Nigerian Rapper Ice Prince claims that he and his team were the first to coin the genre Afrobeats with his 2011 hit song 'Oleku'.

 Nigerian Rapper Ice Prince claims that he and his team were the first to coin the genre Afrobeats with his 2011 hit song 'Oleku'.

Panshak Henry Zamani, widely recognized as Ice Prince, asserts that his 2011 track 'Oleku' with Brymo can be credited as the inaugural song to fall under the classification of "Afrobeats." During an interview on the Echoo Room, the Nigerian rapper reaffirmed that Oleku was one of the first songs to be playlisted on BBC Radio. Global media as at that time did not have a name or term for African music.

The 'Aboki' crooner said, "And at that time, they [foreign DJs] didn’t know what to call our music and they couldn’t call it Afrobeat. So, we [I and my team] told them to put an ‘s’ it to make it Afrobeats". Ice Prince was hesitant to make such claims as he did not want fans to take his words the wrong way.

He went on to say “Check the history, ‘Oleku’ was the first Afrobeats record. Because they have to label it on a radio station, that was why we put the ‘s.’ If not tell me who came up with the ‘s’ at the end? A lot of people said it is credited to DJ Abrante, but guess what? Abrante was the one that playlisted the song ‘Oleku.’ That’s my own claim o!”

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