Meet Baddo’s new alter ego: Alagemo Merindinlogun, the visual-art identity behind his latest creative experiment
Olamide has spent more than a decade turning Yoruba language, street culture and Nigerian life into music that travels. Now, the YBNL founder is moving into another form of expression: the canvas. The rapper has unveiled Alagemo Merindinlogun by Olamide, a new visual-art identity and brand through which he is beginning to present himself as a painter. The announcement came with a first glimpse of his works and a characteristically playful explanation: while Baddo is apparently still working on the album, Alagemo Merindinlogun has arrived to keep things moving.
The joke is very Olamide, but the name is considerably older and carries cultural weight. “Alagemo Merindinlogun” refers to the Ijebu expression commonly translated as “children of the sixteen Agemo”, linking the project to the traditional Agemo masquerades of Ijebuland. The sixteen recognised Agemo figures form part of an important cultural institution in Ijebu society, with the annual festival bringing them together through rituals, procession and performance. Olamide has therefore chosen a name that immediately places his new artistic persona inside a much older Yoruba cultural vocabulary.
That connection makes the project more intriguing than a celebrity suddenly deciding to paint. Olamide has always worked with the raw materials of culture: language, slang, fashion, rhythm, mythology, social observation and the visual codes of Nigerian life. His music frequently turns those materials into contemporary pop culture. Alagemo Merindinlogun appears to extend the same instinct into visual art, allowing colour, form and imagery to carry ideas that would previously have found their way into a verse or a hook.
The first works released under the identity suggest an artist interested in texture and layered imagery rather than simply reproducing the familiar aesthetics of celebrity painting. Reports on the unveiling describe mixed-media and acrylic pieces, accompanied by a dedicated Instagram presence for the project. The works are still an introduction rather than a fully defined artistic catalogue, but that may be part of their appeal. Olamide has given the public the name, the canvas and the first glimpse, leaving the larger visual language of Alagemo Merindinlogun to develop in public.
There is also something fitting about Olamide choosing an alter ego rather than simply putting his own name on the paintings. Baddo belongs to music. Alagemo Merindinlogun belongs to another room. It creates enough distance for experimentation while retaining the cultural DNA that has always run through his work. For an artist who has spent years building YBNL into a platform for other voices, creating another identity for himself suggests that the instinct to build worlds has not stopped at music.
The move also reflects a wider shift in how contemporary African artists build creative careers. Music, fashion, photography, film, design and visual art increasingly overlap, with established artists moving between disciplines and treating creativity itself as an expandable practice. Olamide is particularly well placed for that transition because his career has already been shaped by visual thinking: album artwork, music videos, stage aesthetics, fashion and the construction of distinct artist identities have all formed part of the Baddo universe.
For Nigerian popular culture, the cultural reference may ultimately prove as important as the paintings themselves. Agemo is not a newly invented aesthetic. It is part of Ijebu heritage, with the sixteen masquerades historically travelling from different settlements to participate in annual rites in Ijebuland. By borrowing the language of that tradition for a contemporary art project, Olamide is doing something familiar to artists throughout history: taking an inherited symbol and asking what it can mean in a new era.
The canvas, then, may be less of a departure for Olamide than it first appears. Baddo has always been building a visual world; now he is putting some of it on canvas. Whether Alagemo Merindinlogun becomes a serious second creative career, an evolving side project or another chapter in Olamide’s unusually elastic artistic identity remains to be seen. For now, the painter has introduced himself, the album can wait, and the first canvas is already on the wall.
