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Bouncing towards me on his alligator-skin trainers,
Dapo Daniel Oyebanjo opts for a one-armed hip-hop hug when at last we meet. Not
only does he look the part – the shoes are by designer Philipp Plein, his
T-shirt’s Calvin Klein and around his neck hangs a dazzling chain created by
Jacob ‘The Jeweller’ Arabo, purveyor of ‘bling blings’ to the hip-hop elite –
but he smells it, too: an almost suffocating cloud of lavender scent hangs in
the air.
D’banj, as he shortens his name, is the biggest name
in entertainment in Nigeria and has the potential to become the first-ever
artist from Africa to compete on equal terms with any acts in the western pop
firmament. It’s the brash, moneyed, sexy version of the continent – home to
seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world – that he represents.
Today he is in the UK promoting his Top 10 hit Oliver Twist, a ribald account
of the famous women he fancies, from Nicki Minaj and Rihanna to the Ghanaian
actress Nadia Buhari. Recently he heard it being used as the background music
to a party in EastEnders – precisely the sort of mainstream attention that he
wants to receive.
It quickly becomes apparent that the 32-year-old,
acclaimed by his peers back home in Lagos for his relentless drive, is
difficult to stop once he’s on a roll. ‘I’m so excited – not just for me, but
for the whole of Africa’, he says. ‘Two years ago I said it’s time for me to
take my music global because I’ve won all the awards back home.’ With his
mentor, the producer Don Jazzy, he created the biggest record label in Nigeria,
but ‘now I want to win a Brit award, a Grammy’.
‘Yes, we have MTV, yes, we sell millions of records
and have endorsement deals, but we’ve never felt as if we’re part of the same
music industry as the rest of the world – the Kanye Wests, the Adeles and Tinie
Tempahs,’ he continues. ‘I see what I’m doing now as the bridge that we’ve been
looking for from Africa to the mainstream world. I want others to see the
potential in my country, other than our oil and natural resources. That’s
what’s making me move. I feel like a new artist.’
The first time I laid eyes on D’banj it was in
Abuja, the Nigerian capital, in late 2008, when he waltzed away with three
accolades including Artist of the Year at the first-ever MTV Africa Awards.
Just before he turns up for our encounter in London, the ebullient Bankulli,
his manager, shows me footage on YouTube of him on the promo trail in the UK,
visiting a school in Plumstead demonstrating how to do the ‘Oliver Twist’ dance
to a background of shrill screams from the pupils. It’s not just hard to think of
another African artist who’d engender such a reaction at a south London
secondary school, it’s tricky to think of that many home grown pop stars who
could incite quite as much hysteria. But over the past three or four years,
there’s been a growing appetite for what are styled ‘Afro beats’ among that key
pop demographic in this country.
Listen to DJ Abrantee‘s show on Choice FM on
Saturday nights or DJ Edu on Radio 1 Extra with his Destination Africa
programme on Sundays and you’ll hear the likes of Sarkodie and Efya (from
Ghana) or Psquare, Wizkid and – especially – D’banj (all from Nigeria). Rickie
Davies runs a website promoting Afro beats in the UK, and she describes ‘a real
shift in perceptions among audiences in the UK. No one’s talking about this as
if it’s ‘world music’,’ she says, ‘or alien to the culture here.’ Abrantee told
me recently of the deeper impact of this burgeoning scene. ‘When I was growing
up in London’, he said, ‘you never let on that your family came from Africa –
it was too embarrassing. Everyone pretended they came from the Caribbean. But
suddenly black kids from Ghana or Nigeria are saying it’s cool to come from
there.’
‘It’s very humbling, my success here,’ D’banj says.
‘Coming from Africa – Nigeria – doing music for a decade there… it’s a
different world.’
Ten days earlier, I’d flown to Nigeria to meet
D’banj, and ended up on a whistle-stop tour of the Lagos nightlife scene with
one of his younger peers. Ice Prince arrives at the Oriental Hotel with an
entourage that includes his own bodyguard, a figure so strapping that he’d be
slightly intimidating even without the Soviet assault rifle. As he explains,
over the culinary challenge that is a bowl of egusi soup in a fast-food joint
in the upmarket district of Lekki, he’s simply there to intimidate the sort of
crazy fans that any fledgling pop star will encounter.
‘I can’t normally eat in a place like this’, Ice
Prince explains. ‘I just get too much attention’. Instead he has a cook at
home, and when he drives around the city in his white Land Rover, his assistant
will pull bundles of naira banknotes out of a black bin liner to shower on the
crowds who surround him – both a bid to distract them and, as it’s explained to
me: ‘It’s expected of you here. If you don’t, people will start saying God
thinks badly of you’.
In a nutshell, the 25-year old Panshak Zamani, who
grew up in the northern city of Jos, listening to the likes of South African
reggae star Lucky Dube and his pop counterpart Brenda Fassie – he now counts
Jay-Z as his favourite artist – is living the life that he describes in his hit
‘Superstar’. ‘Better cars, better clothes on me/Better parties, better houses
and better girls on me…’ runs the chorus. ‘See I can take you there/Champagne
everywhere/That’s the life we live.’
The story of the Nigerian pop scene as it exists
today – with its videos showing fast cars and faster women – doesn’t date back
much further than a decade and reflects the booming economy in the country. GDP
has more than doubled since 2005 and the growing middle class has an appetite
for the affluent lifestyle that figures such as Ice Prince or D’banj embody.
The latter tells me that ‘it used just to be footballers who got endorsement
deals, but now entertainment is attracting a lot of media and investors, too.’
Ice Prince is contemplating offers from a drinks
company and a telecoms outfit at the moment. Acts such as his can earn up to
£20,000 for a live show – and without that income, rampant piracy would mean
the music industry in the country would barely exist. Instead, in the absence
of global players such as Sony and Universal, four or five labels – including
Ice Prince’s Chocolate City, Storm Records, Kennis Music and EME Music, and
D’banj and Don Jazzy’s Mo’Hits – have competed for success.
‘There’s been mad growth in the music industry
here,’ Ice Prince says, while acknowledging the problems with publishing and
the collection of royalties. Nonetheless: ‘If you go to a club or a party in
Lagos, 80% of the music that you’ll hear is Nigerian, which never used to be
the case.’
Factor in the advent of MTV and other cable channels
across Africa, – including Channel O, BET (Black Entertainment Television) and
the French network Trace – plus the new power of Twitter and social media, and
little wonder that when an artist such as Ice Prince plays a show in Malawi,
he’s greeted by crowds numbering in their thousands. He shows me footage of a
recent gig on his Mac PowerBook. ‘This is new. They might not understand our
patois, but the fans there know us from TV, and we’re famous right across the
continent.’
Ice Prince has a gig to play in Abuja this evening,
so he leaves me in the care of the most celebrated hip-hop star in the country,
M.I, meaning Mr Incredible (or Jude Abaga, as he was christened). His posse –
that’s now me, incongruously; the producer Kid Konnect and another rapper, the
brilliant Loose Kaynon – end up swigging Hennessy at a party called SLU…shh in
a mansion in Lekki where other acts including Davido and Tiwa Savage freestyle
on the mic by the swimming pool. Come 3am the next day, we’re in Number 10, the
nightclub on Victoria Island owned by Jay-Jay Okocha – the most famous Nigerian
footballer of all time (later MI even introduces this drunken foreigner to
him).
The following afternoon there’s a gig at the Teslim
Balogun stadium: Coca-Cola is sponsoring a youth football tournament and paying
for the accompanying entertainment. This means appearances between games from
Davido, Brymo and then M.I himself. He sprints around the pitch, mic in hands,
rapping along to the bellowing PA system, stopping only to goad members of the
crowd who aren’t fellow Arsenal fans, before sprinting to his waiting car and a
hairy ride out of the stadium before the vehicle is mobbed.
From there I head to the airport, regretting only
that the figure I’d travelled to Lagos to see never actually materialised:
D’banj himself. One of his representatives did arrive at the hotel with a
bottle of Moët & Chandon and a Koko mobile – from his own branded
mobile-phone line, launched last year – as gifts for me. But with it came the
message that he’d preferred instead to go to the Cannes film festival with
Kanye West – in order to help promote Kanye’s 30-minute movie Cruel Summer,
shot in Qatar and featuring several artists signed to his G.O.O.D Music label,
among whom D’banj can now count himself.
Born in Zaria in northern Nigeria to a military
officer and a businesswoman, D’banj grew up just north of Lagos, becoming
interested in music following the death of his 17-year-old brother Femi in an
air crash in 1994. ‘I arranged all his possessions on his bed after they were
brought home and just picked up his harmonica. I’d play it to remember him.’ Later,
at university, he realised what his new skills with the instrument could bring
him. ‘I’d go to the female hostel after lectures, and even if there was no
electricity I could play there.’ He remembers learning Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart
Will Go On’ after Titanic came out – ‘and that got me a lot of girls!’
Plans to continue his studies as a mechanical
engineer in London were derailed when he arrived in the UK in 2001 and met Don
Jazzy. The 18-year-old – born Michael Collins Ajereh – had also come from Lagos
and was trying to make it as a songwriter and producer, working with acts such
as Big Brovaz (career highlight: the song they contributed to the soundtrack of
Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed). D’banj started hanging around the studio,
making ends meet with work as a security guard. ‘It was OK, because I did
nights,’ he says, ‘so I could listen to music on my headphones.’
Don Jazzy told D’banj he thought he was a star in
the making and, sensing that the music scene in Nigeria was ‘blossoming’, the
pair returned to Lagos in 2004. That same year came the single ‘Tongolo’, the
video paid for by D’banj’s mum – ‘Thank you, Mummy!’ – who’d hitherto been
suspicious of his new-found calling, and then his first album, his first
endorsement (with an energy drink called Power Fist) and ‘the rest is history’.
In fact, as Don Jazzy tells it, there was a definite
plan with each landmark single. He’d clocked the success of Psquare across
Africa, so with the next D’banj record, ‘Fall in Love’, he emulated their
sound. With ‘Mr Endowed’, he went for ‘fist-pumping dance music’ – a risk at
home in Nigeria, but it paid off in spades, and through the help of a mutual
friend (jeweller Chris Aire), Snoop Dogg was brought in on a remix of the
track. The impossibly infectious ‘Oliver Twist’ was a calculated attempt to
crack the market in the UK. ‘I thought we could do with a sort of funky house
sound. I thought: ‘It’s not like the music is that different from the music we
listen to here.’‘
Listen to ‘Oliver Twist’, or Ice Prince’s
‘Superstar’, or P-Square’s ‘Chop My Money’ – which I heard blaring on Beat FM
all weekend in Lagos, alongside the occasional likes of Carly Rae Jepsen’s
‘Call Me Maybe’ – and the production isn’t so dissimilar from any western pop
hit. But as Ice Prince told me, there’s definitely an indigenous feel, too: ‘There’s
a lot of American and UK influence, but the present Nigerian sound is really
influenced by highlife and juju music. We made it a bit funky, a bit more
modern.’
Prior to the likes of 2face Idibia and the brothers
in Psquare and D’banj, the biggest name in Nigerian music remained the late
Fela Kuti, and Don Jazzy cites the influence of his ‘Afro beat’ sound, too.
It’s a source of some irritation that what he calls his ‘Afro pop’ is termed
‘Afro beats’ in the UK, when ‘what we do now sounds totally different’.
With D’banj, Jazzy built Mo’Hits records, also
signing the likes of Wande Coal. But earlier this year, the pair split,
following D’banj’s decision to sign to Kanye West’s label and relocate on a
more or less permanent basis to the UK and US.
In D’banj’s telling of it, he and his entourage were
in the first-class lounge at Dubai airport in November 2010 after playing a gig
when a stewardess approached with a name card that said ‘Mr Kanye West’. ‘I was
looking fly – if you know anything about D’banj, you know I’m always looking on
point. I say: ‘Dress how yon: ‘That means Kanye West is coming, let’s get
rolling… Eyes open!’ Then we saw him, checking in, wearing a hoodie. I said:
‘If I get five minutes, I will take it. I’m an African man! I will not waste
it!’ And he came and five minutes became 30 minutes and he held my plane for
me, because I would have missed it. In fact the first thing he said was: ‘I
like your dress sense…’‘
Mr Endowed.
The story of D’banj’s split with Don Jazzy has
dominated the Nigerian entertainment press all year. The week after I leave
Lagos there are even (false) rumours that D’banj has been shot by three gunmen
near Kanye’s Atlanta residence, then rushed to the city’s St Joseph’s hospital
and is dying from his wounds. There doesn’t seem to be much substance to the
idea of hostilities, although Don Jazzy did cut a slightly forlorn figure when
I met him in his half-built mansion in a gated compound on the outskirts of
Lekki. ‘Every day I’d wake up, I’d be scared to look at the newspaper or go to
the internet to see what people are saying now,’ he said. ‘It’s been blown out
of all proportion.’
While he also has a deal with GOOD Music as a
producer, Jazzy intends to concentrate on his new venture, MAVIN records, and
those acts still signed to him, including Dr SID, Tiwa Savage and Wande Coal.
He says now of D’banj: ‘he’s a very ambitious person and he works hard: I give
it to him. I’m glad that we’ve been able to get to the point where he can go to
the UK and the US and stand as a man. I don’t need to be carrying him – there’s
other people who need help here now.’
When D’banj and I do meet, he’s mollifying. ‘It’s
like we were married – a very successful marriage,’ he says, ‘and we just had a
divorce.’ There are also those voices, he knows, who think that now he’s tasted
success in the UK, he’ll turn his back on Nigeria, but he’s adamant. ‘I can’t
wait for the world to see what we have in Africa. I tell Kanye and everyone,
I’ve got rappers back home who can really rap. MI is going to murder everybody!
I had a vision that I want to be global,’ he says, ‘but I don’t want to change
my Nigerian identity, I don’t want to change my style.’
In person, he radiates such easy-going star quality
that it’s impossible to begrudge him anything, or to think that he won’t help
pave the way for others. (In fact, just days after we speak, Ice Prince joins
him on the bill for the BBC’s Hackney Weekend festival).
The final question I put to him – and it’s the sort
of question that a lot of his peers in the UK and US would shirk – is whether
his Afro beats hold a mirror up to society in the same way that Fela Kuti’s
did. D’banj argues that today’s stars are simply reaping the rewards of battles
Fela won, that ‘things are better – there’s not just freedom of speech. For
instance, we’ve got social media.’
At the last Nigerian elections, D’banj was courted
by presidential candidate Goodluck Jonathan and filmed a video in support that
was subsequently credited with ensuring his success. Any flak that the singer
attracted as a result deters him little – even if the raging fuel-subsidy
issues in the country have overtaken the promise in his clip on YouTube of ‘no
shortage of fuel and kerosene’. Perhaps it’s a reminder that on any road to
progress there are always setbacks.
‘We’re enjoying democracy now,’ D’banj insists, ‘and
the economy is on the up and up. There’s also been so much negative coverage of
Nigeria,’ he continues, ‘but I like to think that the message I preach through
leading the lifestyle that I do is: anyone can make it.’
By Caspar Llewellyn Smith
Culled from The Guardian UK
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