Updated: This story has been updated to reflect an additional recent interview with Victony.
“Melody is a global language,” Victony explains to OkayAfrica. “They’re songs you hear in different languages and you don’t even know what the hell the artist is saying but you feel the song — that’s because of the melody.”
It’s fitting that he would speak this way. One of the most original stylists in Afropop, the Nigerian artist has progressed the genre primarily on the strength of his melodies. Victony embodies the talent behind Afropop’s current push towards wholesome global influence. Stubborn, his debut album, is a gold-level work of art. Composed yet raw, it compresses the 23 years of life experiences Victony has accrued into a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, dazzling at every turn.
The album’s original form came as most albums do: a collection of spontaneously recorded songs, from different parts of the world, like postcards capturing the moods of each place. Between the beginning of the year and February, he stayed in L.A, where he continued recording music and putting out content. “But the day we made Stubborn, that’s when I knew I had something special,” he says. “I was actually thinking [if] that should be my next single or not, but I had to stick with the plan.”.
It was supposed to be an EP — the Stubborn EP — but the pile of songs he had made that difficult. A productive recording run meant Victony was far ahead of his listeners, and singles like “Jaga Jaga” and “Ohema” were vastly different from the music he was creating from last year to present. These were the songs that had to be fitted into Stubborn and an album was the only route now. “I see no reason why we should be holding music back from the fans,” he says. “I’ve never had the opportunity to properly introduce myself to my fans — like, ‘Okay, this is Victony, this is what I’m about, this is my ability, these are pockets I’m comfortable with, these are stories I want to tell.’”The stories are quite interesting, even eclectic. Victony’s music seems very inspired by the eccentricity of childlike behavior, and if his lullaby-evoking melodies don’t reveal this connection, then his playful approach to writing does. Being stubborn is a theme which he espouses through references familiar to consumers of Nigerian pop culture, such as the comic actor Osuofia and even the title of one song: “Bastard, Don’t Be Silly.”
Opening the album is “Oshaprapra,” which incorporates somber chanting and voice chops that espouse street affiliations. But the singing flows with cherry ease, even though the narrative accounts for the tough times in the singer’s life. “I’ve been through hellfire,” he sings in the Afrobeat-evoking structure of the chorus, while running into a rap-nodding flow in the second verse. This detailed fusion operates the core of the album, so that the familiar bravado of Asake sits perfect beside the celestial soundscape of Victony.
“Slow Down” with Teezo Touchdown espouses ‘80s influences, featuring a suffusion of sharp guitars and light-dazzling synths. Victony and Teezo interchange energy seamlessly, maintaining a flamboyant outlook even in their varied vocal styles. Teezo’s fast-tracking rap gives the performance a different dimension, revealing an ease and purposefulness with the collaborations across Stubborn. On “Tiny Apartment,” it is SAINt JHN who forms the two-way partnership with Victony, a classic narrative — two men aligned over a vision, here the dissolving mirage of a departed lover. “Na blankie I use hold body oh,” sings Victony, just before he and JHN go back and forth over bird-like vocalizations in the background.
Victony has been a longtime fan of SAINt JHN, he tells OkayAfrica in a recent conversation. “He’s inspired a good amount of my works that I’ve put out, his artistry, his imagery,” he says, adding, “so being in the same room and witnessing his process, I felt blessed because that was one of the moments where I truly felt like, ‘Oh, I’m actually doing this.’”
Speaking about the Teezo Touchdown collaboration, he says the American’s debut album How Do You Sleep At Night? was one of his favorite projects from last year. “That’s what this project is about, you know, authenticity,” he says, adding, “so collaborating with Teezo brought that whole theme to life even more.”
When Victony creates a song he peruses how to take it to its “best form,” he says. “If a collaboration comes to mind, I will think ‘Okay, who would complement this sound?’Even if it’s not necessarily that person’s pocket, I feel like I have good ears and I’m able to tell when somebody would just blend in a song. That’s what I do sometimes.”
It’s been a long way coming for Victony, whose early music imbibed the qualities of rap, especially its emo variant which was popularized on SoundCloud during the mid 2010s. A mixtape, The Outlaw King, established the conceptual plane the artist could follow, with reflective, braggadocious lyrics and striking visual resonance with goth culture. Saturn saw him come into his own as an Afropop stylist, which he credits to his origin in rap.
“I would say I’ve really grown in the aspect of understanding music,” Victony says, “how to apply different techniques to give me different sounds. And going from rapping to singing, and not just singing Afrobeats, it’s a huge jump right? ‘Cause it needs its own understanding of the sound. [On the Saturn EP], I was still in the process of understanding what it was to do something like that. Then you look at the Outlaw EP, you see that ‘Oh, he has an understanding of the sound, he has what it takes to put out pleasant Afrobeats songs.’”
Victony’s remark ties into a larger conversation about Afrobeats and why a lot of its artists don’t want to associate with the tag anymore. “A lot of artists back home draw inspiration from different people that are not even Afrobeat artists,” he says. “And, you know, they make something entirely different from the genre, right? But just because they come from Africa, they automatically label them Afrobeats. I think that's like the problem, you know, and I feel like it shouldn't be that way. It might be frustrating to want to be identified as something and then everybody is like, no, that's not what you are. So I get it like I get the frustration and that's probably where it's coming from”.
However, he also recognizes that Afrobeats is relatively new and that “we're still trying to get more people to consume and buy into it,” he says. “I guess that's why it's like a lot of people are just categorized into the genre, but I believe [that] as we grow bigger over time, it will happen naturally. So I'm not worried.”
The songs he’s making now have his “own touch,” he says. “I feel like I’ve found my lane, for real, for real.” It’s a bold thing to say, but for an artist who connects with the rudimentary elements of their artistry, we perceive a hard-won sentiment. The music has muscled with itself, has gone deep into itself to touch somewhere it had never done, and he says Stubborn is the mark of that fight. Is it a surprise that its imagery is of a man on a battlefield?
Photo courtesy of Victony.
“I would say I’ve really grown in the aspect of understanding music.” - Victony
Anthony Ebuka Victor was born in January, 2001, in a part of mainland Lagos known as Ojo Road. His parents are from Imo state, middle-class and relatively comfortable, and sent young Ebuka to good schools while growing up. An important detail, because Ojo Road is just some minutes away from Boundary, the commercial hub of Ajegunle, a town whose notoriety dampens in comparison to its actual happenings of gore and violence.
Some of this violence spilled into Ojo, and whether the youths knew it or not, they were thrust towards dangerous possibilities: it was easy to lose one’s head to that street life — drugs, guns, vices. “It made us know what to do and what not to do,” he says, “cause obviously, we could learn from people’s lives — to see people who died doing certain things and it was good in the sense that it made us mentally strong. Ojo is not a place that gives you hope. Because I know a lot of people who have been there all their lives even till this very day, they feel like that’s where they belong because they don’t know anything else — that’s what it does to you. But if you’re able to make it out, that means you’re a strong person, you’re someone who’s goal oriented, you’re stubborn.”
Stubborn, like much of the music Victony has put out before now, carries associative visual material. A product of an all-round creative mind, when one hears Victony the imagery emerges of celestial, outworldly presence, all which ties back to his Outlawville universe. He’s often used the alien-looking character Tredax to mirror events happening in his own life.
His current visual identity is influenced by medieval knight imagery, the swords and the coif, that hood of mail he’s been wearing throughout the campaign for Stubborn. “It’s a strong reference to an era where they used to fight a lot of battles,” he says. “I’m trying to tell people, I’m fighting real time battles, I’m going through stuff, but I’m stubborn. Which is the strong message of resilience I’m trying to preach with this album. I just thought of a way to represent that artistically.”
Kendrick Lamar comes up as an influence for Victony in this aspect of conceptual worldbuilding, and if there’s anything else the duo share, it’s an affinity for working one’s way out of pain, and all the efforts of that inching towards grace becomes audible in the music.
“Music is my best outlet to pass information,” says Victony as we conclude our conversation, “and I feel like a body of work like this will tell my story.”