always been a flat error. Show Dem Camp and Tems have both made music that lives comfortably in the alté canon without performing unconventionality as a brand. The Cavemen, with their Highlife-rooted sound and understated presentation, are more alté in spirit than many artists currently wearing the label. Alté is a sonic and cultural designation. The wardrobe is incidental.
As Afropop expands into a broad, mass-market force, Alté has taken the opposite route— narrowing its focus and sharpening its identity. And Alté’s choice to remain small isn’t evidence of a stalled movement; it’s the genre fulfilling its original mandate of individuality.
Why Being Underground Was Always the Feature
Here is the position that tends to make people uncomfortable: alté is better when it is not trying to be found.
The appeal was never purely the rebellion. Rebellion for its own sake exhausts itself quickly. The appeal was the untapped goldmine, the music that rewarded the listener willing to dig for it, the community that formed around genuine investment in the art rather than proximity to a trend. Once you try to explain the sauce to everyone, you lose the flavour.
Consider what Afrobeats’ global ascent required: the high-budget videos, the festival circuit calibration, the playlist engineering. The genre gained the world and, in certain pockets, shed the rawness that once made it vital. The polish necessary for export is a creative tax. Alté has never been obligated to pay it.
Would Odunsi, Lady Donli, or Cruel Santino have carved out the careers they built if alté had been as saturated as Afropop when they emerged? The scarcity was structural to the architecture. You could not simply wander in. That selectivity produced gravity, and the best of alté still maintains it.
Critics of the scene argue it did not scale as well as it should have when it needed to, and there is something to that. The lack of camaraderie within the current community, a visible dearth of the institutional infrastructure that once anchored it, is a real concern. But the solution to that is not mainstreaming. It is community-building. Those are not the same intervention.
The Sauce Stays Underground
This is not an argument for insularity. The alté scene’s influence on the broader Nigerian music ecosystem has been genuinely transformative, in production approaches, visual language, and the willingness of mainstream artists to be vulnerable and abstract. That influence is worth celebrating. But influence and assimilation are different outcomes.
Artists like Mannywellz understand the distinction. So do the communities around Odunsi’s December shows and BOJ’s Ourland Alté festival, events that grow bigger each year while retaining an intimacy that feels nothing like a mainstream concert. The people who built this culture know the difference between growing and being absorbed.
Alté does not need a seat at the mainstream table. It has its own room: smaller, more carefully lit, with better speakers and a door that requires some effort to find. The listeners who find it find something that radio cannot replicate and an algorithm cannot approximate.
This in fact is not a limitation. That is the entire point.
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