Where do you go after a record-breaking run of breaking the barriers of popular sound? How do you reach for more after setting new benchmarks for your contemporaries?

Simple. Be Wizkid.

With an industry shifting collaboration with Drake, the eyes of the world on him and an RCA deal in the bag entering 2017, the 27-year old Afropop icon came into the New Year with the pressure that obvious potential and its first fruits can bring.

Whether he met those expectations is not a matter to contest, what matters is how, with little to use as a template and the weight of an industry that lacks structure and honesty, Ayo Balogun continues to push the ceiling of what Nigerian music can do, whether he seems like he’s trying to or not.

2016’s success put the onus on Wizkid to prove that he could propel afro-pop to global status beyond strategic features and guest spots. It is why “Sounds from the Other Side” is the most important body of work of the past year.

The artist may have us torn between addressing it as an EP, a mixtape or an album but in a collection of 12 songs recorded over three years on four continents, Wizkid created a template for African artistes looking to the world by inviting a selection of genres to create one truly all-encompassing party.

“Come closer” was the moment that ignited everything after it. His third collaboration with Drake charted at № 29 on the US R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay Charts. It is now certified Gold in Canada and Silver in the United Kingdom.

In the months leading to the project’s release, he did the rounds in record studios and media houses in the United States and the United Kingdom, sitting across tables from Eddie Kadi, DJ Semtex, Abrantee and Channel 4’s Jasmine Dotiwala.

His interview with Ebro Darden at Apple’s Beats One provided the quote that perhaps best captures the direction that propelled him this year, “For the rest of my life, I will always incorporate those sounds”, Wizkid said.

“I’m not the kind of artiste that will be boxed into making one type of music. I’m making music with everybody, all types of sound, everything. But I’ll always infuse that African sound in my music. It’s my first love”.

One of the biggest implications of being the face of a continent’s music is the responsibility to represent and reflect that genre and the people that it speaks for. In that regard, Wizkid was perhaps Africa’s biggest ambassador this year.

He joined Future and Chris Brown on their respective world tours, but neither of those will be as eulogised as his concert at the Royal Albert Hall on September 29, 2017.

It made him one of the African musicians to fill the hall, and crowned a year that saw him grace stages from the Caribbean to Cyprus.

Globetrotting is something that 2016 handed to Wizkid on a silver platter, and after he had gone around the world, it was only fitting he came home to touch base.

It was also a response to fans of an artist who is both his most-adjacent contemporary and his arch-nemesis; a retort to those who believed he had forgotten Ojuelegba and all the people that now make up Wizkid FC, a term for his fans that he announced at the Pepsi Concert in December 2017.

When he did, it was with songs like “Manya“, his collaboration with one half of his in-house production duo, Legendury Beatz, and “Ma Lo”, one of the songs of the year, alongside Tiwa Savage.

In his role as Afrobeats’ biggest star, Wizkid has been the pollinator, laying the blueprint and sowing seeds of what we call the African sound in music around the world.

Yet, you never get the sense of an artiste who is detached from the source. It is a strength propelled by his work ethic, to over-achieve, a perfectionist’s tendency that has taken our music to the world, and created what longtime collaborator Sarz called “Hard-Drive Records”, an entire database of unreleased music.

It was another win for Africa then, when Wizkid won the MOBO Award for Best International Act, beating Jay-Z, Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar and others to take home the continent’s first.

Starboy truly took it worldwide this year, and he didn’t even have to leave home for too long. For these groundbreaking achievements, Wizkid deserves to be the YNaija Person of the Year for 2017.