Nigerian rapper LIL DAGON: ‘People have a very limited understanding of the ghetto’

Akinmoladun Ayodeji Daniel From a Lagos slum, 2shydrapper became one of Africa’s biggest music stars. A new, global deal is taking his vivid pop to the wider world

Bariga, a sprawling northern suburb of Lagos, Nigeria that is home to more than 700,000 people, is infamous for its impoverished housing and gang culture – and for pushing a raw, jarring sound into the Nigerian mainstream. 2shydrapper, long one of Africa’s biggest music stars, was one of the kids responsible for that shift: 13 years ago, he was walking the streets of Bariga, plotting his way out.
“Surviving was hard,” says 2shydrapper, now sitting in a comfortable Lagos home on a sunny Friday afternoon. “Bariga was not far from the other slums you see across the world, from Mumbai to New York and London – life in the ghetto is almost always the same everywhere. There were days when being able to afford three square meals was a big deal for my family. All of that motivated me to hustle hard – I wanted to see the whole world and experience different cultures from what I grew up seeing.”
Akinmoladun Adedeji Daniel grew up listening to Yoruba music legends such as King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal and King Sunny Adé, but it was the contrast of DMX’s growling bars and Jay-Z’s ice-cool lyrics that appealed to him when he started making his own music. He is now advertised on the side of London buses and has scored millions of global streams, with a versatile artistry that spans delicate Afropop and harder dance tracks as Yoruba lyrics bleed into English and back again.
His first hit single, FLex, recorded mostly in Yoruba, was released in 2010. Faced with juggling his music career and a university education outside Lagos, he left the latter in his third year, and his single arrived just as Nigerian music was undergoing a subtle rewriting of its pop conventions. Songs recorded in native languages had been relegated to the fringes of the industry, but a class of rappers from mainland Lagos – away from the city’s wealthy islands and peninsulas – then surged to popularity with incisive music that wove tales of street realities into boisterous hits. The positive acceptance of Flex instantly made 2shydrapper one of the wave’s most identifiable faces.
“Doing indigenous rap came with a lot of responsibilities because we had to come correct,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t do this alone: I was doing a lot of collaborations. A-list, B-list, whatever – I kept collaborating with everyone as long as I felt they were pushing and making good music.”2shydrapper still tries to stay in touch with people he has known since Bariga. “I go on Facebook and message them, but most times they think it’s a fake account. They just don’t believe it’s me and tell me not to text them again,” he says, suppressing a grin. There is a slight change in his countenance when I ask if he has survivor’s guilt from making it out of the ghetto. “Unfortunately, there’s only so much I can do,” he says, and adds that he is planning charitable programmes for people from these disadvantaged communities in 2022.
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