How Joy Oladokun's Career Bloomed In An Uncertain Year
The only true constants in the music industry during the tumultuous pandemic era have been fantastically sobering ones: lost livelihoods; interrupted career momentum; belated recognition of the brokenness of a system built on the exploitation of Black innovation and labor.
And yet, during this same period, Joy Oladokun's career has quietly blown up. The Nashville-based, Nigerian-American singer-songwriter has been tapped for timely, visibility-boosting, tech-powered initiatives, including Hulu's virtual Black History Month concert and YouTube's grant program for Black creators, while also benefiting from the sort of old-school, television-centric strategies that artists' promotional teams prioritized well before the streaming age, like performing slots on late night shows and song placements on primetime dramas. Oladokun's music has even appeared on Grey's Anatomy, that holdover from the aughts, twice to date.
As the buzz builds around her, Oladokun is observing it from a levelheaded remove, taking the long view.
"I think about the future," she says on the phone, "but in terms of, 'OK, I have X amount of money or influence with which I can do something that I've always wanted to do, like get involved in prison reform.'"
She goes on, "I've been trying to communicate that it's not even that I've arrived. It's been a journey and a process. It's one thing that led to another thing that led to another thing, and not just that I woke up and Jimmy Fallon was like, 'Do you want to be on the show?'"
Oladokun with equanimity since 2019, when far fewer people were taking notice. Back then, she was a couple of years into a publishing deal with Prescription Songs, she'd relocated to Nashville,
