Source: africanentertainment.com
“I feel like my mum has been using music to blackmail me since I was a child,” she said while jiggling.
Nigerian singer and performer Ayra Starr has shared how her mother cleverly used the promise of a music career to motivate her to achieve other goals.
In a recent interview with Billboard, the Grammy-nominated artist recounted how her mother encouraged her to prioritize education before pursuing music. This led to Starr gaining admission to university at the age of 14.
Starr explained, “My mum insisted that if I wanted to do music, I would have to finish school first.” Knowing that most Nigerians complete secondary school at 15 or 16, Starr was determined to become a teenage pop star and realized she needed to act quickly. “I joined my elder brother and we wrote JAMB, what you guys called SAT here,” she said.
Despite not achieving top scores, Starr’s results were satisfactory enough for her mother. “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,” she shared.
Starr also revealed that her mother used music as a bargaining tool to persuade her to do things she initially resisted, such as relocating to Lagos. “I feel like my mum has been using music to blackmail me since I was a child,” she said with a laugh. “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. And immediately after my graduation, I started doing music covers online and that same year I got signed.”