I am born in one place, spend half of grade school in another, attend the other half in a third country. I go to high school in a fourth city. I am forever the superminority. As much as I hate the cliché, it’s true — I am too “this” for “that” and too “that” for “this.” But in Wizkid’s music, I’m given the choice to not make a choice. “My music travel no visa” he declares confidently on Superstar. His world is one not of binaries but of bonds between Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. And though he was not raised in the diaspora, it feels like he makes music exclusively for us: the lost and confused trying to find ourselves in clunky hyphens and numerical ordering, struggling to determine if our culture is first generation, second, or even third. He is not the first to tell me who I am, but he is the first I believe.

Even when the songs are emulating an American pop formula, they still feel stubbornly African, which is to say they buck against the niceties of said formula, opting for vim over veneer, playfulness over perfection. The production is gritty, percussion chaotic, auto-tune abused, lyrics disregarded, and melodies embarrassingly saccharine. And it is all held together by the faith that it will accomplish its only goal: to make people dance.

In this mélange, more than anything else, I find my rhythm. Wizkid’s music is elastic enough to leave room for the movement I inherit from my early youth while also accommodating everything else. It’s hard to explain how intuitive it all feels, but when his music comes on, I just know what to do and I know I am doing it right.

The encounters I have with creepy men and shitty lovers are tragic for their normalcy, shattering the image of sexual freedom and power that I imagine with the help of Wizkid’s music. My experiences, in which my inflated expectations are met with, at best, indifference toward my pleasure and, at worst, the denial of it, confirm that the real world has not caught up to the worlds we can create in music. I consider two options. One is to throw away the music, believe nothing, trust no one. Another is to see the contradiction as instructive, for if I can’t imagine pleasure, how will I know when it’s real?

In time I look beyond myself, searching for critics who have more precise language on the subject; who have elaborated on the gap between the imaginative agency that popular music offers to women and the physical realities that take it away. I find helpful language in the work of Ann Powers, who, writing on rock, cites the “always partial and precarious” erotic freedom that many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll. “As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body,” she says, “that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you.” Itching for parallel analyses in genres I feel closer to, I look to the work of Joan Morgan and the journalist Akoto Ofori-Atta, the latter of whom writes of the “gray area” that abounds in the hearts of Black women who love hip-hop, of the “contradictions of loving an art that is reluctant to include you; loving men who, at times, refuse to portray you in your totality; and rejecting sexual objectification while actively and proudly embracing your sexuality.”