The Meltdown Festival is not a typical affair. Staged at London’s Southbank Centre, its legacy is built on artistic curation, with each edition’s lineup handpicked by a single, formidable musician. For its 2024 iteration, the selectorship fell to Chaka Khan, an icon whose career in funk, soul, and R&B has shaped the vocabulary of modern music. To be invited into this space is to be acknowledged as part of a serious musical lineage, a dialogue that values history and substance over fleeting trends. It was on this stage, under this particular curatorship, that Tiwa Savage offered a performance that was less about spectacle and more about the quiet, confident telling of her own story.
Her set was a polished journey through a catalogue that has defined and redefined the possibilities for a female Afropop artist. Yet, it was a moment midway through, with the opening chords of Patoranking’s “Girlie O (Remix),” that the weight of her trajectory became most clear. The inclusion of the song was a deliberate choice, a piece of personal and collective history brought into a space of artistic prestige. It was not her song, not her biggest solo hit, and not her most recent work. It was a collaboration from 2014, a time when the modern Afrobeats movement was still finding its global footing and a female artist’s visibility was a hard-fought battle.
Revisiting “Girlie O” in that context was a powerful act of curation. A decade ago, her feature on the remix was a pivotal moment. Patoranking was a rising dancehall voice, but Savage’s verse gave the track a crossover appeal and a dose of seasoned star power that propelled it into a different stratosphere. She did not just add vocals; she elevated the song’s narrative, becoming an indispensable part of its success. Her appearance on that track solidified her reputation as an imperial collaborator, an artist whose presence could turn a local hit into a pan-African anthem. For many, her verse is the most memorable part of the song, a perfect fusion of her R&B melodic sensibilities with the track’s dancehall energy.
To perform that song at Chaka Khan’s Meltdown, a decade later, was to make a quiet assertion. It was a nod to her role as a foundational figure, a collaborator who has consistently lent her platform and talent to others, often creating moments bigger than the sum of their parts. In an industry that frequently focuses on individual glory and chart metrics, this was a gesture of communal memory. It reminded the audience that her journey has been one of both headlining and harmonizing, of building her own legacy while simultaneously being a crucial component in the construction of the broader Afrobeats edifice. The performance was a subtle acknowledgment that long before Afrobeats became a global phenomenon, Tiwa Savage was already putting in the work, one masterful feature at a time.