From art to film to music to dance, Brown alumni are reimagining the possibilities of artistic expression and sharing the sources of their creativity.
When rapper-producer Dolapo Akinkugbe ’16 (a.k.a. DAP The Contract) and singer-songwriter Tomi Madarikan ’21 (a.k.a. Pan Tèrra) joined forces for “Lotion,” an airy hip-hop and R&B-peppered track about pushing through the daily grind of life, the collaboration felt like destiny. Both were active in the music scene at Brown when they were students and performed at the Art Salon Experience event during the Black Alumni Reunion last year. Their creative processes—from developing melodies to writing song lyrics—are also connected by their desire to create music that flows organically and their shared experiences.
“We respect each other’s crafts and also naturally understand each other’s perspectives because of the similarity in our backgrounds,” says Akinkugbe, who is also a lawyer by day. “We’re both Nigerians who have spent a lot of time in school abroad in various places, both in the U.K. at certain points of our upbringing, and that comes through in the substance of the song.”
Akinkugbe played Madarikan the beat to “Lotion” the first first time they connected to make music and the rest is history: “She pretty much freestyled most of her verse off the top of her head.”
For the artwork to promote the song, the two returned to College Hill for a photoshoot with student photographer Dori Walker ’24—a full circle moment that reminded them of how far they’ve come in their own creative journeys.
What does your creative process look like?
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Dolapo Akinkugbe (DA): My creative process usually starts with piano chords and beat production. Once I have a solid skeleton, I pivot to writing lyrics and melodies, either from scratch or drawing from ideas I’ve written down over time. I've always preferred creating at home and still create with my laptop, midi-keyboard, and mic setup in my home studio. When I need extra production, I have sessions with different instrumentalists—most of which are fellow Brown alums—to add specific parts.
Tomi Madarikan (TM): Every song that I write starts off as a freestyle and then I fill in the blanks. This can happen while I’m strumming guitar in my bedroom, listening to beats that a friend produced, or even in the middle of a concert. I take a lot of voice memos of these freestyles so that I can refer back to them later and build them into full songs. When I freestyle, it’s like I’m writing a script in real time. I tend to imagine a character and a plot. This helps to create a separation between who I am in my personal life and Pan Tèrra, the artist.
Where do you draw inspiration for your music videos and how does this process compare to the experiences of producing and performing?
DA: The vast majority of my music videos are a collaboration with my wife, who is a painter and a video creator. I usually have a visual in my mind right from the beginning of beat production to the lyrics through to completing the song. I started out as a producer about 15 years ago, but when I started making my own videos seven years ago, it felt very similar to beat production (and the software operated very similarly). I use videos to highlight the autobiographical and storytelling nature of my music. For example, the intro sequence of the video for my song “Nobody Like You,” filmed by my wife and inspired by the black and white silent movies from the era of Charlie Chaplin that I grew up watching, humorously depicts a fictional meeting of my grandparents, whose 60-year (and counting) marriage inspired the song.