Central Park’s Great Lawn has hosted its share of history, but on a September night in 2025 it belonged to Ayra Starr — the Nigerian star they call the voice of African Gen Z — who turned her Global Citizen Festival set into a master class in arrival, then brought out a surprise guest who sent sixty thousand people into orbit.
She came dressed like the moment demanded. Head to toe in white — and crowning it all, a custom white New York Yankees cap hand-embellished with colorful rhinestones by VidaKush, styled with Katie Qian, catching the festival lights with every turn of her head. It was fashion as punctuation: this is New York, this is my stage, and I know exactly what I’m doing here.
Starr, born Oyinkansola Sarah Aderibigbe and signed to Mavin Records, has spent the last few years making good on the promise of her 2021 breakthrough single “Away” and her debut album 19 & Dangerous. Her single “Rush” earned a Grammy nomination for Best African Music Performance, and she has carried the Afrobeats banner across the world’s biggest stages without ever dimming the Yoruba sparkle that made her a star in the first place.
Her Global Citizen set was a victory lap with a conscience. She moved through “Rush,” “Sability,” “Bloody Samaritan,” “Hot Body,” and “Gimme Dat” with the ease of an artist who has nothing left to prove and everything left to give. Then, in the set’s most tender passage, she closed her solo segment with a mashup of “All The Love” and Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing,” dedicating it to the festival’s mission — and asked the crowd to light their phone torches in a sea of small flames for energy access across Africa. Sixty thousand lights answered.
The Surprise That Stopped the Lawn
And then the night detonated. Fellow Nigerian star Rema — her labelmate, her countryman, and the man behind the billion-stream global phenomenon “Calm Down” — walked out as her surprise guest, and the Great Lawn lost its mind. Together they tore through “Rush,” then Rema stayed to deliver “Calm Down” — the Selena Gomez remix of which carried Afrobeats to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and past a billion streams in the United States alone — and “Baby (Is It A Crime).” Two of Nigeria’s brightest exports, one stage, zero restraint: it was the kind of summit moment festivals dream about and almost never get.
A Festival With the Weight of the World
The evening around them carried its own gravity. Global Citizen Festival 2025, headlined by Shakira and Cardi B — the latter stepping in after The Weeknd’s cancellation — and hosted for the eleventh year by Hugh Jackman, drew more than 60,000 people to Central Park and raised $3.7 billion toward energy access for a million people across Africa, education for 30,000 children worldwide, and the protection of 30 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest. Tyla, Mariah the Scientist, Camilo, Elyanna, and a special appearance by Blackpink’s Rosé rounded out a lineup that felt like a dispatch from pop’s future.
But the night’s defining image may well be the simplest one: a young Nigerian woman in a rhinestone Yankees cap, microphone in hand, asking a darkened park to hold up its lights — and sixty thousand people saying yes. Ayra Starr did not just perform at Global Citizen. She presided over it.
Correction: an earlier version of this article misidentified the performer in the photograph as Rema. The performer is Ayra Starr, who brought Rema out as a surprise guest during her set. LIKE Magazine regrets the error.
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