Floxy Bee, the Queen of Hikosso music
Professional singer, Songwriter, Arranger, Composer and Cultural Ambassador.
The sounds of the diaspora. The Echos of our culture.
If you hear Floxy Bee sing, you'll know that her purpose is to make music for the soul.
Floxy Bee, the Queen of Hikosso Music has devoted her career to furthering the musical & cultural traditions of Nigeria throughout the diaspora. Since the age of sixteen she has been performing and recording. She has received numerous awards for he Hikosso music, a mixture of highlife, makossa, soukous, juju, afrobeat and neo-traditional Yoruba for which she is renown.
She has performed at the 2017 Olojo Festival in Ile-Ife, the Apollo Theatre with Lucky Dube, the Toronto African Music Festival, etc. She has received citations form the cities of Boston and Newark for her efforts to bridge cultures through music. In 2017 she was appointed an executive member and representative of African Views, a UN affiliated NGO interested in women’s empowerment and cultural preservation in Africa.
Chief Floxy Bee is from the Onigbinde family. Onigbinde means “the drummer has arrived”. Her grandfathers, as they had been doing for generations, would beat the drums and sing at all the major festivals in the town of Modakeke/Ile Ife. She remembers when she was a little girl, her mother dragging her to the face cutter, her terror at seeing the knives, and how she cried and cried after it was done. Because of the marks on her face, she could only run so far from her culture. All she had to do was to wash her face and look into the mirror and she knew from where she came. Her father was an officer in the Nigerian army and he loved playing highlife. When she stepped out into the military compound, she would hear all the indigenous music of Nigeria.
As a young singer, out of Nigeria’s fascination for all things Western, she had to learn American Jazz & R&B classics in addition to her indigenous music. Later she added Reggae, Miriam Makeba and some Grand Opera to her repertoire.
There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.
The Yoruba believe that a person is born with a purpose, anyone hearing Floxy Bee sing, knows that her purpose was to make music.
At heart she is an African woman and in recent years she has immersed herself in the traditional music and culture of Nigeria. She developed the YeYe Asa Festival to champion the issues of (African) women. In her new releases “Gbanga Lasata” and “Moyege” you can sense the joy, the pain, the beauty and the struggle of the African woman.
