Welcome to Adamslink Media: Davido on FADER Magazine Cover, with reveling interview

David Adedeji Adeleke, the Nigerian pop star now better known as Davido, covers the latest issue of Fader Magazine cover. The father of one shared more light on his journey to becoming one of the most sorted Africa artist. He went as far into his family and having a rich father with net-worth over $300 million. more after the cut.

How Davido Became African Pop Music’s Fortunate Son

Davido was 16 when he had arrived in Huntsville, a year earlier. His father, Dr. Adedeji Adeleke, a well-known businessman and Seventh-day Adventist in Nigeria with an estimated net worth of over $300 million, dropped him off with his passport, $2,000 cash, and freshman registration documents for Oakwood University,

The school roomed him with another international student, a Rwandan track athlete—

“I was like, ‘Okay, wow. They just put all the African people together?’”—but he gravitated toward an upstairs neighbor named Jaymo, an American kid whose speakers constantly rattled Davido’s ceiling. “One day, I went to go check what the noise was. I went upstairs, opened the door, and the guy had a full studio in his room,” he says. “I told him that I was trying to do music, too. He asked me, ‘How much do you have to invest in equipment?’ And I said, ‘$2,000.’ He was like, ‘That’s too much.’” They went to Guitar Center with $500.

From then on, Davido spent most of his time making beats and recording vocal references to send to a cousin in Lagos, a fellow musician with a trove of industry contacts. His grades slipped, and after three semesters, he dropped out and left town without telling his father. First he went to Atlanta, where he used his older brother’s ID to get into clubs, and funneled the money Chief Adeleke sent for school and living expenses toward drinks and motels. Later, he threw out his SIM card and hopped on a plane to London, where he went MIA for several months as he shifted his focus from production to vocals. “There was no Snapchat, no Instagram. There was barely Twitter,” he says. “I just went off the radar.”

Davido returned to school, but often snuck out of his dorm room to hobnob at industry parties and blew off exams to record.

“People always say, ‘Oh, he’s just some rich kid.’ And he is,” Davido’s current manager, Kamal Ajiboye, tells me over coffee in the lobby of a Lagos hotel. “But they don’t realize that this music stuff—at first he did it alone.”

For the past three years, Davido, now 23, has lived in the posh Lagos neighborhood of Lekki, in a three-story house that welcomes a revolving cast of employees, friends, and hangers-on, with imported weed and liquor in constant supply and demand. On a Friday afternoon in December, he’s sitting on a couch in the home’s top-floor lounge, telling his life story to an audience of a half-dozen people. A television is queued up with YouTube videos of some of 2015’s most potent grime beefs and freestyles. With an omnipresent gold chain swinging around his neck and a pair of traditional leather slippers dangling off his feet, Davido waves and claps his hands to underscore some points, and spits out Nigerian exclamations like ah-ah! and eiiiish! to emphasize others. A pair of deep symmetrical dimples and a generous flashing of teeth make even his wildest stories seem like harmless capers.

Davido says people with money are now afraid that flashy gestures will make them targets of government watchdogs, and that, as a result, the private concert market has begun to shrink. In 2014, he says, he might have booked as many as six gigs on a given Saturday—each paying in the neighborhood of $70,000. Today, it’s closer to two or three. “The show money is cool, but I need the kind of money that comes in the mail,” he says. “Now, if I say no shows, where’s the money going to come from? I should be able to take my daughter somewhere and say, ‘I’m not doing no shows for two months.’”