Introduce yourself
My name is Ayodele Adepoju (Ayo for short), creative director for We Plug GOOD Music, a small-cap media company aimed at promoting good emerging music from all around the world. We believe in the true art form of music and not necessarily what the industry calls ‘good’ and are dedicated to pushing emerging music more out there to a wider range of audiences, as far reaching as possible.
We’ve basically started off as a blog doing full-length article features on some of the emerging music we believed people should hear & know more about and now we’ve evolved over a year and a half into promoting these emerging music and artists via our radio show on Melody One, our live music showcases here in London & in Lagos (Nigeria) as well as still keeping with the onus of what we do on the website, which is basically giving these artists and their music a platform to be seen and heard. I think, as we go on, we will continue to explore more avenues to push these artists and their music more out there. Hence the radio show and the live events and more recently the compilation tape we’ve just released of original songs by 20 of the best emerging artists we believe you should know about.
Favourite song lyric
This is just one of the many from 2010:
“I promise Mama, Imma do it ‘cos I know I put you through it & I just want you to sit around with your friends at the dinner table and say My baby’s famous & I know it…”
– Closer, Drake
I’m inspired by
Good Music inspires me and I know it probably sounds cliché but that’s the main reason we do this. There used to be so much good music on the radio, especially on the ‘urban’ stations, now it’s all gone and if you’re not making your music to fit into that mould of what the industry want, then you’re essentially screwed and it shouldn’t be like that. Musicians and artists should be allowed to express themselves in whatever way that feels true to them and I guess the struggle that I see some of these artists and musicians who stay true to themselves going through, pushes me to want to support their cause. Essentially the goal is to get that ‘good music’ to crossover to the mainstream and as long as there is that ‘good music’ being made then I’m inspired to talk about it.
My icons past/present
Firstly, my Mother has to be my ultimate icon. That woman has been through fire and brimstone for my siblings and me, to make sure we were set-up and equipped to live life and do and become whatever we wanted to do and become. My mother is a legend mate.
Most people don’t know this but my academic /career background is in finance & investments so when I say one of my icons is Benjamin Graham, you’re going to be like huh? He wrote this book called ‘Intelligent Investor’ in 1949 and he completely revolutionized the way investors behave. You know Warren Buffet? Well Benjamin Graham was his mentor.
Marsha Oakes (Soul Culture) & Amelia Ideh (Put Me On It) are two people in the ‘industry’ that I look up a great detail. They are such great advocators for good music and their support for emerging music is immense and unwavering.
Thenublack philosophy/mantra according to Ayodele Adepoju
I am a huge Hip-Hop head and Jay-Z is one of my favorite artists across all genres and there was this one phrase he used to always say, ‘I Will Not Lose’. Granted the race is only with yourself as Baz Lurhman said in that song, ‘Everybody’s Free’, which has some really great advices that I constantly try to adhere to but alas I digress, talking about that ‘I will Not Lose’ phrase, for so long in my life, it helped build up my perseverance and helped me achieve in some areas (especially academia). They say, ‘you are what you say’ so it’s all about positive affirmations right?
Earlier this year, I saw this quote on the ‘Air n Graces’ blog that said ‘No Hype without Substance’ but I’ve switched it up a bit to ‘No Hype… Just Substance’ and over the best part of the year as we worked on the compilation tape I spoke briefly about earlier on, this quote was my mantra and it was what I lived by as we put it (the compilation tape) together.
Check me out
