In July 2015, Drake aired the first episode of OVO Sound Radio on Beats 1, and somewhere in the middle of the two-hour set, he dropped a remix that nobody had announced. Wizkid's "Ojuelegba," already a beloved track in Nigeria and across the African diaspora, suddenly had verses from two of the most prominent voices in their respective scenes: Drake from Toronto, Skepta from Tottenham. The moment was unplanned, unforced, and completely clarifying. A song rooted in one specific corner of Lagos had just become a conversation piece across three continents.
The original "Ojuelegba" appeared on Wizkid's second studio album, Ayo, released on 17 September 2014. The album title translates from Yoruba as "joy," and the song lives up to that etymology while also carrying something heavier. Produced by the Lagos duo Legendury Beatz, the track draws on the rhythmic density of Afrobeats, with a synth-horn counterpoint that feels both buoyant and nostalgic. Wizkid sings in Yoruba and English about his early years hustling through the Ojuelegba neighborhood of Lagos Mainland, scraping together money to record, moving through the city on buses and on foot, sustained by the belief that the music would eventually pay off. The neighborhood gives the song its name and its emotional anchor. Ojuelegba is a busy, working-class transit hub on Lagos Mainland, and Wizkid's invocation of it is specific enough to feel like a postcard and universal enough to resonate with anyone who has ever bet everything on an unproven talent.
The song moved quickly. It received heavy airplay on Nigerian radio stations and peaked at number one on Capital Xtra's Afrobeats Chart in February 2015. It won Song of the Year at The Headies 2015 and Hottest Single of the Year at the 2015 Nigeria Entertainment Awards. The music video, directed by Clarence Peters, placed Wizkid on a Lagos bus, surrounded by the textures of everyday neighborhood life, and it reinforced the song's argument: that the place you come from is not something to escape but something to carry forward.
The remix happened because of a chance encounter at the Wireless Festival in London in early July 2015. Skepta, who had been building a friendship with Drake during the Canadian rapper's extended stay in the UK, played him "Ojuelegba." Drake decided he wanted to record a verse. Wizkid later confirmed that Drake had proposed the collaboration. The result premiered on OVO Sound Radio without any prior announcement, which gave it the quality of a discovery rather than a release. Listeners who tuned in that night heard something they had not been prepared for, and that surprise was part of what made it land so hard.
Skepka's presence on the remix is not incidental. Born Joseph Olaitan Adenuga Jr. in Tottenham, North London, to Nigerian parents of Yoruba and Igbo heritage, Skepta brought a verse that traced his own complicated relationship with African identity. Growing up British-Nigerian in North London in the 1980s and 1990s meant navigating a cultural gap that could feel like a chasm, and his contribution to the remix acknowledged that journey directly, moving from a place of distance toward something closer to pride. The verse gave the remix a second emotional register that the original did not have, and it made the collaboration feel like more than a co-sign. It felt like a reunion of sorts, a recognition across the diaspora.
Drake's verse, meanwhile, did what Drake does well in guest appearances: it stayed in the pocket of the original's mood rather than redirecting attention toward himself. The remix did not become a Drake song with Wizkid on it. It remained Wizkid's song, with two guests who understood what they were being invited into. That restraint mattered. It meant that the remix amplified the original rather than replacing it, and that listeners who followed the trail back to Ayo found the full album waiting for them.
The Fader ranked the remix 12th on its list of the 107 Best Songs of 2015, placing it alongside records from Kendrick Lamar, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Courtney Barnett. That kind of critical placement, in a year-end list compiled by a publication that covers music across genres and geographies, signaled something real: "Ojuelegba" was not being received as a novelty or a crossover curiosity. It was being evaluated on its own terms and found to be among the best things released that year.
What the remix accomplished, in the longer arc of Wizkid's career, was to make the case for Afrobeats on a global stage at a moment when that case still needed to be made explicitly. Wizkid had been a major figure in Nigeria since his debut album Superstar in 2011, and his profile in the UK and across the African diaspora had been growing steadily. But the OVO Sound Radio premiere put him in front of an audience that might not have found him otherwise, and it did so through a song that was already fully formed, already award-winning, already loved. The remix did not introduce a new Wizkid. It introduced the existing one to a wider room.
Legendury Beatz, the production duo behind the original track, built something that could hold the weight of that moment. The instrumental is spare enough to leave space for three distinct voices and dense enough to feel like a complete world on its own. That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds, and it is one reason the song has lasted. A decade after its release, "Ojuelegba" remains a fixture in Wizkid's live sets and a reference point in any serious account of how Afrobeats moved from a regional phenomenon to a genuinely global one. The remix was a catalyst, but the song was already the reason.
