DRAMA ENTREPRENEUR ENTERTAINER DBANJ MOST REVEALING ARTICLE!! A MUST READ!

Comprehensive article on D'Banj and some of Nigeria's pop stars by Oluwacaspar

This article was originally posted in the Guardian UK,  it shows an insight into the world of superstar entrepreneur entertainer as he likes to call himself DBANJ!





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.

D'banj kokomaster

@iamdbanj
Oliver Twist on Eastenders?! What a great pre-birthday gift for me from the UK!! Oossshheee!! LEBETE!
8 Jun 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
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

he 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 homegrown 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 P-Square, 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."
D'Banj. Photograph: Richard Saker
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, MI, meaning Mr Incredible (or Jude Abaga, as he was christened). His posse – that's now me, incongruously; the producer Kid Connect 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 drunk 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 MI 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 GOOD Music label, among whom D'Banj can now count himself.

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