Black Sherif has always been more interesting when he’s unsettled. His best work doesn’t celebrate so much as interrogate and “Popstar,” despite what its title promises, is no different. On the surface it reads like a status record, another entry in the long tradition of self-anointing anthems that run through Afrobeats and hip-hop crossover culture. But Sherif has never been a clean narrator of success. Even at his most declarative, there’s an undertow. “Popstar” follows that pattern, it claims the title and immediately complicates it.
The record opens with a line that quietly reframes everything that follows, “November to November / Me I don’t mind no calendar.” Time, for Sherif, is no longer external or linear, it bends to survival, to momentum. He positions himself as a “running man,” not someone who has arrived but someone still mid-stride, still in pursuit. It’s a deliberate destabilization. If the popstar archetype is built on the idea of arrival, Sherif is rewriting it as perpetual motion, and in doing so, he makes the whole concept feel less like a crown and more like a condition.
“Popstar” artwork | SUPPLIED
The hook carries that tension too. “Hol’on I’m a PopStar… The most high na my style / Can’t you see the lifestyle”, it doesn’t land with the effortless arrogance of someone fully settled into their position. There’s an urgency to the repetition, something almost maintenance-like about it.
He’s asserting the identity, but the assertion itself signals that the identity needs asserting. That’s a subtle, honest distinction and it’s what separates this from more generic “I’ve made it” records.
Lyrically, Sherif threads his origin story through the song without sentimentalizing it. “From the mud boys, no handouts / Serious and poised no self doubts” reads like a standard rise narrative until it runs into “Dangerous choices but I’m love with time” and suddenly there’s moral weight where there wasn’t. The path wasn’t just hard, it was risky. Time becomes both companion and record-keeper, something he’s drawn to but also something that holds the receipts. Then, almost jarring in context “I gotta chill I gotta relax.” It cuts through. A moment of self-interruption, a crack in the forward motion, small, but it lands.
The bilingual movement between English and Twi remains one of Sherif’s sharpest tools, and here it does real structural work. The shift into Twi doesn’t feel like a nod to authenticity, it is the authenticity. It tightens the tone, pulls the listener closer, grounds the “popstar” persona in the local reality it grew from rather than above it. In an industry that still rewards dilution for global reach, Sherif keeps leaning into specificity. It’s a quiet act of resistance, and it works.
Black Sherif | SUPPLIED
Production-wise, the record is deliberately understated, no explosive drop, no oversized chorus engineered for a streaming spike. The beat cycles patiently, almost hypnotically, and that restraint is a choice worth noting. It keeps the focus on Sherif’s voice, the phrasing, the tone, the slight hesitations and reinforces the song’s mood, not a celebration, something more like a meditation. Slightly weary underneath the confidence.
What “Popstar” ultimately gets right is its refusal to resolve. It holds confidence and doubt in the same breath, lets arrival and motion coexist without forcing a conclusion. Sherif doesn’t dismantle the idea of stardom, he just refuses to make it simple. The title has been claimed, but the cost of carrying it is becoming legible, and he doesn’t look away from that.
So, the record lands less like a coronation and more like a checkpoint. Sherif sounds like someone who has stepped into the light and is already studying what it reveals, and what it exposes. That awareness is what makes “Popstar” linger. Strip out the self-assurance and what you’re left with is something far more honest, an artist who has earned the title and isn’t entirely sure what to do with it.
Words by Zimiso Nyamande
