Rap Music Has Come To Stay

Zdon Paporella is one of Nigeria’s brightest music stars. Imbued with a rare intelligence and eloquence, Zdon is also reputed for his frankness. In this interview with TheNEWS, the Plateau-born musician speaks on sundry issues affecting the music industry and offers suggestions on how to move the industry forward

• Zdon Paporella

Q: How do you define Hip-Hop in the Nigerian context?
A: Hip-Hop, by the true definition of what hip-hop is, is supposed to be a way of life – the culture of the African-Americans.
It’s supposed to be a way of life for them over there. And we could say it actually started from Africa because a lot of our slaves were taken to the western world. And before then the Africans had their local way that they used to chant or speak to their gods through the means of incantations.

And history says that some of these slaves took that same tradition with them. And while they were in those boats or ships, they made some of those incantations. They cried to their gods and the traditions lived on. And you will know for now it had more to do with development rather than change. It’s not a complete change. People just developed what we had there already. They developed it and it now became the rhythm of modern poetry which we have today, which is rap. And hip-hop became the way of life. Rap is just one of the ways by which hip-hop is expressed. Hip-hop has to do with the dressing, which is another way. There is a particular way that most hip-hop acts are expected to dress. It is a way of life. Rap is just one of them. Today, a lot of Nigerians are imbibing that culture. We have imbibed the means of communication which is rap. Some of us are doing it very well. Some of us are doing it in our local lingua. Some have decided to take it a step further, to do it in the lingua even people in the western world can understand. And some of us have also imbibed their dress codes.

So you could say that the Nigerian music industry is actually by the day, every single second, imbibing the culture. Some years back, rappers actually didn’t do too well because most people would not give an average rapper a chance. People were used to melody. People want to hear others sing something they can, maybe, relate to; even if they cannot say the words, at least they can hum it. But they cannot hum rap, they can only say it. So if you don’t know it, you cannot say it. And, you know most Nigerians are lazy. They are laid back. They are usually not too interested in the lyrics, that is, the content of the song. They only want to hear the melody or the beat. But when the awareness started and people started singing songs, they started learning to sing songs.

Now, for rap it was difficult because if you don’t hear, you don’t hear it. Thank God for rap in the local lingua. It has grown and people have started accepting it.
Today, rappers are making money. Ruggedman is making money, Mode Nine is making money. Several other rappers are making money from that. So you could say the hip-hop culture in Nigeria has come of age and it’s doing very well now.

Q: There is the complaint that rap is bad because the lyrics are usually dirty as rap artists promote sex and violence generally.
A: It’s very, very untrue. Rap is a genre of music. You, the artist, decide the content of what you want to talk about. There are a lot of raps that are gospel rap songs. We have Rooftop MC, they sing Christian rap. There are so many of them out there. They do Christian rap. And you have the ones that will talk about sex, drugs and violence. There is a particular set of audience that wants to hear them; that’s what they want to hear. But not everybody wants to hear that. So you have to have that kind of rap music that suits that kind of audience.

Q: In Nigeria there are some artists who are virtually rapping in their local language: Lord of Ajasa, 2 Shots etc. How do you rate the acceptability of those artists?
A: I would say that the acceptance is very, very high, most especially in the western region. I have to be frank. But if you go to some other areas like the east, it’s a different story. You know Nigeria is a very tribalistic country. That’s the way it is. Inasmuch as we try to ignore that fact, it is a fact that it is in existence. It is there. And you can’t do without it. And every artist should always take that into consideration when they are doing their songs, especially if they want a very, very wide audience. But if you go to the east now, an Igbo man wants to relate with the songs that he is listening to. He wants to hear parables. Some of them are very clever. Lord of Ajasa, for instance, is very smart. What he does is that he has a very good sense of balance – the Yoruba language and English and pidgin English.

So, what you have at the end of the day are punch lines that will make the average Yoruba man want to listen. So that he can permit the punch lines that are there because they are very good punch lines.
But some of them don’t take this into consideration, but they still do well.

But if you have an artist now performing his music, and he does his songs on stage and the whole song is like 90 per cent Yoruba. He does one song like that, the second one like that and by the third one, the audience will be bored. They probably might even boo him. That is Nigeria for you. But if you bring Miriam Makeba to Nigeria to come and sing in Swahili, if she performs for two hours, Nigerians will sing the whole songs, even though they don’t understand what she is saying.

So, there is hypocrisy and tribalism. Our music has come of age. Nigerians brought Awilo Logomba to Nigeria, even though nobody knows what he is saying in the songs. So there is hypocrisy, there is tribalism. Though our music has come of age, there are still certain factors. People need to get some orientation. They need to be well educated. Tribalism has to be phased out. Music should be criticised based on certain elements and certain basic factors. That is, technicality is involved. There is production, which has to do with the groove; and the delivery, which has to do with the vocals. Those are the two basic factors that should be used in judging music, not what language you are using to sing. In Nigeria, we still have that problem. People still need to be educated.

Q: It is true that there is widespread acceptance of rap music. But does that acceptance translate to good money?
A: It is bad always to use one individual. It is always best to make a general analysis. Now if I should do that, I would tell you that yes, it is. Since Mode Nine is the first among so many talented singers to get such a huge endorsement from Globacom, it shows rap has come of age. It shows that rap is a brand and a genre that the people are accepting. Companies do endorsement based on a 50-50 basis. I give you something and you give me something in return.

Brand and brand must complement. So, I would not use you if you are not going to do anything for me. I have seen some endorsement that became more useful for the artiste than for the brand. I won’t lie to you.

But Mode Nine generated so much noise for Globacom. And it also helped Mode Nine, too. So it was complementary for both brands. And Mode Nine is a rapper. They could have used so many singers. There are so many that probably would have done it for free. I know a lot of artists that would do endorsements for free, just to have their faces on billboards.

Yes, because you know that in the long run people count monetary gains. But in the true sense of it, professionally, you shouldn’t do an endorsement for free. But there are a lot of people that will do it for free. So, I will tell you that generally it is a huge step. And rappers are making money.

Q: Beyond endorsements, what about CD sales and concerts?
A: CD sales, maybe not. But it cannot be a win-win situation. There are talented singers whose albums will sell, but they don’t do well. There are a lot of factors in this country that affect sales of album. So, basically sale of albums has a lot to do with luck.The luck factor plays a very vital role in it. There are songs that you hear in the studio, already you have written them off. But in a month they sell one million copies without them being heard on radio, without the videos being shown on TV.

So there are other factors. I don’t generally like to use CD sales, because I am a professional. I believe that today, with the way things are, a lot of people are getting more informed about music. Four years ago the ratio of the bad songs you heard on radio was more than the ratio of the good ones. Today, it is getting better because a lot of people have started realising that good songs need to be heard because they speak a whole lot about us. People are beginning to know what good songs are. I see how people on the street criticise songs and they say some interesting things. So, at least almost everybody has an idea of what a good song should be like. But there are good songs, you will agree with me that don’t make hits. And there are some hits that are not good songs. So you would not use CD sales as a general criterion to judge an artist or his capability. It will be a very wrong criterion. There are other areas. Now listen to the music. Is it good? It is good. Is the artiste a good entertainer? Are the lyrical content of the song good? Is the song commercial enough? Those are certain criteria that people should look at when you want to judge an artiste, not CD sales. Sometimes the marketer might even be responsible for that.

Q: How can Nigerian musicians make more money?
A: We’ve been campaigning for radio stations and media houses to pay royalties. There are a lot of ways artists make money abroad. When I was in London last year, I did a song with a Sudanese artiste called Emmanuel Jah. The song had been used for two documentaries. I have been collecting royalties for that song.

I didn’t know about it. I have not even seen him since we recorded the song. And so far so good, I probably would have received close to $1000 from that song as royalty. Something I did and had forgotten about.

Artists are not being paid royalty in this country. They have been campaigning for people to pay their fees. You see adverts, and they have been using Nigerian songs, they should pay for them.

Now it would be very very unrealistic for us to say radio stations should pay every artiste for every song that they play. It would be unrealistic because I have been on radio and TV. I have an idea of how much they generated even from the so-called commercials. And I know how many artists they play a day and how many title songs are played. But if you say you have a body like MCSN to collect funds on behalf of artists and every radio station every year pays N500,000, which is not too much money for any amount of songs they used from different radio stations, there are over 100 radio stations in Nigeria and you’d collect N500,000 from each one of them based on their reach. Some will collect N150,000, you will collect N200,000. You will generate close to millions. And you disburse this one in seven years. Artists that get heavily rotated will make good money, because there is a way you can keep a track on that. Any song that gets heavily rotated, you will know. From nowhere as an artiste, in five years you will have nothing less than N1.5 - N2 million in your account. From somewhere you didn’t go to perform, you didn’t go to do a song, you didn’t go to do anything, you will make money.

These days in Nigeria we have been taking copyright too much for granted that every single rule has been broken. If you want to advertise a remote control, for instance, they use the song. The artists even celebrate the fact that their song was used. You are using this to sell your product, and you are not giving anything back to the artiste. But the truth is that if you show this remote on TV one million times, it might not get anybody’s attention. And if I am outside and I heard the song and I come in, it diverts my attention. I want to see what it is. I come in, it is not a video, it’s an advert. Four out of ten people would remember this remote control. Now, it is working for you, but nothing is working for me. And these are ways artistes are meant to make money.

Now, some people will intentionally do some shows so that they can use only a particular set of artists so that they will not pay them. It’s ridiculous that in Nigeria you have what is called ‘transport fare.’ An artiste comes on stage, performs for 10-15 minutes. This is the same person that sat down to write these songs, gone to the studio to pay to record the songs. If you know the hell artistes go through to record the song, you will appreciate every artiste you see. Sometimes, you might end up not giving him the meagre N5,000 or N10,000 you are able to give him. Some will give you the excuse that the show flopped. Did I ask you to do a show? It is not by force that you have to do a show. I even think that there should be a body to give licences to people who want to be promoters. Not everybody should just wake up and do shows. It doesn’t happen like that abroad. You don’t just do shows. There should be a standard. Some shows you go to, the stages don’t have backdrop. So, you the artist are in the middle of the audience. You come up to perform for the same audience. How will they appreciate you? Sometimes before you get into the venue, you use the same entrance with them. And the bouncers are there, telling you that they don’t recognise you. And the same people you want to perform for are there. It’s a whole lot of nonsense. And we have bodies that are supposed to look at such matters. They are looking at something trivial. We have a body that says they want to start censoring music. Is that where the problem is? The problem is bigger than that. The heart of the problem is there. It’s looking at them, but they choose to ignore it. As bad as the music industry is, there are people who benefit from it. So those same people will never speak the truth.

Q: Many young Nigerian musicians are doing well now. It’s like a revolution. How did it all begin?
A: We owe a lot of these things to hip-hop. So when a lot of people criticise hip-hop, I laugh. This particular genre of music started from when Zaky Adzee came out with Na Me Go Marry Am. A lot of people will say it is Remedies. No, but it was Zaky Adzee first, then the Remedies. But the Remedies’ hit track, Shako Mo came, it caught fire; the first time you would go to an event or a party and they would play a Nigerian song five times back to back. It was Shako Mo.

I say Zaky Adzee because in that album, Na Me Go Marry Am, he had another track that was a remix of Shabba Ranks’ Mr. Lover Man. Those songs were hits in every nook and cranny of Nigeria. In any part of the country you went to then, you would hear that song, Na Me Go Marry Am. It was selling well. Then, Shako Mo came. Now, before Na Me Go Marry Am, it was either reggae or highlife. People didn’t pay too much attention to R&B. The likes of Chris Okotie and Felix Lebarty were trying to do the R & B thing then. But the song that got Lebarty attention was the song that was more like highlife, Ifeoma. Felix Lebarty was an R & B singer, but he needed to do what we are doing today. Felix Lebarty realised that. Chris Okotie never wanted to accept it. That is why till today very few of us can remember his songs. But we can remember Ifeoma, because highlife was the in thing. So he was smart. It was either highlife or reggae music. So when you are talking about the leap, you have to be specific. If you are talking about making good money, that started from when they started taking our artists abroad. It was Tony Tetuila that was first taken to London to perform. And he was well paid for that because he had a good management company. And eventually the money thing started coming.

Then corporate bodies started getting interested. They started bringing in their money. When Tuface came, when they gave him that endorsement, that was the first time we heard an artiste was given over N20 million. It caught like wild fire because we are getting millions in music. And going to London now became the in-thing.Then what capped it all: Corporate bodies like Nigerian Breweries started Star Trek and Star Mega Jamz, we started hearing that artists were now getting N500,000, N400,000.

Q: What really goes into good video production?
A: Plenty of money. When P-Square shot their videos, those videos cost them N7million because they shot on film celluloid. That is why I say the reason why this industry would not grow or why the growth is impeded is because we have certain people at the helm of affairs. Every artiste wants to do a good video, but for God’s sake we can’t go robbing banks. We are not making the money from the industry. Some of us even take risk by investing the funds that we got from other places into it. Some of us don’t even have that privilege of having other things to do to generate these funds to invest. If artists are paid well from their royalties, and everybody is paid according to his or her dues, perhaps we would have shot on film celluloid now.

It is because of the system. The system puts you in a certain position whereby you are helpless. A lot of money goes into videos. And only very few people have the money to afford the videos. For you to shoot a very good video, you are looking at from N500,000 upwards. It is not small money.

Q: Who Is Zdon?
A: I am versatile. I am one person that can do a lot of things I never miss any opportunity to acquire knowledge. If there is something anybody can do and I have the opportunity of learning it, I join him. So I find myself doing so many things.

Q: How do you describe your music?
A: Over time when I was growing up, I listened to different kinds of music, so it affected me. So basically, my music is just an expression of myself, Zdon. It’s just me. A lot of my colleagues are doing well. Timaya is doing well in sales and rotation. P-Square is heavily rotated. Now the most rotated song is 9ice’s Gongo Aso. Ruggedman is doing very well because he is a brand that has weathered the storm. XProject are doing well in the area of rotation and acceptability.

In the area of general acceptability right now, I would say P-Square are top of the pack.