Wale Was Never Given the Benefit of the Doubt

“This shit ain’t never been easy for me.” It’s how Wale opened our conversation, unprompted, before I’d asked a single question. What followed was an inventory: two decades of people telling him what he couldn’t be. “First rapper from DC. Going to be a Nigerian? Oh, he’s just a Go-Go rapper. And I had to prove that I could really rap. Oh, he can’t make a song. I made one of the biggest songs. He’s not going to get a record deal. I dropped out of school, told Mark Ronson, do Glastonbury, do all this stuff. Then I told Jay-Z. It’s just a constant proving myself.”

The rapper Bun B, of UGK, once put words to why the doubt never let up. Wale relayed it to me almost verbatim, clearly a line he’d turned over in his head more than once. “He was like, man, Wale has like a triple thing. He got his era, J. Cole, Big Krit, Drake, all of them, Wiz, he got that. He got the DC shit, they don’t have no rappers. And then he’s got the Nigerian thing. And he’s like, that can make a concoction of like, man, where do I fit in?” Wale didn’t disagree. “I didn’t realize how much that was probably hard for people to accept until I got older.”

Even his sense of what art is for traces back to that same tension, holding several identities that were never supposed to fit together. “Art is supposed to be all the parts of you, how you express all parts of you. And this is part of me. My name is my name.” Not a slogan. A fact he’s had to keep restating.

Long before Afrobeats had a seat at the American table, Wale was already building toward one, working with Nigerian artists at a point when, in his words, “no one cared about us.” I asked why it mattered to him then. His answer was inherited. “I grew up around it, so it never felt like a reach to me. And at the same time, it’s like I just really believed, and still do believe very much so. I just happened to only be good at one of the arts, but I just always believed. If I grew up in Tennessee, I’d probably be trying to fuse together country and hip hop.”

That inheritance runs deeper than taste. His father drove a taxi in DC, and the household soundtrack, he says, wasn’t a choice. “Every Sunday is Sunny Ade playing at nighttime and Sunday Ade playing in the daytime. So it’s just like most real artists or producers, they use what they was brought up on to influence how they make their music. And I’m no different.”

He didn’t even recognize how far it had seeped into his own instincts until someone else pointed it out. “I didn’t even consider ‘Belly’ to be anything truly in the direction of African music. But when I went to Fat Joe, Fat Joe was like, yo, is this African? And I’m like, oh, well, I can see that now. But my instinct when I heard the beat was like, I like this beat, I like how I feel.” He calls that the higher-source version of his process, the beat choices he can’t fully explain. The more visible version, he admits, is the one that’s designed on purpose, tracks built consciously to carry the sound across.

His conviction that Afrobeats would eventually break globally was informed by arithmetic and pattern recognition. “There’s so many Africans, you know, and dancehall was running the world. There’s so many Africans everywhere. It was only a matter of time before this music is being played in every neighborhood. It’s only a matter of time before the music catches up to the population.” Asked to name the spark, he pointed to the same record I would have: Drake and Wizkid’s “Ojuelegba” remix. “That was a big one. Um, that might be one of my favorite Wizkid songs, to be honest. I was really proud when that joint dropped.” He remembers the shift showing up first in small, physical ways closer to home, before the charts caught up. “Just more parties. Lounges were starting to have Afrobeat night, whatever. And you know, Wiz having shows in DC, it’ll be a good crowd. I could just see it shifting.”

Wale’s family couldn’t afford to visit Nigeria when he was growing up. His father made the trip alone, once a year. “We ain’t have no money. My dad was the only one that was coming here, like once a year. We barely saw him for real.” A cousin was sent back at a young age and never made the return trip. “My cousin, God rest his soul, they tried to leave him here. And my other little cousin, they did leave her here.” The first time Wale himself set foot in Nigeria, he says, was after the money from music started coming in. “That price tag was too much” before then, plainly, without self-pity.

When it finally happened, the feeling wasn’t triumph so much as dislocation. “It was kind of surreal though, because it’s like I grew up around so many Nigerians and we had such a camaraderie, but I felt kind of like a little bit on the outside. I mean, it was still beautiful to see, like where my parents were born and all of that, that was special to me.”

His parents, he says, never fully registered what he’d built until a specific image entered the house: him performing at the White House, making history as the first rapper to perform at the State of the Union. “It never really resonated with my parents until I did the State of the Union with Obama. That was huge in my mom’s house. That’s when I knew, like, okay, show everybody.” The picture, he told me, still sits in the family living room. “That classic Nigerian living room with a million pictures, and it’s big over there.” He’s careful, even now, not to overstate what the moment meant politically, only personally. “Nigerians love politics. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect president. But when I did the State of the Union, that’s when I knew, even though I don’t think she really loves me being in this music space, I know she’s grateful it didn’t go another way for me.”

I asked Wale what success changed in him. He didn’t reach for the usual language about gratitude. He reached for a theory he’s tested against his peers. “I have a philosophy that has yet to be proven differently. I asked a lot of my artist friends, my management, and executive friends. I think when you cross this six, seven year barrier, something in the music industry, something traumatic has happened to you by that point. That has changed your outlook on everything. It could be good or bad, but that’s the moment you realize you’re not who you was when you started.” For him, that trauma wasn’t a bad album cycle. “With me, it’s been like watching a lot of my friends die. Like Nipsey and PNB Rock.”

What it bought him, alongside grief, was a loneliness he now treats as simply the cost of doing business. “It’s a loneliness that you have to accept when you get to a certain level.” A friend once described the math to him bluntly. “When you’re the new artist in town, your first couple of shows you probably come a hundred deep. By year two, it’s about maybe fifty. Year six, it’s like you and two other people, and all y’all got a gun, because that’s how it goes.” He allows for the outlier. “There might be a miracle where all fifty of y’all are cool, but highly unlikely.”

The part he misses most isn’t fame. It’s ease. “I miss being more extroverted for sure, because I can feel myself in some rooms. I don’t like the feeling of knowing that I can’t be social because I got so many walls up. I miss being able to just go in a room and talk to anybody, or be at the airport jolly.” One bad experience, repeated enough times, recalibrates the instinct permanently. “You take a picture with somebody and then they post it, and the comment is some backhanded stuff. If that happens a couple of times in your life, some people, I eat myself, like, look at that experience different now.” He still wonders, out loud, what that older version of himself would look like if he tried it on today. “Sometimes I try to force it, and you can force it sometimes. But that’s what Blanco comes in, when you have to try to push through it.” The tradeoff, he says, is naivety, which he’s careful to note isn’t a virtue in this business. “Being naive and being an artist, it’s not a good combination, because a lot of people will trick you if you’re too naive or too friendly with everybody.”

For all the walls, Wale describes himself as immovable on the things that actually mattered to him inside label deals. The clearest example he offered me was his 2017 album Shine, where he tried to put Wizkid, J. Balvin, Dua Lipa, and Major Lazer on the same record before the industry had any language for that combination. “These were kind of frowned upon back then. They were looking at me like I was crazy. But I didn’t budge. I remember one of the execs from the same label a year later was like, man, this album was literally just a year and a half too early.”

He’s philosophical about why stubbornness has to come first. “I think the bag should be the love of this first. That’s the only way, because this is a thankless job. It’s more days where nothing happens, no praise, no adulation, than there is the opposite. The bag, to me, comes after the true love affair with this thing. Some people have got it the other way, but it’s not sustainable to me.” That conviction held even when there was, quite literally, no bag. “I know the money was going to come. I could starve this week, next week, but let my art be top tier. I never really even looked at accounts that much along the way.”

Asked directly what was non-negotiable in every deal he’s signed, his answer was procedural. “What I’m saying, how I’m saying it. That’s non-negotiable. I’m going to say what I want to say. I’m going to work with who I want to work with.” Pressed on what he considers his obligation once a deal is actually signed, the answer widened past himself. “To speak my mind, to speak for people that might not have a platform, and represent those three sectors that I mentioned before. That’s it.” The scarcity he grew up with, he says, didn’t soften that resolve, it hardened it. “DC wasn’t really a hip hop town. It still really isn’t, technically. So the lack of resources was definitely a thing for me. But that built the resilience in me. I get it done no matter what, because we didn’t have the resources when I started. So now I go even harder, with the resources.”

Wale is unusually candid about how differently he thinks music gets written now versus how he still writes it. “I remember doing an interview and they didn’t understand the concept of ‘City on Fire.’ I had to realize I can’t even be mad, because the way people consume music now is kind of like sound, vibe, and then the story or message. When I’m writing, it’s concept first.” The gap frustrates him less as an ego wound than as a communication failure. “It’s like trying to speak in Braille.”

That attention to detail, he says, is simply the writer in him, a habit formed by proximity to people he considers the actual standard. “I’ve been around greatness. Mark Ronson gave me my first record deal, and he won producer of the year that year for the Amy Winehouse album he and Salaam Remi did. I was around that, I saw that.” His years touring with Jay-Z, as the first rapper signed to Roc Nation Management, left an even deeper imprint. “I spent a lot of time with Jay. I toured with him for like two years. I remember he dropped Blueprint 3, and I remember he got the numbers, and I think he just dapped his manager up like, yeah, we did it again. And in my mind I’m like, did Jay-Z, bro, you didn’t think you was gonna go number one? But I get it now, because he’s keeping it going, staying at the top.” He compares the instinct to the way Timothée Chalamet has talked publicly about wanting to be counted among the greats. “I feel the same way. I study it.”

The clearest recent example of writing that still worked despite going against the grain, in his telling, came from someone else’s record entirely: Odumodublvck‘s “Declan Rice.” He heard it within weeks of signing to Def Jam, on the recommendation of the label’s head. “He was like, bro, I want you to check this guy out, he’s different. And I’m talking, as soon as I heard ‘Declan Rice,’ I was like, yo, that guy has no idea how many niggas in Detroit don’t know nothing he’s saying, because I be playing it. That joint’s probably platinum alone on my phone.” What struck him wasn’t melody. “It was just the patterns, man. The flow patterns, the fact that it’s only one verse, then he halfway does it again, then it just fades. It’s just an infectious thing. Some records are just anointed.”

He’s aware the discipline can tip into something closer to compulsion. Finishing his most recent album, he told me, cost him something close to a normal week. “I didn’t know what day it was. I didn’t leave a certain room in my house. I was just writing and changing stuff, arranging stuff, thinking. I was probably driving myself a bit crazy, clinically, probably. But it got done.” He’s uninterested in measuring the album’s success by early numbers. “This album is like two percent of where it’s going to go. My goal is the people who haven’t heard it yet, that’s going to hear it in twenty six and be like, whoa, this shit is crazy. I don’t care if it’s a gazillion people. I just want everybody to give it an honest listen.”

Wale’s commercial peak, by his own account, arrived less like a party than a shift change. He nearly hit number one on his second album, he believes, before “Justin Bieber’s holiday record” got in the way, though he’s quick to hedge the exact chronology. What he remembers more clearly is not celebrating the milestones the way he probably should have. “I honestly think it was expected. I was a machine at that time.” The run that got him there, a three-month stretch without a label after leaving Interscope, a mixtape he calls one of the biggest of that year, The Mixtape About Nothing. Then “No Hand,” then a deal with Rick Ross that produced his verses across the Self Made tape. They all felt to him less like a series of victories than a system finally catching up to output already in motion. “I knew that when my debut came, it was going to be some shit for real. So I kind of expected it. Maybe I even took it for granted, for real.”

What he does allow himself to celebrate is narrower and further out. “I celebrate the good stuff, but it’s been an uphill battle. Even just being able to be at the top of my game and have an album that’s being revered. It didn’t go number one first week, but I’m sure in a year’s time I know where it’s going to be, because I can feel it. I celebrate stuff like that.”

Wale’s feature on “Blood on the Dance Floor,” alongside Odumodublvck and Bloody Civilian, gave him his first Nigerian chart plaque, a number one on the TurnTable charts. When I handed it to him on camera, his reaction wasn’t heartfelt. “Thank you very much, man. This is special. I ain’t never... I knew it was a great song, but I’m just happy to be a part of it.” Asked if it was his first plaque from Nigeria specifically, he confirmed it plainly. “It is. Hopefully it won’t be the last.”

He’s clear-eyed about the shape of his own recognition here, and where the gap still sits. “I think it’s an appreciation for me as a figure in the States. There might be a little bit of a disconnect with the music. Even when I first came out here, they knew me, but I don’t know if they knew my records like that.” Rather than take offense, he treats it as a fresh start. “In a lot of ways, I do feel like a new artist, as far as the connecting, especially with Gen Z. But it’s something I’m excited to be involved with. I don’t take any offense if anybody doesn’t know who I am. It’s good to be acknowledged here. A lot of us Nigerians can be stubborn, so it’s a good feeling to reach some success musically in Nigeria.”

What Wale wants next isn’t another song, at least not primarily. It’s infrastructure. When I raised the absence of touring circuits, concert venues, and functioning collecting societies in Nigeria, he didn’t just commiserate, he pitched a fix on the spot: beat battles, the producer tournaments that thrived in the US in the mid to late 2000s. “Those are the ideas. I want to bring that here, because just to elevate competition, competition doesn’t have to be like beefing. I think it just sparks the community of the artistry.” He’s under no illusion the country makes any of this easy on him personally. The last thing he brought up unprompted was the airport. “We gotta fix this airport situation. The greatest time in Nigeria for like a month, and then you go to the airport and it almost puts a dent in the whole experience you had here. If I could come to Nigeria eight, ten times a year, that’d be great. But things got to make sense, and I got to put in the work so it makes sense.”

His list of plans runs wider than music. “We’ve been working with Nike a lot lately. I want to do stuff with NFL Africa, NBA Africa, and some more music programs.” He’d floated the idea of a UFC event in Lagos to Dana White, and a sports camp to basketball player Angel Reese. Conversations he brings up almost as asides. “I was just talking to Angel Reese yesterday. I was like, man, it would be so dope if Reebok brought you out here to do a basketball camp. Just young women, or even guys, just to build a culture.” Both, he admits, may be a stretch for now. “Certain things can’t be, it’s like trying to put the World Cup here. But again, I have big delusional dreams.” Among them: seeing the Super Eagles return to form, with the country’s best players abroad coming home to do it. “These are the ideas that I have.”

He’s also developing film projects aimed at documenting the Nigerian diaspora’s history in America across decades, work he calls, only half-joking, a Trojan horse. “We’ve talked a lot about telling the diaspora’s story from the seventies, eighties, nineties and beyond, to an audience like a Netflix, so people can understand the nuances of our lives.” The stakes of that project, to him, are generational. “If you’re a sixteen year old trying to make the music, you don’t know the sacrifices, or what we had to do to get here.”

Some of what moves him most, he says, has nothing to do with charts at all. He and Nigerian singer Teni, he told me, are distantly related. “She spent a lot of time in America when she was growing up, my mom knows who she is.” It’s a small detail, and he lingers on it. “Those are the little things that give me joy, that money can’t buy.”

He closes on unity rather than legacy, and on his own hesitance to slow down. “I would love to see more unity and less infighting in the thing that we care so much about, because in order for us to go where it can really, really go, it’s the unity. You could be competitive and still be, you know.” Even as we wrapped, he was already pitching the next session, an hour or two in the studio with unsigned local talent before he left town. “I love discovering new producers, new or innovative artists. When I’m in the studio, I’m like Rain Man. I’m just in it. That’s when I know the ancestors are kicking in.”

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