Ladipoe: The Price is Never on the Tag

He sits across from me in my living room in Lagos, a man in the middle of a new becoming. Not the novel actualisation that happens at the start of a career, when the world first opens up, but the quieter, more costly one that happens after the first wave of everything has already crashed through. After the hits. After the recognition. After the long, grinding silence between projects when the fan base starts to wonder whether you’re still there.

Ladipoe has been an artist long enough to know the price of the thing. He just didn’t always know it in advance.

He came from a family of civil servants and entrepreneurs, he says, and it is immediately clear this is dimensional. There is a tradition, in that stock, of the name meaning something. Not wealth in the monetary sense, not necessarily, but integrity carrying its own kind of currency. “There’s an era of civil servants where your name meant something,” he says. “So I can’t say it was wealth in monetary sense. It was the power of the integrity of the name and maintaining that.” He grew up inside that value system, which made the decision to become a rapper in Lagos one of the more structurally confusing things a person in his position could do. The path was the office, the suit, the tie, and the vaunted job. Music was the opposite of everything the family’s sacrifice was meant to produce.

“I did not even believe I had this ability when I discovered it in school,” he tells me. He started making music with two other guys, in college, as a side thing, 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, rising again to go to the office. Putting his family’s view of him on the line. Sometimes ending up in places he shouldn’t have been, at hours when things could get dangerous, for music that might not work.

Ladipoe did it anyway. Because the pursuit was giving so much that the cost didn’t register until years later, when the responsibilities accumulated and the clarity came. “As you get older and you start to have certain responsibilities, a certain view of yourself and where you really want to go is much clearer now. The cost becomes even more apparent.”

The shopping analogy he reaches for is apt: you walk past the window, you want the shoes, you want the outfit. You go in. They tell you the price. Your body calms down. The difference with music, he says, is that nobody tells you the price when you’re deciding to pursue it. “Here you’re not told the price. You go for it, and along the way you discover the cost: the loss of family time, the disassociation from yourself, even your own self, what you give up to create.”

What Ladipoe discovered, and is still discovering, is that the cost doesn’t stop presenting itself. It compounds and arrives in new forms. It morphs into the tension between seeing yourself through your own eyes and seeing yourself through the eyes of the audience. He names this as one of the central pressures of the work, the thing that can drive you crazy if you let it get out of balance. “The thing that you bring to your art and to your creativity is your own unique POV, that’s the actual selling point of music. And if you lose sight of that, it’ll start to show 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 pidgin, the vernacular of the street and the music industry. He came up in a lane that barely existed before he helped make it exist. He knows exactly what it costs to hold a position that the mainstream keeps treating as a niche. “People who make music in that lane are made to feel like you’re doing too much,” he says. “You’re being too difficult. You’re a perfectionist.” He rejects 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 is not interested in lowering the standard.

What he is interested in, what he has been interested in for as long as he has been making music, is the line. The exact line. “I can’t describe to you the feeling of coming up with the line that says exactly what you wanted to say,” he tells me, and in this moment he loses all the careful reserve of a man measuring every word. “For me it is addictive, it is an addictive thing, because it’s like, yo, that’s exactly how I wanted to say it. This is the way I wanted to say, and I’m gonna try and deliver it the way I want. So, before that song is out, I already love it.”

This is where his confidence comes from, and he is precise about what kind of confidence it is. He calls it arrogance, but the word doesn’t quite fit. It is closer to a conviction that has been tested enough times to become load-bearing. Years of making music that the market didn’t immediately receive taught him to locate the validation inside the work itself, before it met the world. “I trust my sense of taste to the point where I will think you have the problem.” He says it flatly, without aggression.

Ladipoe’s next album has been coming for nearly three years. He has been working on it since 2023, and the process has required, in sequence: figuring out what he wanted to say, figuring out how to say it, finding the beats and the sound that matched the mode of communication, and then, underneath all of it, accepting the artist he actually was rather than the artist the moment was asking for. “There are many, many, many layers that have gone into the creation of this project,” he says.

He’s always called his fan base “Lifelines.” No punchlines, just lifelines. The name carries his whole philosophy inside it: the people who have held on through the gaps, who are waiting on the other side of the silence with a particular kind of sustained investment that he feels the weight of, every day. “My fan base is very like they feel a certain type of way right now. Let me just put it like that. Anything I post, last last, oh, cute. Where’s the album?”

Ladipoe feels the urgency. He absorbs it, incorporates it, lets it go into the music. “I feel the urgency of the fan base, I feel the excitement, I feel the anticipation, I feel the apathy, I feel all the different things.” The pressure, he says, is mostly self-generated. He quotes Vince Staples: tortured artists, not a new term, tortured for real. There is audio playing in his head all the time, cataloguing what he didn’t do right, what he could have done better, and he has to make the real audio over and around it.

The album is called a “Revival.” Revival season. He says it with the demeanor of someone who has been holding this thing for long enough for it to breed anticipatory impatience. “Anybody who’s cared, who’s stuck with the art, let it sit with them. They know that there’s a journey that they’re going to experience with the project.”

The guiding delusion, as he puts it, citing my question back at me with clear pleasure, is that you can still connect with people if you are simply yourself. He knows this is a cliché. He says it anyway, because for people who are actually this way, driven by an obligation to their own POV, it is not a hackneyed. It’s a survival position. Everything comes at you offering opportunity, only if you become something you are not. “So many things are, over time it becomes valuable to find out who you’re meant to be.”

Ladipoe arrived in the Nigerian music industry not knowing he would be here. He signed to a Mavin Records, a predominantly pop music house. He’s long navigated the identity crisis that follows commercial connection, the moment when the question shifts from ‘can I make it?’ to ‘what am I willing to do to sustain it?’ He pieced the answer into form with each release: niche artistry, mainstream success, the tension between doing what is authentically you and connecting to the widest audience possible. He and the label named it together, which is itself an unusual enough thing in Nigerian music that it’s worth noting.

“I will always care about writing,” he says, near the end of pourc conversation. It is stated like a commitment he is renewing rather than making for the first time. He will not engage with a rap artist who has nothing to say. He believes lyrical rap is in the middle of its evolution right now, happening in real time, and he names Dave’s recent record, Odumodublvck’s project, and Blaqbonez’s, as evidence of the landscape filling up with people who mean it. “That is how industries grow and niches grow. That’s how we stay healthy. A balanced diet.”

There is a question underneath all of this that the interview keeps circling without quite landing on, and it is the question of what it costs. Not in the abstract, not in the shopping analogy, but in the specific ledger of Ladipoe’s career: the years of not being heard immediately, the Christmas gig turned down, the album held for three years until it was right, the refusal to tweet himself into relevance, the credibility he has protected by saying no to things that would have made his phone ring more, but would have made him less.

“It’s probably the reason why I’ve gotten some opportunities, but also the reason why I’ve lost a lot of opportunities,” he says. He does not regret this. He is not performing the absence of regret. He is genuinely at peace with the trade. He’s made the right calls and then lived inside the consequences long enough to understand why moderation was the better path.

Ladeipoe’s father is an optimist. He gets this from his father. The guiding light, the question that keeps him moving, is the one I keep asking myself too: what if it all works out? “Not all reality checks ground you to reality,” he shares. “Sometimes they confirm that you’re supposed to be floating, you’re supposed to be a bit crazy.”

He is supposed to be floating. He has been floating for a long time. The album is almost here, and the Lifelines are waiting. And if it all works out, which it might, which the music suggests it will, then the price will have been exactly right.

He just didn’t know that when he paid it.