₦airaland Forum

Wizkid has been named Nigeria's best dressed pop star by Vogue.com which also conducted an interview with him in a chat via skype.The publication wrote

"Wizkid is pretty much the biggest thing in Nigerian pop, which itself seems to advance on the global music stage almost as quickly as the country’s economy, one of the fastest growing in the world. He scored a massive smash last year with “Ojuelegba,” an insatiable rags-to-riches hit with a shoulder-shrugging Afrobeat, which inspired Drake to jump on a remix...."

Read excerpts from his interview below:
What’s the shopping like in Lagos?

I have local tailors out there who make me traditional stuff. So I get material from Lagos, and I have them make me pieces. I mix them up with whatever I wear. I have a whole lot of tailors. The fabrics are from different parts of Nigeria. We have the tie and dye from the western part of Nigeria. We get stuff from the north. I mix it up.

Do you wear a lot of traditional Nigerian clothes?

When I’m back home, all I wear is African fabric. All I really rock is the traditional stuff. That’s the in thing right now. That’s really coming back. Back in the day, our parents used to wear it every day, and they still do, but now it’s cool for wee young ones to wear it. It’s amazing. We’re doing it differently. We’re having it a little bit more fitted. We have styles on it, embroideries and stuff, by local people, made by hand, designed on it.

What’s your process when you get something made for you?

I design everything myself, and I get them to make it. I do a little sketch; sometimes I just sit down with a tailor and describe what I want. Sometimes we go back and forth, like, for days, trying to get it right. Sometimes it’ll take a day to make it, sometimes three, four days. I have a lot of tailors. If I want something made in 12 hours, it will be made in 12 hours.

Everything is super-clean with you.

Fresh, fresh, fresh. That’s how I like to keep it. It’s hard for me to wear the same thing twice.

You’re also not afraid to wear really skinny jeans.

No, I’m not afraid to wear skinny jeans! Yeah, I don’t care, man. I rock skinny jeans!


Where do you live now? Are you clubbing? Is Lagos the place to be?

I live in Lekki now. There are new clubs popping up every day. We go to places like Escape, Sip, and it’s madness. December is the craziest time to be in Lagos. I just left there, so I’m pretty exhausted from going hard. Africa is the next thing right now. Talking fashion, music, anything—Africa is on top of all that.

Davido believes his Sony Music Deal will go very well unlike the GOOD Music deal Don Jazzy and D’Banj signed with Kanye West.
Davido first of all said he doesn’t want to be Don Jazzy, who was in the same room with 10 other producers including Kanye West. “I don’t want that to be me,” he told The Fader. “I wanna be that one African nigga, where it’s like, ‘Call that African nigga. Let’s get him on the hook.’”

He also firmly believes his American background gives him an edge unlike Don Jazzy and D’Banj. “I can be in the club with Meek Mill and Future and be on a level with them,” he says. “I understand what they’re talking about. I know what the trap is. These are things that some of these other guys, they don’t have it. They can’t have these conversations with the rappers, so how can they have them with the (American) fans?”
When asked if whether he thinks the world is ready for a Nigerian superstar, he said “Of course they’re ready,”. “They just might not know what that’s going to look like.”

David also said he knows the kind of song that will be accepted in the US. “I know what kind of songs work. The music should have everything in it—Jamaican, African, American, everything. Something like Wizkid’s ‘Ojuelegba,’ it has a cool feel to it.” he said.