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He sits across from me in my living room in Lagos, a man in the midst of a new becoming. Not the new realization that happens at the beginning of a career, when the world opens up for the first time, but the quieter, more expensive one that happens after the first wave of everything has already collapsed. After the shots. After recognition. After the long and oppressive silence between projects, when fans start to wonder if you’re still there.
Ladipoe has been an artist long enough to know the price of that. He just didn’t always know in advance.
He came from a family of civil servants and entrepreneurs, he says, and it’s immediately clear that this is dimensional. There is a tradition in that lineage that the name means something. Not wealth in the monetary sense, not necessarily, but integrity that carries its own kind of currency. “There’s an era of public servants when your name meant something,” he says. “So I can’t say it was wealth in the monetary sense. It was the power of the integrity of the name and maintaining it.” He grew up within that value system, which made the decision to become a rapper in Lagos one of the most structurally confusing things a person in his position could do. The path was the office, the suit, the tie and the vaunted job. The music was the opposite of everything the family’s sacrifice should have produced.
“I didn’t even think I had this ability when I discovered it at school,” he tells me. He started making music with two other guys in college as a sideline because there was nothing to lose. The studio sessions came later, in Nigeria: Red Room Studio, staying up until two, three, four, five in the morning, going home at six, getting up again to go to the office. Bringing his family’s view of him into play. Sometimes he ended up in places he shouldn’t have been, at times when things might get dangerous, for music that maybe didn’t work.
Ladipoe did it anyway. Because the research was yielding so much that the cost was recorded only years later, when responsibilities piled up and clarity arrived. “As you get older and start having certain responsibilities, a certain vision of yourself and where you really want to go becomes much clearer. The cost becomes even more apparent.”
The shopping analogy he uses is appropriate: you pass the window, you want the shoes, you want the dress. Come in. They tell you the price. Your body calms down. The difference with music, he says, is that no one tells you the price when you decide to pursue it. “Here you are not told the price. You try and along the way you discover the cost: the loss of family time, the dissociation from yourself, even from yourself, from what you give up to create.”
What Ladipoe has discovered, and is still discovering, is that the cost never stops showing up. It is composed and comes in new forms. It turns into the tension between seeing yourself through your own eyes and seeing yourself through the eyes of the audience. In his opinion this is one of the central pressures of the job, the thing that can drive you crazy if you let it get out of balance. “What you bring to your art and your creativity is your unique point of view, that’s the true strength of music. And if you lose sight of that, it will start to manifest itself in different ways.”
This is not abstract philosophy for Ladipoe. He raps in English, in a market that has historically favored colloquial Yoruba, an assortment of pidgins, the vernacular of the street and the music industry. He came to a lane that barely existed before he helped bring it into existence. He knows exactly how much it costs to maintain a position that the mainstream continues to consider a niche. “People who make music in that lane feel like you’re doing too much,” he says. “You’re too difficult. You’re a perfectionist.” Reject the label, all of it. Not because perfectionism isn’t real, but because the accusation itself is a form of pressure to lower the standard, and he’s not interested in lowering the standard.
What interests him, what he has been interested in since he has been making music, is the line. The exact line. “I can’t describe to you the feeling of finding the line that says exactly what you wanted to say,” he tells me, and in this moment he loses all the careful reserve of someone who measures every word. “For me, it’s addictive, it’s an addictive thing, because it’s like, yo, this is exactly how I wanted to say it. This is the way I wanted to say it, and I’m going to try to convey it the way I want to say it. So, before that song comes out, I already love it.”
That’s where his confidence comes from, and he’s specific about what kind of confidence it is. He calls it arrogance, but the word doesn’t quite fit. It’s closer to a belief that has been tested enough times to become self-sustaining. Years spent making music that the market didn’t immediately embrace taught him to find validation within the work itself, before it met the world. “I trust my sense of taste enough to think you’re the problem.” He says it flatly, without aggression.
Ladipoe’s next album has been coming for almost three years. He’s been working on it since 2023 and the process required, sequentially: understanding what he wanted to say, understanding how to say it, finding the rhythms and sound that suited the mode of communication and then, beyond it all, accepting the artist he actually was rather than the artist the moment called for. “There are many, many, many layers that went into the creation of this project,” he says.
He always called his fans “Lifelines”. No punchline, just lifeline. The name carries within itself all its philosophy: the people who have resisted despite the gaps, who wait on the other side of the silence with a particular type of sustained investment whose weight they feel, every day. “My fan base is just like they’re feeling a certain way right now. Let me put it this way. Everything I put out, the latest, the latest, oh, nice. Where’s the album?”
Ladipoe feels the urgency. He absorbs it, incorporates it, lets it enter the music. “I feel the urgency of the fans, I feel the excitement, I feel the anticipation, I feel the apathy, I feel all different things.” The pressure, he says, is mostly self-generated. Quote Vince Staples: tortured artists, not a new term, really tortured. There’s always audio in his head, cataloging what he didn’t do well, what he could have done better, and he has to create the actual audio over and around it.
The album is called “Revival”. Season of rebirth. He says it with the demeanor of someone who has held onto this thing long enough to arouse anticipatory impatience. “Whoever cares, who is attached to art, let it stay with them. They know that there is a journey that they will experience with the project.”
The guiding illusion, as he says, quoting my question with clear pleasure, is that you can still connect with people if you are simply yourself. He knows this is cliché. He says it anyway, because for people who are actually like this, driven by an obligation to their point of view, it is not a trivial thing. It’s a survival position. Everything comes to you offering you opportunities, only if you become something you are not. “So many things are that over time it becomes valuable to discover who you are meant to be.”
Ladipoe came to the Nigerian music industry without knowing he would be here. He signed to Mavin Records, a predominantly pop music house. He’s long gone through the identity crisis that follows the business connection, the moment when the question shifts from “can I do this?” to ‘what am I willing to do to support him?’ He shaped the answer with each release: niche artistry, mainstream success, the tension between doing what’s authentically you and connecting to the widest possible audience. He and the label called it together, which in itself is a fairly unusual thing in Nigerian music that is worth noting.
“I will always take care to write” he says, towards the end of our conversation. It is stated as a commitment that renews rather than makes for the first time. He won’t engage with a rap artist who has nothing to say. He believes lyrical rap is in the midst of its evolution right now, happening in real time, and points to Dave’s recent record, Odumodublvck’s project, and Blaqbonez’s project as evidence of the landscape filling up with people who mean business. “This is how industries and niches grow. This is how we stay healthy. A balanced diet.”
There is a question underlying all this, which the interview continues to revolve around without getting to, and that is the question of how much it costs. Not in the abstract, not in the shopping analogy, but in the specific register of Ladipoe’s career: the years he wasn’t immediately heard, the rejected Christmas concert, the album held for three years until it did well, the refusal to tweet himself to become relevant, the credibility he protected by saying no to things that would make his phone ring more, but make him less so.
“It’s probably why I had some opportunities, but also why I missed a lot of them,” he says. He doesn’t regret it. It is not representing the absence of regrets. He is sincerely at peace with the trade. He made the right choices and then lived with the consequences long enough to understand why moderation was the best path.
Ladeipoe’s father is an optimist. He gets it from his father. The guiding light, the question that pushes him forward, is the one I keep asking myself: what if everything worked? “Not all reality checks ground you in reality.” shares. “Sometimes they confirm that you should be floating, you should be a little crazy.”
It should float. It has been floating for a long time. The album is almost here and Lifelines are waiting. And if all goes well, which it might and the music suggests, then the price will have been exactly right.
He just didn’t know it when he paid for it.
