In all of DJ Dope Caesar’s videos on her Instagram and TikTok pages, there is none without her in front of her controller, feverishly sliding knobs on a mixer and tapping pads. While fun-seeking youth hold their breath as they wait for the beat to drop to figure out what new song she has transitioned to. When they get it, they go wild, and the party’s atmosphere goes up a notch. These are moments she lives for, when she takes different parts of two different things and creates something entirely new. She sees it as being “creative with other people’s work, you can spin it differently with how you’re feeling and it would resonate with people”.
Christened Sarah Oboh, the Lagos-born DJ is definitely resonating right now. July came with an unexpected blow-up, when her TikTok video went viral. In the clip captioned “this is the hardest transition on the internet right now”, she first spins Brick and Lace’s timeless hit, Love Is Wicked, then she isolates its piano sequence, reworks it, and, somehow, pulls Victony and Tempoe’s Soweto out of that jumble. The crowd reacts like it would to a match-winning goal. For this video she earned the TikTok follow of Nyanda Thourborne, one half of Brick and Lace, and in turn, 173 thousand others. She still can scarcely believe it. “Wow. It was crazy” she says, recalling her reaction to the social media reception. “I’m very very grateful, I feel very grateful and humbled. If I was told, even in June, that I would be having this amount of buzz, I would be like its not possible”
She says she had her own trajectory planned before that video, but July had other plans on a bigger scale. Other videos in her catalogue, bearing more modest view numbers, also share the same genre cross-pollination as this one. She swings from Chris Brown to Asake, Lagbaja to BNXN, Burna Boy to Tyler ICU.
In Culture Custodian’s conversation with her, we delve into how she is able to bring so many cultures together. Most of the answers are buried in her childhood.
“I’ve always grown up around music. My dad used to be a music producer, song writer, singer, sound engineer. Everybody I grew up around loved music and everybody’s music taste was quite different. My dad was like a reggae, dancehall, ragga kind of person, like, Caribbean culture. My mom likes pop music, funk stuff, gospel too. My cousin, my uncles they were RnB heads, the Alicia Keys and the Chris Browns and all of that. Me too I had my own taste which was more of the singer-songwriter pop guys, Ariana Grande and the likes, so, yeah. I’ve always been exposed to sound.
Dope Caesar’s multitalented father is John Oboh, or Mighty Mouse, who is credited with laying the bricks of what became Ajegunle’s sound and producing music for Ajegunle icons like Daddy Showkey, Baba Fryo and Oritsefemi. With such a strong music pedigree, it would be easy to assume Dope Caesar dug into her creativity from an early age, but you would only be half right. In secondary school she was surrounded with friends with musical inclinations, and, for fun, they would play around with instruments and music. “We’d just do like a live set that time in secondary school. I used to go on YouTube and maybe there is this pop song, I’ll just check a tutorial on how to play the chords. It’s not like I know how to play the piano but those chords I’ll just know, okay F to A to this to that. Then over time, even if I didn’t know the key, I just knew how the progressions of different chords worked. It actually helped me know how to bring music to life.”
But this was more a creative phase than a prodigious career. Afterall, secondary school Sarah Oboh was not the type you would earmark to become a music performer of any kind, especially because it comes with celebrity that was not very compatible with her introverted, bookworm nature. After school she gained admission into Covenant University to study computer science, and here in the conservative Christian school, she continued to be the model student. “I never used to go to parties, I swear, all my years in university I never left school to go to any party. I just dey school”, she says of her time in the Uni.
She would, in time, be starting those parties, but 2017 Sarah Oboh had a closer calling to academics. She wanted to continue her schooling abroad, get her Master’s degree, get a good job, the whole lot. So when she discovered a DJ controller in her father’s room, and got her closest contact with music since her time in secondary school, it was only meant to be a pastime. A hobby to occupy her mind while she arranged her japa plans or got a job. Neither of these was forthcoming, though, and soon she was falling into old habits. Watching YouTube videos and teaching herself. Practising more and more. While a job and a visa eluded her,—Nigeria wouldn’t let her live, or leave—Disc Jockeying was putting the occasional naira note or two in her pocket.
“It had been on and off. It was hard getting anything, getting gigs. But sometimes I was able to survive, to pay one or two, make a little money on my side”. In 2021 she was taking Disc Jockeying more seriously, but to make more money she needed to get better and to get better, well, she needed money. Consequence and Massive, Disc Jockeys who Dope Caesar holds in the highest esteem, were organising their premier DJing masterclass—the Vibes DJ Academy, and Caesar wanted in. There was one small problem. The advanced class which she wanted to register for had an entry fee of 150,000 naira. For her this wasn’t an entry fee, it was a wall. That is, until she heard of scholarships organised by Soundbuzzs, a growing streaming platform, and Budweiser.
“They were like, submit a video of your performance. There was money to be won, about 100K. What caught my attention was that the top ten entries would be in the academy. I didn’t even want the money, I wanted to be in the academy that year so I just made a video”. That video earned her the fourth position, and her joy was multifold. First she had gotten the opportunity to interact with professional DJs, she could gauge herself with them and learn how her talent compared with others. Second, in her very first competition with them, she had proved her mettle. In the academy she learned that she had been undervaluing herself all along; on passing out in August she was the best graduating student.
Even this win was not sufficient to derail her off the academic track. By 2022 she had gotten a residency at a club, but she thought of it as a way to make some more money to process her departure. “I said okay let me just take the gig for a while, like a few months before everything is ready then I’ll tell them I’m not doing again, I don dey go”. But when her visa hit a brick wall yet again, the appeal of making DJing a career was at an all-time high, especially as she continued to flourish in it, thanks to the knowledge and connections she had gained at the academy. She speaks on when she finally came to terms with a career in DJing.
“Unfortunately for me, or would I say fortunately right now?, my papers never came. The embassy never got back to me for some reason, so I just concentrated on my job. I started meeting people and I started getting other jobs from there. As at the end of last year, I had like three residencies so I was like, you know what? I’m not doing school anything again, this is the work I want to do, I want to be a DJ.”
With her mind now fully set on it, her obvious talent could prosper unimpeded. Gigs rolled into bigger gigs. DJ Consequence had helped her find small paying gigs, she built on these to earn club residencies. At a residency at a club, Ikechukwu, the rapper, took note of her, and was soon whispering her name into DJ Obi’s ear. DJ Obi himself, urged by testimonies like these, granted her a platform at Obi’s House. One step after another, until July brought the biggest of them all. She performed at Adekunle Gold’s listening party. This happened a week prior to our interview, so her voice is still thick with the incredulousness of it all.
“(When I was told,) I was shocked. It wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. It was through Obi I got that. Fiyin (Mofiyinfoluwa Somuyiwa), the project manager of Obi’s House, called me to tell me that I would be playing a gig on Thursday. I was like, ‘what gig?’. She said, ‘Adekunle Gold’s listening party’. I was like ‘ah’. She said they want me to be the one to play the Listening Party itself. The Adekunle Gold”, she emphasises. “So I’m very, very humbled and very, very grateful to experience that. No words, man. Just gratitude”.
For Dope Caesar, these successes, gratifying as they are, would be merely ephemeral if they were not won with the right ideals. She emphasises the importance of staying true to oneself, of being unflinching in the face of convention. She recalls the days before The Vibes Academy, when her only DJ friends were subscribers of the conventional—of playing popular music to an audience to make them vibe to it. For Caesar, the muse may be from ten years ago or ten thousand kilometres away, but she will invoke it in front of an audience that was not expecting it, and still make them vibe to it. This is simultaneously her most challenging and enjoyable part of the job, bending the audience to her will and avoiding being bent to theirs.
She acknowledges that it is a difficult endeavour, and one she was discouraged off when she made her first mainstream steps. “I’ve always heard guys say ‘this stuff you are doing cannot fly here, people are not going to vibe with you here. I don’t know but this life just dey pray so that maybe your helper will carry you to another country or something’.” She laughs now, but there were times when her friends thought she was unlikely to make it if she didn’t change her style. But that was never an option for her. “The only thing that can keep you going even when you fail is knowing that at least you failed being your real self, you didn’t lose yourself to find success. It makes it sweeter when you actually succeed.”
At this stage of the interview, I have lost count of how many times she has said ‘be yourself’ or some variation of that phrase; it is easy to deduce it is one of her core values. To speak, to act, to become as close as possible to who you are on the inside. To not let yourself be swayed with what you are supposed to be. It is why, one day in mid 2021, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and decided it was time to shave her entire hair off. And why she has stuck with it, despite unfriendly comments. “When I shaved it, everyone said I looked somehow, but I looked in the mirror and I liked it. So I don’t care what anybody else was saying at that point. They say ‘it doesn’t fit you’ , ‘you look somehow’ , ‘you look sickly’ I say ‘okay, no problem, all right, thank you’. Everybody’s opinion can continue to be their opinion.”
She brims with advice for upcoming DJs, and although she was a student only two years ago, she is always willing to guide others. Impact, just like authenticity, is a value she ranks above mainstream success. Recently she had that opportunity via Femme Africa’s The Sound Lab workshop, and she did not hesitate to say yes. “When they called, I just told my team there’s nothing that will stop me. It’s Femme, I’m always going to be there. I met very wonderful students, amazing people. It was even more impactful for me because they are women. Because if you’re looking at the ratio, there are more men in this field, it’s a male-dominated field. I’m always inspiring them (women) to come into the game. Come, be yourself, come and enjoy this whole ride. It’s a level playing ground.
She has settled perfectly into the ecosystem and carved a niche in which she can be unconventional and yet win the crowd, be booked busy and still have the time to enlighten young female DJs. When I ask what could come next from her, she hesitates for a moment, but when she starts talking she doesn’t stop, like she is reading from a vision only she can see. “Festivals. The biggest stages. I’ll put out my own show. We will put out something legendary, something that will outlive us and change the face of DJing in Nigeria”, she says.“I promise”.