What's Akon up to right now (na na na)?

Published October 16th 2015

Sometimes you’ll get reminded of an artist and realize that you haven’t heard anything from them in a while. Akon popped in my head yesterday and, even though last I’d heard of him being a label owner who helped launch the career of Lady Gaga and his track “Sexy Bitch” with David Guetta, I can’t remember hearing much about him after. And all of this was 2009 – 2010.

So, what has happened since?

Well, it turns out he did a couple features and collaborations and then, indeed, take a break from the limelight. He returned to making music in 2013, releasing a free song, “Dirty Work”, with Wiz Khalifa and a regular single, “So Blue”, later in the year, but then began his mission to get electricity to Africa with his Akon Lighting Africa-project as 600 million people still don’t have access to electricity there.

However, right now (na na na), he is working on returning to his music career in a way I’ve not seen it done before. He will deploy in 5 different genres with 5 different albums, all at once!

Stadium

The albums are called “Stadium” and are subtitled with their genre. On his website he’s currently showing 4 of the albums: House, Island, Urban and World. In January of this year his website was updated with one preview track per album, and according to Billboard, you were able to preview 5 tracks: “Feeling a Nikka” (featuring D’Banje), “Just a Man” (featuring Stephen Marley), “Whole Lot” , “To Each His Own” and “Better” (featuring Niko the Kid). “To Each His Own” has somehow disappeared since.

As he’s still working on the albums, anything can really still happen there, but it’s clear that these albums, his work for Africa and problems with redoing his mansion have been taken up all of his time for the better part of this year.

In September, it became known that Akon is planning to release his music through his Stadium app, instead of using the regular methods of digital distribution. You can sign up for this on his website.

However, to tie you over, there are a few features of his released lately: OG Boo Dirty has released a single called “Problems”, B-Red “Cucumber” and D’Banj “Feeling The Nigga” all featuring Akon. R City’s new album “What Dreams Are Made Of” also features a track with Akon called “Lived By The Gun“. So if you look, Akon is still out there.