Ayra Starr, the Afrobeat sensation, revealed that she feels her mother used music as leverage to influence her decisions since childhood. Reflecting on her path into the music industry, Ayra Starr shared instances where her mother guided her on what to do to succeed in music. She recounted how her mother encouraged her to pursue her music dreams and how she completed her degree at age 14, eventually relocating to Lagos, all under the guise of supporting her musical aspirations.
Starr recounted: “I got into the university at 14. I feel like my mum has been using music to blackmail me since I was a child. She was like, ‘If you want to do music, you have to do this.’ When she suggested we relocate to Lagos from Benin Republic, I declined initially, but she convinced me that Lagos is the land of music.
“She insisted that if I wanted to do music, I would have to finish school first. Usually, a lot of people in Nigeria finish secondary school at 15 or 16. I knew that if I waited till I was 15 [before completing my secondary school], I wouldn’t be able to be a teenage pop star. And I wanted to be a teenage pop star. So, I joined my elder brother and wrote JAMB, what you guys call SAT here.
“To be honest, the result wasn’t crazy to get me onto all these Ivy League schools but it was enough to pass by. It was enough for my mum. I got admitted into a good school. My course was for three years. It was International Relations. And immediately after my graduation, I started doing music covers online and that same year I got signed [to Mavin Records label].”