A Cat With Nine Lives

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, The Age of Afrobeats. Buy the issue here.

It is true. Afrobeats has taken a different turn in the last one decade, thanks to the global big shots like Davido, Wizkid, Burna Boy, Fireboy DML, and more lately Rema, Asake and others who have brought it many feathers of paean. It is a genre with eclecticism of melodies and sonics, making the world listen to African stories in different tunes, styles, and voices. These hit makers have mastered octaves and notes addictive for a global audience. Even within its short timeline and global assertion, several key moments have occurred in Afrobeats and Davido has been a key contributor. The 30 BG leader has numerous hits beginning with ‘Dami Duro’, followed by a streak of others such as ‘Aye’, ‘If’, and ‘Gobe’, to mention a few. With constant global headlines, charts, and multiple laurels including BET’s, MTV’s, World Award Music, and three nominations for Grammy 2023, Davido has cleared his name as an African music titan, a cat with nine lives, ‘elemi nine plus’.

Ede, with its flourish of greens, the aura of rainforest and brown rusty roofs of houses that spill into the red earth of Osogbo from the south might be the place where you begin the story of the Nigerian Afrobeats enigma, David Adeleke, with stage sobriquet, Davido. His grandfather, an Ede-born, Ayoola Adeleke, was a Second Republic senator, during Shehu Shagari’s buffer period (1979-1983) after the military power shuttle. Known for his merry-heartedness and enthusiasm for revelry, Ayoola Adeleke frequently hosted company and community revellers, minstrels, loyalists, and musicians in his illustrious compound. A possible theory, therefore, is on the ground, rooted in this familial patronage of local artists and singers. We may conclude simply that the fierce artistic impulses of Davido came from this background. We can further solidify this assumption if we go by Davido’s constant remark of the mother’s footprint on his musical life. Davido had claimed in his Big Boy interview in May 2023 how enamoured he was by his mother’s interest in gospel music and the number of albums on her shelf. The Clarke-educated business magnate, Veronica Adeleke, spurred his interest in music early. Where music is the staple of the home, building a social capital as an artist becomes easy—partly accounting, unsurprisingly, for Davido’s eventuality as an Afrobeats melody lord—the doddering step would later change the face of the Nigerian Afrobeats industry. But that is not all.

Back in Oakwood College in Alabama, the US-born teenage Davido was to start the pursuit of his degree at the Historically Black University. America, rife with its hip-hop culture, loud stereos from the local clubs with students in their big titanium chains and baggy trousers and loose T-shirts, one may just say this was a concrete launch of Davido’s big step into the $80 billion Afrobeats industry. The story has been rehashed often by the artist himself. In May 2023, Davido revealed to Kurt of Big Boy TV  in his interview that he heard the woofer of his neighbour shaking the wooden and red brick wall of his apartment. Davido knocked on the door and found out that next to his room was a small studio inserted into a corner of his neighbour’s crib. He, from that moment, accepted the need to move into this rite of passage of learning the physics of sounds and the chemistry of lyrics and to switch to a new whole career path. This came with so many breaches, hurdles, and ocean-jumping between America, Nigeria, and London—where fresh voices were DJ-ed to multicultural audiences. Absconding school put him in crosshairs with his father, Adedeji Adeleke, a Nigerian billionaire, who Davido admitted privileged education above Davido’s musical interests. But convinced as an eagle with an eye on the chest of the mountain, Davido reached a compromise with his father who, according to Davido, ‘built the best studio in Nigeria,’ on the pledge that he would finish his degree at Babcock University. In 2013, Davido released ‘Dami Duro’, an upbeat sound pumped with the mood of club gyrations. With much virtuosity, ‘Dami Duro’ became a street banger and youth anthem and an FM-favourite on Nigerian radio music breaks.

Within a few years of his rise, Honourable Kings of New School Record Label was established by the Adeleke quad, Sina Rambo, B-Red and DeeKay, and Davido as a platform to advance their artistic careers. However, bad blood spilled between the Adeleke brothers—Dremo, B-Red (his cousin), and Davido. In 2016, the Afrobeats superstar established his own record label branded as Davido Music Worldwide (DMW). Apart from Mayorkun whose success brought the label more prestige, DMW was home to several artists including Peruzzi, Lola Rae and Idowest. Although both Mayorkun and Peruzzi left the label to establish themselves as independent artists, new acts like Lagos Olori, Morravey, and Liya later joined the label. Since 2018, DJ Cool has become the official DJ for DMW, joining Davido across his global performances in Europe, America, and Asia.

The heroic trope of grass to grace is not Davido-esque. Instead, Davido’s run so far has been from grace to grace. His interluding humbling moments cater in part to his resilient spirit, his persistence in the face of multiple adversities, and his eventual solid status in the arena of African creatives, and hordes of them, each one striving to assert their voice in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. His face colossus on every front page, with his streak of feats and tours de force on the global stage, he has become a major stakeholder of Afrobeats—a king and kingmaker. But Davido’s cat life is beyond the seal of his success. Earlier this year, Davido, had made a controversial remark in a media chat on Brut, curtly referring to fellow artist, Burna Boy, as a ‘new cat’. The ‘Old Cat’ and the ‘New Cat’ binary is a metaphor for the history of his evolution in the industry, but also showed the flippant fingers, many have said, he has pointed at his arch-rivals in the industry. He is aware of this in ‘Over Dem’, his 2023 track off his album, Timeless.

With staying power more than a decade in the spotlight and steady records and peaks, the ‘Nwa baby’ love querist wants to blow his horn and many years of its echoes. Yet in many ways, Davido’s life estimation crosses the bar of this explanation. There are at least nine indices of his life that help us sum up his personality. These include: Afrobeats contribution, philanthropy, rivalry, fashion maker, star maker, political Davido, marriage and scandal, and a sprinkle of his spiritual life.

Unlike Fela Kuti—the credible ancestor of Afrobeat resurged in forms as Afrobeats—many present Afrobeats artists have weaker political stance and lyrical vigour, with little or limping narrative arcs. Their songs are more often display just assonance of words and rhymes that simmer in melody. What Afrobeats has lacked in this richness of verse and the poetry of it, it has made up in earful of sounds. It was for the form and the electric mood in 2012 when I started listening to Davido while rounding off my Bachelor of Arts programme in Ife. Like me, most fans came to know about Davido through ‘Dami Duro’—an echo of himself as a Nigerian bourgeois class member and a manifesto that frowns at any thwarts, doubts or biases against his talent. Davido has attempted to live up to this stride and released many globally successful singles.

Sometimes confessional in form, his love songs are intimate and private declarations for his lover, and the associated benefits attached to being in love with him. Consider ‘Fall’ which was included in his discography of his 2019 album, A Good Time. But his traction for the amorous and keen attention to emotional fuse in his song started early from ‘Ekuro’, also released in 2012, collected in The Genesis powered by his earlier singles, down to when he crooned ‘Assurance’ to his partner, Chioma. In all, there is a note of caution in the 2014 ‘Aye’ where love is not equal to material gratification.