An Oct. 21 Style & Arts article about local rapper Wale Folarin contained several errors. The article incorrectly said that Wale is 24; he is 23. The last name of a sound engineer was misspelled; he is Derek Pacuk. The article incorrectly said Wale drives a Nissan Pathfinder; he drives an Infiniti QX4. One of the rapper's lyrics was also incorrectly reported; it should have read, "I sag it like Dan Tanner." The article said that Jeremy Carry and Daniel Issayes are on Wale's "payroll," but Wale and his manager, Daniel Weisman, say that is not the case.
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The Great Rap Hope
Wale before the Flowers appearance with his endorsements manager Daniel "Sneakerman Dan" Issayes. Both sons of African immigrants, they worked at a shoe store before Wale hit it big.
(Jahi Chikwendiu - Twp)
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"It's a lot of pressure for him to be the first rapper from D.C. to have national attention," says Nick "Catchdubs" Barat, a DJ and music journalist who profiled him and D.C.'s other native-son rapper, Tabi Bonney, in Fader magazine and now performs with Wale. "He needs to just be himself and find himself creatively rather than carry a whole city's expectations on his shoulders."
'I Had D.C. Attitude'
Pain of an immigrant
Know it cuz I've been in there . . .
Pops drove a cab
That's African . . .
-- Wale, "Cuz I'm African"
He's been making words rhyme ever since he was 6, a chatterbox first-grader who loved to hear himself talk. His mom bet him that he couldn't stay quiet for 10 minutes. He took her up on the bet. But: "I was doing fake sign language," he says with a laugh.
His family, from the Yoruba ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria, arrived here in 1979 from Austria, moving around the metro area, starting in Northwest Washington, near Georgia Avenue and Peabody Street, with stints around Montgomery and Prince George's counties. Wale is the baby of the family, the youngest of two boys. (His brother, Alvin, lives in New York, where he works for a record label.) King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti and Kool and the Gang provided the soundtrack to their lives.
Remembers his father, Ayo, 55, "When he was young, he would be asking for musical instruments, and he would be singing. . . . I'm not surprised. [Our family is] from the originators of the talking drums back in Nigeria. It looks like it's in his genes. It's his inheritance."
But Wale wasn't always comfortable with his inheritance. "I was almost a rebel," he says. "It is such a strict culture." In school, he says, kids made fun of his name and teased him about being African. So he started calling himself by his English middle name, Victor. After moving to Maryland, he says, "I had D.C. attitude." Which meant that he got into a lot of scrapes with other kids, fights with teachers, juvenile arrests for trespassing, he says.
But on some level, he appreciated his parents' strictness. He might have blown his midnight curfew by an hour or two, he says, but at least he had a curfew. His friends who didn't have such strictures, he says, ended up either dead or in jail.
And yet, for all his professed admiration of his parents, he doesn't seem all that comfortable talking about them. Ask him what his folks do for a living, and he'll say, "I don't even know." (His father says that he is a Realtor and his wife is a nurse.) Ask him to introduce you to his parents, and he dodges the issue, saying that they're never at home.
