"I was shocked to see people singing my song, word for word," Shallipopi tells me, sitting across my living room couch in Lagos, as my reflection from his sunglasses catches my eye.
We're mid-interview, recording an episode of Afrobeats Intelligence podcast, sponsored by Martell. It's his second appearance on the show, having shown up earlier in 2024 as he navigated his explosive ascent to stardom. In the two years between episodes, he consolidated his position as a staple of African pop culture, weaving his unique take on artistry into Afrobeat's lifeline. He's also dropped three albums in that time, with an ever-expanding discography buoyed by hits like "Laho," heavy-hitter collaborations across the globe with Burna Boy, Rauw Alejandro, Gunna, Odumodublvck, and Swae Lee, tours across two continents, and a carousel of cultural touch points.
The people singing his songs, word for word, were in Portugal.
It was Afro Nation. Shallipopi had walked through the streets of Portimau earlier that day, and nobody had looked twice. Then night came, the stage lit up, and Portuguese-speaking strangers sang his Benin City slang back at him, syllable for syllable, in a language that wasn't theirs. "It was a crazy thing to see," Shallipopi says. He laughs when he says it, but the laugh carries something underneath it. It’s not pride, exactly, because Shallipopi is philosophically suspicious of pride. But a kind of amazed recognition. The world had gotten bigger than he had imagined, and he had gotten bigger inside it.
This is the central tension of sitting across from him: the artist who took over the clubs, who bent the sonic grammar of Nigerian pop toward his own image, who built a sound so distinct that an entire generation of new makers have quietly pressed their ears against it and called it a template — this same artist insists, calmly and without any performance of humility, that none of it really moved him. Not in the way you'd expect it to move someone.
"It's just a job, at the end of the day," he says.
Shallipopi grew up in Benin City, in Edo State, the eldest of three brothers who shared the same restless ambition and nowhere to put it. Before music, there was comedy. Before comedy, there was dancing. The three of them would make videos — skits, dance routines, whatever format seemed like it might catch — filming on a neighbor's Samsung phone, editing on the phone itself, posting to YouTube. The app they used to record music in those early days was called "To Me," a primitive voice-capture tool that ran through earpiece mics. He mentions it with the fond detachment of a man who has since been inside London's best studios.
"The highest views [were] just 14K," he says. "It was not like it was too much."
But even at 14K, he understood that the views were not the point. The views were evidence of something he had not yet built: a reason for people to stay connected. "Those 14K people, they didn't know me," he explains. "They'll be just like, 'Okay, this is a cool dance.' And then they go search for more dance videos. And they see maybe 10 more, that's better than ours." He shrugs. It was a clean equation. When the container changed and music replaced dance, the same hunger that had driven the dance videos now drove the music. He simply needed to search for a lever for stardom.
That lever arrived in time as the hit record, "Elon Musk." When that song began to pull traction, he knew something had shifted, though he describes the aftermath with the same low-key precision he applies to everything else: "You drop. It waits. Maybe you try and gather money and send one. That doesn't work. You wait again." Then he dropped "Shapiru." Then "Ex-Convict." Each song moved him a few inches further into a market that had not yet agreed to make space for him.
At that point, the market was not looking for what he had. Nigeria's pop infrastructure was built around a certain sound — melodic, Afrobeats-adjacent, tending toward warmth and sentiment. Shallipopi arrived with something else entirely. He was a trapper who talked over amapiano production. He had always been a trapper. He says it flatly, without apology: "I'm a trap star." The amapiano influence that eventually powered "Elon Musk," the song that broke him nationally on TikTok in 2023, was a winning compromise. "It's amapiano that brings food to the table," he says, "So we'll do it. I will drag it with them." He laughs at the memory of it. It’s the laugh of a man who let the market think it had figured him, while keeping his own identity completely intact, as evidenced by his latest album.
Auracle, his latest project, is where the mask comes off, or more accurately, where he stops wearing one. The album splits almost evenly between amapiano, Afrobeats, and trap — each genre calibrated for a different temperature, a different room, or even a different part of the listener. "If you want the house to be shaking, play the amapiano," he explains with breezy logic and reverse-engineering joy. "If you want the cool vibes in your chilling section, play your trap music." He says it like it is the most obvious thing in the world, because to him it is.
The trap section of Auracle, completed in three days in London — three days during which he barely left the studio, barely slept — is the most revealing work of his career. Songs like "Hymn,” the Gunna collaboration, and the record with Swae Lee pull out a version of Shallipopi that his earlier audience mostly wasn't allowed to hear. He flowed differently. He spoke more. He arrived on the beats with a vocabulary and a looseness that surprised even people who had been paying close attention. When I tell him this, he is unbothered. "That's the way I've been singing," he says. "If you watch my old freestyles, that's the way I've been singing." The market simply was not ready to receive it.
“Like That (bomboclat)”, the record with Wizkid — made in roughly an hour — gets a characteristic response when I ask about it. "It was lit now," he says. "We have a fun studio type shit." He pauses. "It just sounded mad, bro, without [any] mixing." There is something in this, in the matter-of-fact way he narrates what would, for most artists, be a career-defining moment. Wizkid, in an hour, sounding mad without mixing. He says it the way you might describe finding good rolling paper.
The Calculated Rise of Shallipopi
What is interesting about Shallipopi — more than the hits and the trajectory — is his relationship with strategy. He denies that he is strategic. He insists he is simply "thinking." And then he describes, in lucid detail, decisions that would make a label executive weep with admiration.
"Laho II," the breakout collaboration with Burna Boy that became one of the year's most-played Afrobeats songs, was not designed to be a global anthem. It was a Benin City anthem. "In this album, let me put one track for my Benin people," he explains. "That was the 'Laho.'" Every album, he tells me, has one. A track rooted in Edo identity, in the heritage of where he came from, placed inside a project aimed at everywhere. He says it the way a contractor might describe a structural decision.
Then came the versioning. "Laho" found its audience in Nigeria, then the UK, then the United States, where Burna was on tour performing it live. By collaborating with Puerto Rican superstar Rauw Alejandro, Shallipopi moved into Spanish-speaking markets. He says it’s not just Spain, but all of the Americas that speak it, by recruiting a collaborator ranked in the top 50 artists in the world. "I was like, 'Shit, man. Go for it.'" Part one, part two with Burna, part three in Spanish for the diaspora. Three markets, one song, sequenced like a television franchise. When I call this strategy, he pushes back lightly. "I was just thinking," he says. Then he pauses. "I agree," he concedes.
His successful brothers, Zerry DL and Famous Pluto, are now artists in their own right. They are signed, releasing hits, and orbiting the same cultural universe. He speaks about them with a warmth that is different from anything else in his register, softer and less guarded. They started together: the comedies, the dance videos, the YouTube channel. When "Elon Musk" moved, he did not call them to say they were next. It did not work like that, he explains. It moved gradually, the way all real things move. Song by song, show by show, until he had enough of a platform to extend. "Those are like my first children," he says, and then immediately seems to reconsider whether that framing makes sense. "Something like that. You get what I mean?"
He insists on keeping work and family separate. It is a line he draws clearly, almost philosophically. And yet his brothers are his collaborators, his people, his "warriors" — a word he uses with unmistakable pleasure. When I point out the contradiction, he does not really resolve it. "I don't know how to explain. Those are my brothers. I trained them. There's a difference." He sits with it for a moment. Then: "All of us grew up together. So I don't know how to explain the whole issue for you, my bro. It's just I have to separate work from family."
It occurs to me, listening to him say this, that the separation is not about distance. It is about protection. He has organized his world in compartments because unorganized worlds collapse under the weight of success. He has watched that happen to people around him. He has thought about it carefully enough to name the danger. "If you feel too fulfilled," he says, unprompted, when I raise the idea of satisfaction, "that's when you feel too comfortable and start relaxing because you did it. You’ll be lazy and all that. And that's the beginning of falling off."
I tell him about the Roman generals. About the tradition, after conquest, of stationing a servant beside the triumphant commander to whisper memento mori into his ear: remember that you will die. A check on pride. A way to stay human within the celebration. He has never heard of it, but he nods slowly when I explain it.
"That's true," he says.
Shallipopi does not feel pride, he insists. He equates pride with rudeness, with a kind of ceiling that settles over you when you think you have arrived. "I know the outcome of being rude," he says. He is not interested in the ceiling. He is interested in what comes next. When I ask what has been most important to him, across all of it. Is it the albums, the awards, the tours, the collaborations, the billion streams, and the Benin City boys who made it to London studios and back? He does not hesitate. "Family, bro." He grins. "Family and a lot of money." Then, reconsidering: "Fulfillment? Fulfillment is tricky. The moment you're too fulfilled, you stop pushing."
He seems satisfied with this answer. He leans back as we wrap up. Shallipopi, the trap star who let the market think he was an Amapiano artist, who placed a Benin City tribute on every album and turned it into a global hit, who made the clubs sound like him, and then quietly watches an entire generation of new artists try to make the clubs sound like him. Shallipopi sits there in his sunglasses, still composed, still seeing everything.
"Strategy is life," he says. Then he laughs. "That's what I'm telling you now."
Watch the full episode of Afrobeats Intelligence with Shallipopi below.
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