Wizkid

Wizkid made Essence, the first Nigerian song to reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, which is less a hit than a door opening.

He was born in Lagos on 16 July 1990 with the Sun conjunct Jupiter within a degree, both in Cancer. Jupiter is scale and the Sun is identity, and the two fused is the oldest signature of good fortune there is: a person whose presence enlarges whatever it gets attached to. But Jupiter also stands opposite Saturn, under a degree from exact, and the Sun opposes Saturn too. So the expansion has a brake welded to it at both ends, and the chart is a three way argument between the thing getting bigger and the thing that says no.

Earth takes five of the ten, with a single one in fire and a single one in air. That is a patient, material, unhurried distribution, and it is not what a decade of chart pop looks like from outside. Three of those earth planets group in Capricorn, all retrograde, which puts the whole slow half of the chart in the sign of competence and sets it running inward.

His Moon is at the end of Aries or the start of Taurus, undetermined, but either way it makes an easy angle to Uranus six minutes of arc from exact, the tightest aspect he has. Emotional life in effortless contact with the planet of the unexpected: somebody genuinely unbothered by change, who treats a new sound or a new country as a smaller event than it is.

A song in Yoruba-inflected English crossing into an American chart is what Sun conjunct Jupiter against Saturn actually looks like when it finally gets through: not an easy rise but a slow one that then moves a boundary. Afrobeats reaching an American chart was a decade of patient records before it was a hit, and the five earth planets are where that patience lived.