Nigerian, international Afropop music star, Yemi Alade, has revealed that her management ignored emails from sensational music star, Beyoncé, for close to two months because they thought it was a scam.
Yemi Alade made this disclosure during an exclusive interview, where she mentioned that before she collaborated with Beyoncé on her album, ‘The Lion King: The Gift (Deluxe)’, her manager had been receiving emails from Beyoncé’s music company, Parkwood. However, her manager who was oblivious of the name of Beyoncé’s company deemed those emails as a scam and he nearly blocked the continuous emails from coming in, since, he was getting vexed by it.
“We thought it was a scam email. I wasn’t the one receiving the emails, my management was receiving the emails, and the thing is that you have to be a crazy Beyoncé fan like me, to know her company’s name is Parkwood. My manager was telling me that he keeps getting these messages from Parkwood. He sounded very irritated and he was thinking of maybe blocking the email… and I asked him, what did you say? Did you say Parkwood? I said [in a screaming voice] that is Beyoncé!”
Speaking further on how long it took them to reach out to the Grammy award-winning American singer, Yemi Alade said: “It took a while…they were at the end of the collection. They’ve been working on this for a while, maybe a month or two. I think even someone at some point came to Nigeria, and they were trying to meet me, but, you know how some people are, they don’t want some people to meet others”.
The ‘Johnny’ hitmaker also revealed that immediately she realized her manager’s mistake, she boarded the next flight to Las Vegas and made her way to Beyoncé’s studios.
“I had no idea what was coming. When we were done with the meeting, I went back to my apartment. I just woke up the next morning I couldn’t talk, and definitely could not sing. I had no voice, I pushed and I got something out of it”.
When asked about her outlook towards people in the western world and the kind of feeling they gave her, she noted that it was the same kind of feeling just like she receives when she is in her home country, Nigeria.
“When I try to just envision every country that I’ve been to, I realize that human beings are just human beings, some come with good vibes, some come with bad vibes, and then you can never know who has ulterior motives or not, just like an onion peel… they just keep opening up and showing you… and revealing everything… so I would just say human beings are the same everywhere, Nigeria, outside Nigeria they are all the same”.
It can be recalled that in July 2020, Queen Bey released ‘The Lion King: The Gift (Deluxe)’, which saw several collaborations from other African musicians and Yemi Alade was part of this project.
That notwithstanding, Ghana’s own Shatta Wale, was also selected to be a part of this project. Beyoncé collaborated with him to record the ‘King Already’ track on the album, which took the airwaves like a wildfire.
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