Interview: Temi DollFace

Earlier this year, journalist Matt Sonzala visited Lagos. As he was there, he conducted numerous interviews, getting a unique look into the city’s varied music scene at the moment. Temi DollFace’s electro pop sound has made it far outside of her home country, but in this interview she talks about the challenges associated with sounding like little else in her local music scene, offering a rare glimpse of the Nigerian music business.

I came up listening to Afrobeat, highlife and all sorts of sounds from Africa. I have to say, I never expected to hear anyone like Temi DollFace coming from Nigeria.

Oh, thank you very much. For me, it’s really about just being able to express all my different influences, no matter what parts of the world they’re from, obviously including my Nigerian influences, and Fela Kuti, funnily enough, is the biggest one. I’m a big believer in fusing different sounds, even if they come across to people as disparate, and that they shouldn’t be mixed together. I like to show that that can be done, and that was something I think I learned from Fela.

When you were a child, was his influence really evident out here?

His influence, definitely, but I wasn’t allowed to listen to that sort of music as a child, so I actually got to know Fela’s music quite late. I’d heard some of the stuff, but... Obviously I’d be out and hear it on the radio, but I knew that at home I wasn’t allowed to listen to that sort of stuff, so Fela’s music came late, but it still made the same impact it probably would’ve done if I was a child when I first heard it.

With your music I get a similar feeling to when I first heard Aṣa. She took me by surprise, because that was the first time I’d ever heard someone from Nigeria that I would label “alternative folk” or something. Your music, like hers, coming from Nigeria, it’s just not something I would ever think of.

Yeah, I don’t think enough of a cross-section of what is actually in Nigeria in the way of talent actually makes it to those platforms. Obviously, a lot of people, when they think Nigeria, they think Boko Haram, or the negative side of things, but there’s always another side. The same way with music, there’s always another side. There are rock bands here, there’s just so much that people haven’t tapped into or people don’t know about, which is quite sad.

That’s what I was thinking, because there are at least 20 million in this city alone?

Yeah. Having said that, though, I know that there are a lot of factors that do make people want to be able to dance and forget their worries. Sometimes we don’t have running water and electricity and that sort of thing, so most times, nobody’s really wanting to...

Well, I wouldn’t say nobody, but not that many people want to sit down and listen to music that makes them think, and so I really think it’s about a beat. That’s what it is for most people, the grassroots want to listen to something with a beat, and they don’t necessarily want to hear what the lyrics of the song are, but I think that music has its place. Like in other parts of the world, there’s a balance of all the different kinds of music, and I think that’s what we need and that’s what we’re working towards.

When the majority of people in the world think African music, they think Afrobeat. But some are starting to see how strong hip-hop’s influence is here right now.

Definitely. Hip-hop has a massive influence, but it’s so weird. If you think to five years back, I think most Nigerian artists were more influenced by what was on the charts in America, and now more of the Africaness is coming through. It’s almost like they found their own niche that’s very much their own, that’s very much Nigerian, and that’s the zeitgeist at the moment. I mean, it’s great to see that we’ve carved out our own niche, but there is other music that fuses so many different kinds of sounds that may not necessarily all be from here, and there’s just so many ways of interpreting music.

I love that, though. When I listen to Nigerian radio on the internet, I’ll hear the... Even what they would call hip-hop here, I still hear the African sounds, the Yoruba influence, the original language influence when they come in and the Pidgin talk, and that sort of thing.

Even the Hausa, they’ve got a very unique sound. I think their music uses more the Arabic scale. There’s so many different kinds of Nigerian music. There’s Fuji, there’s the Afrobeat. There’s now what we call Afrobeats, what the UK calls Afrobeats, which is more Nigerian pop, and some Nigerian hip-hop. Then there’s folk, there’s Nigerian folklore, so more artists like Adekunle Gold have incorporated that into his own sound. Then you have the Aṣa’s, who were doing more alternative music, more guitar-led music. There’s just so much, there really is.

Your breakout song is an upbeat number called “Pata Pata.” What does pata pata mean?

Pata pata is Yoruba for “completely,” so when you say “pata pata” after a statement, it qualifies it, saying “This happened completely,” and I’m talking about a break-up. It’s a break-up song, which was released around Valentine’s Day, funnily enough, because I thought the people who were going through break-ups at the time... Not everybody’s all loved up and happy around Valentine’s Day, so I thought the people who were not in relationships needed a song that they could sing along to.

“Pata Pata” is really about the end of a relationship and sort of prolonging the end, knowing that it’s over. Going through the motions for the sake of your other half, not wanting to hurt their feelings, but you know the truth so it’s time to spit it out, because how long can you keep up the pretense for? I’m saying it’s over, pata pata, it’s over completely. Done. Dead.

Your music has the potential to break into the pop realm, while remaining socially conscious. Is it possible to make money as a recording artist here? I see a wide spectrum of people here. Could Temi DollFace go pop?

I think it is possible, but as of now, a certain kind of artist is making all the money, because at the moment we have a narrow idea of what good music is. Anything that doesn’t sound like that narrow idea of what Nigerian pop is gets thrown into the alternative box. For an artist like me, for instance, I’ve had dancers on set and they’re like, “This is pop. This can be played in the club.” Over here especially – I’ll use “Pata Pata” as an example – the song doesn’t get a look in the clubs, and the DJs at the clubs will say, “Sorry, this isn’t club music,” because it doesn’t have all those typical elements that we know to be the Nigerian pop sound in it. Whereas they would play trap music in a heartbeat.

That happens a lot of the time. I think obviously the Nigerian music industry is quite young and we lack the infrastructure and we obviously have a lot of growing to do, and I think what’s missing is that balance, so yes, it can be hard for an artist like me to make money, but artists are making money. Sadly, there’s a piracy problem, so most of the people that want to buy this music can only afford very little. I’m sure that when you were in traffic on your way here you’d have seen people selling CDs for about 350 Naira ($1) on the streets. A lot of people buy that, because Nigeria has a massive, massive population, but a lot of those people can’t afford to even have the laptops and the Android phones that they can go and download. They don’t have access to the internet.

We meet them at their level, in a sense, and the music is sold to them on the streets, but this just means piracy, and it means that the artist isn’t getting what’s due to them. Artists generally in Nigeria are making most of their money from shows and endorsements. Even with the internet, we need to find a way to block the leakages in the distribution and how the music is distributed. It’s hard for an artist who isn’t put on all these large platforms and getting paid to do these big shows to make money. Artists who don’t have these massive endorsement deals.

How do these massive endorsement deals come?

They come from you putting out a single that’s hot, that’s hot in the sense of Nigerian pop hot. Obviously your song is played in the club, so people hear it all the time. It’s played on heavy rotation on the radio, it’s played on heavy rotation on the television stations, and that’s how you get the exposure, and then people buy in to you. But it almost feels like there’s just a small group of artists that have had those opportunities, because music outside of what’s considered hot really doesn’t get a look in yet. I believe that’s going to change, and I would like to think that I will be one of the people to make that happen.