He’s probably done it all –
sweating it out as a upcoming act, bagging international deals, setting
up his very own record label, releasing a catalogue of albums, marrying
and settling down to family life.
Lanre ‘eLDee’ Dabiri’s life,
not just his music persona, resonates that of a Don. NET had an
extensive interview with the Trybe Records boss where he opened up on
just about everything…
In your 15 years in the industry, how would you best describe yourself ?
I usually don’t spend a lot of time
stepping outside to look at myself, what I think of eLDee is the brand
and what it has been able to achieve, and the fact that the eLDee brand
is a pioneering one and is still relevant 15 years after. I think the
brand has done decently well. I wouldn’t think of myself as super
successful since most of ‘our people’ like to think of success as the
money driving thing.
I’m from a pretty comfortable
background, so it’s never really been about the money for me, it’s been
about passion, building platforms for people, innovation, creating new
things, contributing to the entertainment industry as a whole. When I
started music, I did it because I felt like I could do better than what I
heard. The perception of Nigerian artistes was really bad in the late
80’s and early 90’s, and I felt like that wasn’t accurate. Artistically,
we have some of the most creative people, and it was just an
opportunity to step up to the play and show that there’s a contemporary
side, there’s a new Nigerian, there’s a Nigerian who has an identity,
there’s a Nigerian even though he’s influenced by Hip-hop and Reggae and
R&B, he still has his own culture and something to say, and can
still be relevant in Nigeria.
That was the motivation in the early
stages, so in terms of how I feel about my success; I think I’m pretty
successful because every single target that I’ve had, we met. One of our
first challenges was how do we break the music, we broke the music. How
do we get radio to play, radio started playing it. How do we sell the
music, we figured out a way to distribute it. How do we take it to the
world; we had the first set of interactive CDs, the website, and blog.
So, in terms of setting the pace and creating structure and showing
people that stuff can be done, even sometimes at the expense of being
able to make a business out of it, I’ve done that in my whole career,
and I think I’m satisfied. Just to see that we have created a possible
billion dollar industry out of passion is actually the motivation for
me, so I’m good.
What actually influenced you to go to the studio to record, to put your pen to paper and start writing lyrics?
I think a lot of it was peer pressure.
Peer pressure in the sense that I had a lot of mates who were equally
interested in music, and we started to do a few performances here and
there in school, talent shows and what not. There was a particular guy
called AT I used to roll with, he used to rap then, and
rapping was a big deal in the early 90’s. And then it was in Kaduna,
which was just the norm. At least at some point, every young kid had a
dream of being a rapper, and for me it was really about ‘ok this boy is
doing this thing and he’s been able to attract attention from all these
chicks so let me too try it’ (Laughs). In the early stage I was just fooling around and then I moved to Lagos.
What brought you to Lagos?
I came to school in the University of Lagos. I actually didn’t want to go to UNILAG,
I wanted to go abroad, I already got my admission and everything, but
my dad thought it was a good idea to stay. I used to blame him but at
some point I kind of accepted it and said to myself ‘hey you know if I hadn’t stayed I probably wouldn’t be who I am now’ I came to Lagos for school and I noticed that the level and the quality of music was very low, and I felt like ‘hang on a second, I can compete with this guy and I can do better than this guy, we can create something new.’
Everybody was doing Reggae at that time,
and it was really bad Reggae, which is why I felt people weren’t
interested anymore. So I felt ‘hey let’s try and get to radio, let’s put out some stuff’.
At that time I was writing but most of my writing was just for fun, it
was just something to do to get away from the madness. I had just come
to UNILAG and it was a crazy place then, when cultism was at an all time
high, so it was just a culture shock for me, coming from Kaduna to this
very rough environment with everybody trying to take advantage of you,
where everybody is trying to cheat you. I was coming from being in the
house with the maid and a driver and a nanny and a help and somebody to
run errands, to a UNILAG where the bathroom with like one and half inch
thick filth of spirogyra on the wall, do you understand what I’m saying?
It was a real shock for me, and so really I think music was the one
thing I found to take me away from all the madness. I used music as my
escape route just to get away from all of that.
What was the thing that made you finally say ‘I want to perform, I want to sell my music as an artiste’?
First of all my name has always been
eLDee. I’ve been called eLDee since I was four; my mum’s friend just
started calling me LD and it just stuck, even through secondary school
people call me eLDee. I think the point when I decided I was going do it
was in 1996. I was doing a little school promotion with a guy called
‘Ropo’ there in UNILAG, basically doing events for campus. I used to
plug in my music at these shows, people started liking it and we’re like
‘hey let’s take this to radio and see, since we are promoting the shows on radio let’s see if the radio will play our music’.
So we took it to radio; the late Steve
‘The Sleek’ Kadiri was the first person to ever play my song on radio.
He liked it and kept it on rotation for a while, Ray Power was the only
independent station [at that time], and all the government stations
weren’t interested at that point, so we only got support from them.
Kadiri advised us, ‘you guys should probably record some more, do an album’ and I started looking around for record labels; this was even before Kunle ‘Kaboom’ Bello and
Freestyle came into the picture, so there was a bit of background
already which is what made me start recording a lot of tracks. KB joined
later. We both kicked stuff back in Secondary school so we decided to
get more serious with it.
Why didn’t you consider yourself as a solo artiste and try to develop yourself that way?
The truth is that from the beginning,
I’ve been a song writer and producer, so in a weird way I didn’t really
consider myself in the early years as an artiste at all. Rather, I
considered myself as somebody who could make music, I felt like I could
create music and I needed vessels to put that music out there, hence my
union, my collaboration and my signing of all those people; I was trying
to build that a platform to be able to express that side of my
creativity.
Do you have that sense of fulfilment watching these artistes you helped build their careers?
Yes, I’m happy when I see the success of
Dr SID, Sasha, 2Shotz, Dare Art Alade, Sound Sultan. These are all
people who I knew from before they even started doing this music thing
professionally, and I was a part of their early process, so I’m very
happy when I see how successful they are. However, there is more to this
industry, especially now that we are dealing with structural issues and
stuff like that. There is so much to do and that’s kind of where my
focus is right now, so it’s not about myself or one person, it’s not
just about my artistes, it’s not just about my business, but that we are
able to solve problems.
One morning just you woke up and left the country…
I didn’t just wake up and leave; that’s what people think.
A lot of your fans believe that the crew’s breaking up was attributed to your leaving for the US.
I don’t regret leaving for one second,
let me tell you why; the reason I left was to develop myself and to
build my confidence level to the point where I could say ‘music business, I know it, and music business, I can do it’.
I wanted to be able to get to that level, and unfortunately there was
no access to all that at that time for me, so I had to step away from
this environment, go to a more professional environment and sit down
with people who have done this for 50 to hundreds of years, look at and
study their process, understand what makes the business. Don’t forget
that I owned a record label and I had 11 artistes; I needed to
understand how to make the business work.
So I put myself in that environment, I
worked with artistes, record label people, song writers and producers in
the studio on the visual side, on the audio side, on the interactive
side, media, everything. I even started an interactive company and went
into partnership with a couple of guys and we won loads of awards, and
when I felt like I had gotten enough of that knowledge and I felt like I
was confident enough to come back, that is when I came back. I always
tell people that I didn’t go to America to hustle; I didn’t work for my
first two years, thank God for the fact that I had parents that were
comfortable enough to be able to sustain it, especially when I was
trying to intern and learn things there. It was just self-development,
like going for another Master’s Degree. As soon as I felt I was ready to
come back, I came back.
How was the experience; merging music and the business-branding side?
I had been in an environment where people do these things professionally, the things that you never really consider like ‘okay
the reason why this person is like this is because there is a concept
for every album, there is a branding manual that they go buy, there is a
PR plan that they create, everybody stick to this PR plan.’ When you have that experience, then you start to put it in perspective for what you are trying to do.
I understand that I have a brand that
people remembered from the Trybesmen days, so when I was trying to come
back to Nigeria I figured I needed to re-invent that brand. Re-inventing
that brand was to show people a different side of what they hadn’t seen
before in terms of the music, the marketing, the image, everything.
Already I felt like I had a bit of a role model figure because of all of
the people I had behind me when I started, and coming back, I needed
something that fit in to that ‘Godfather, ELDee, Innovator, Pioneer,
Creator, Big Boy’ image. Something to resonate to people easily…Those
were some of the things I had been able to learn from my time in the US.
It is what has helped me to put myself where I am right now.
You produce almost all your songs…
Until this album; the ‘Undeniable’ album.
What is the major difference in making music here as compared to making music overseas?
The major difference is that there is
structure in the US. Sometimes that structure makes it more challenging
for you as a talent, because there you have to go through a process to
get where you need to be.
However, it works better over there,
because there are song writers, producers, record labels, there are
majors, vanity labels, media; everything is integrated, PR people, photo
people, video people, people who shoot the videos, people who do the
street level marketing. It’s so organized that all you need there is
funding. You can promote literally anything, you just have to have money
and ‘small talent’.
There is a process you have to go
through to be able to get to that point, so I’m feeling like right now,
if you look at it in terms of the guerrilla style that we do here, where
anybody can literally get on the radio and somehow get lucky and become
big, this industry is better for that, and that there’s still an
opportunity for just anybody off the street.
When do you think the Nigerian music industry had the makeover?
I would say maybe 1997 or 1998 with Maintain, Trybesmen, Plantashun boiz, The Remedies, Def ‘O’ Clan, Ruff Rugged and Raw…
Since then, do you think we’ve moved at the right pace or tried enough?
Honestly, independently, without any
support, without any type of enforcement from the government, [and] no
infrastructure whatsoever, I think this industry has done pretty well.
We should have people doing papers on what we’ve done in Nigeria because
what we have done is out of passion and drive; we created something out
of nothing. There are challenges; unfortunately it’s a big challenge.
The fact that our copyright commission is just messing around, or maybe
they don’t get enough funding like they always claim. The fact that
nobody is interested in intellectual property, control and enforcement.
The fact that people just take advantage of the system. No industry
grows if certain things are not in place. Without those things in place,
the industry will forever be stunted, and unfortunately, the power to
do those things lies in the government, and we all know that our
government is irresponsible. No one cares about anybody or what anybody
feels. Nobody cares about the needs of the people, we don’t have light,
we don’t have roads, and basic water and we don’t have security, then
you now want to start talking about intellectual property? That’s like
speaking rocket science to a farmer.
You say that the process of
‘guerrilla style’ music promotion has stunted growth in the
entertainment industry but some people disagree. D’banj, in a recent
interview, likened our style of promotion here to a situation where you
have people who study mechanical engineering in University and people
who have basic training on the street, but both still fix tyres and
repair cars. What are your thoughts?
He would never design a tyre though, [he
would]never design an engine or an airplane. He would never be able to
think beyond that tyre he’s fixing; that is the difference. We need
innovators, we don’t need conformists. We need people who build, not
people who live. The only way to grow is to have constant builders,
innovation from the technology side and the music side; every sector
needs that, so formal training and education is a skill that you can
never disregard, because it gives you the tools to become an
innovator. It’s not enough to do things the guerrilla way; yes it’s fun
if people would benefit from it, but for the greater good, we need
structures. Structure allows for the industry to be monetized properly,
for there to be bankability, for banks to get to a point where they can
give record labels loans because they know they will make their money
back, for someone to be able to get a job as a photographer or be
independent and be sustained by the entertainment industry, for an actor
to do 20 titles and sit down and know for the rest of his life he’s
going to make money off his 20 titles, and for a musician to release 5
albums and have a car at the end of it. Until we get to that point, we
haven’t started yet.
Let’s talk about your past relationship with Storm Records…
It was pretty much a distribution deal
for my second album. At that time, Storm was meant to promote the album
in Nigeria, which they did, so we were going to split the revenue on
sales. Obi and I have been pretty close, and when I was leaving I
actually wanted him to run Trybe Records, but he already had an idea of
what he wanted to do. That’s how Storm Records came about in the first
place. So Obi and I were pretty close, we were working together the
whole time and he was very supportive.
Which of your five albums is your favourite?
Probably ‘Return of the King’, because it’s
the only album I made without thinking of the consequences
commercially. I just made music, it didn’t really matter to me, I was
just in the studio vibing and recording. Also because I wasn’t really in
Nigeria, I just wanted to put out some music so it was approached
almost like a mixtape, like ‘just go in there and do something’, it was post Trybesmen, the eLDee of Trybesmen that people knew back then, and that was what began my transgression into the new eLDee.
Now you have the Da Trybe 2.0. Once again, you are gathering the new school of artistes. Why are you doing it again?
I’m doing it again for two reasons:
1: I believe with the new platform that
we’ve created we can establish a decent level of structure in the
Nigerian entertainment industry
2: I believe that we can be diverse in
our music, so I want to preach a little bit of diversity all over again.
Everybody doesn’t have to do the same thing, I think our people are
yearning for new sounds and new ideas. I think that there are a lot of
people who have the talent but don’t get the platform, so we are
creating a platform and should be able to support talents like that.
Ultimately, what we are doing here is about to become a major thing –
an end to end entertainment business solution. Our structure is strong
enough to sign up to 30 artistes within the next 24 to 36 months, so why
not?
You have signed two producers: Sarz and Sheyman. Why?
Back then we didn’t have many producers;
there were three or four producers in the whole country, but now there
are like hundreds or thousands of producers everywhere. However the move
is not just as simple as people think, it’s about the business that we
are building.
There’s a company we started called IMAN Entertainment,
which is the group head for 4 companies. Trybe Records is one of those
companies; Trybe has been acquired by the IMAN. Trybe production is our
event company and we also have a company called IMAN One, which is the
distribution company. There is also IMAN audio and visual studio, we’re
currently finishing our state of the art facilities in Lekki. My
producers are all going to be there; not just Sarz, and Sheyman, but
I’ll be looking to work with all of the young producers that are out
there right now, bring a couple more of them on board and give them room
to be creative and make music. Let’s go back to the essence of why we
are doing this thing in the first place, let’s make some music, let’s
have fun while we’re doing it, let’s try to change the game.
On the video side, we‘re building a
professional Hollywood standard studio here in Lagos for Nollywood and
for the entertainment industry in general. The studio will be the first
of its kind in West Africa, possibly in Africa.
A lot of Nigerian artistes have
gotten international deals and or international collaborations recently,
like D’banj with Mercury-G.O.O.D Music and Psquare signing a
distribution deal with Universal Music. Do you think Nigeria is ready to
make that leap into the international field?
Our music is strong, but we still need
some level of structure. People are beginning to realize the potential
of the market, and they are beginning to acknowledge this market, which
is a good thing. If I get signed in the US today, I just won’t really
make noise about that because I don’t think it’s necessary. It doesn’t
change the grand scheme of things for eLDee in Nigeria; if I’m unable to
use that platform to sell Nigerian music to Americans, then to me, it’s
a waste of time.
If I have to go to America to make
American music for Americans then that’s a different artiste, that’s a
different brand, a different platform. Until we get to the point where
our music can command enough respect for those artistes to want to work
with us, I don’t really see much of what is going on now as beneficial.
Let’s export our own, let them come and buy from us, we are trying to
create an African major because we want to control Africa, we don’t need
Universal to come and control for us. This is our Africa, this unique
market, it’s almost like on the same thing in every sectors,
telecommunications and oil and gas etc. We have to realize the potential
that we have and begin to capitalize on it. It’s cool that people see
it as a sign of success, but I’m a business man; if it doesn’t make
dollars, it doesn’t make sense.
You tied the knot with your wife Dolapo in 2008. It’s been almost 4 years now, how has 4 years of marriage been?
No real difference, because I have been
with my wife for 13 years now. We started through the Trybesmen era and
we lived through it together, so to get to this point is like ‘it’s just
same thing. The only difference is that we have a daughter, and we
divert some of our funds to her, and some of our attention of course.
Nothing much has changed.
What’s your daughter favourite eLDee song?
That’s very tough, [because] she’s
always making requests for different songs. She likes ‘Today Today’, I
know she likes ‘Higher’. I did a song for her on the album which she
loves. She hangs out in the studio, so she got to listen first. She’s a
fun kid.
When she grows up, will you allow her to follow your in your footsteps as a player in the entertainment industry?
I believe so, even though I wouldn’t try
to manipulate her. I would give her the opportunity; you live in the
house where there’s a studio, if you want to do music it’s right there,
if you want to be a computer geek, fine, if you want to do fashion,
ok. The thing I want for my children is to be able to create access for
them wherever they go for whatever it is they want to do. It’s my job to
create access for her. That’s the reason why I’m working so hard. If my
daughter decides tomorrow that she wants to be an actress, I don’t
mind. She’s just two and I can already tell she knows music.
eLDee the activist
I hate that word ‘activist’
Why?
Activist just sounds offensive ‘eLDee the concerned citizen’ how about that?
Okay, as eLDee the concerned
citizen, you’ve always voiced your opinion through your music; with
songs like ‘I go yarn’ and ‘One day’. Why have you taken it upon
yourself to do so?
I have done that because I have a
platform to do so. A lot of people have platforms and they misuse it,
[but] this platform is not just for me to make music and make money off
people, this platform is a gift, it’s a blessing, to bless other people
with it and if it’s the only way I can do that, then I must be able to
use it to tap into people’s consciousness and say ‘this not the way things are supposed to be.’
I’m pretty comfortable, even in Nigeria, but guess what? A lot of people have gotten so used to not having,
that they don’t even know what having can be like. Look at what just
paying a little more attention to infrastructure has turned Lagos into
within 2 years; why isn’t that happening at the national level? Those
are the things I’m concerned about. I know the people in Lagos cannot
fix power because it’s a federal problem. The people are suffering and
the money is there, they’re just chopping. One person in Nigeria fit get
$1bn,, wetin he wan carry $1bn do? If you have $100m, na the same club
you and person wey get N100m go dey enter, na the same motor una go buy.
There is disregard for the people and I always want the people to know
that it doesn’t have to be like that.
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