The Importance of Being Victony

Victony

Collage by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / MUSIC DEPT.

The Importance of Being Victony

An original Afropop stylist, the artistry of Victony embodies one of the highest creative possibilities within the genre. It’s a showcase of unique qualities meeting to form one of the most intriguing personas in contemporary African music.
Victony

Collage by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / MUSIC DEPT.

The Importance of Being Victony

An original Afropop stylist, the artistry of Victony embodies one of the highest creative possibilities within the genre. It’s a showcase of unique qualities meeting to form one of the most intriguing personas in contemporary African music.

If we’re going by Aristotle’s delineation of stories—which is the beginning, middle and end—then Victony, who represents the narrative edge of Afrobeats, dropped us right in the middle of his. When early listeners got into his music, he was almost an accomplished practitioner of the rap form, drawing gothic influences, dark and melancholic, from the SoundCloud wave that was prevalent circa 2017. By this time, Victony knew the requirements of stardom—language, presentation—but those elements were yet underdeveloped. It is a testament to his characteristic grit that, eight years later, he’s now in control of all facets of his craft, a Thanos whose rings shine brightly across the Afrobeats cosmos. 

Anthony Victor Ebuka was born in 2001, in the Ojo Road axis of Lagos Mainland. This association is important because the neighbourhood is quite close to the notorious Boundary Market area of Ajegunle which, for all its lore and violence, captures an important aspect of the state’s appeal—the multitudinous echoes in its art. Contrary to what is found elsewhere across Nigeria, where the art is intricately woven around similar stories shared by its creators, Lagos inspires a certain individuality. Even when we relate to the same narratives, the colours of their association—by virtue of class or emotional sensibilities—warrant an essential distinction. And this, too, was a narrative factor in Victony’s first arc as a musician. 

Listen to the artist speak, with all the soft overtures in his voice, and one hears a young man whose family played a deep influence in his life. That sense of intimacy is a poignant aspect of Stubborn, the album Victony put out last year. The artist had to claw his way into the central part of this association with the world around him, to shake off American hip-hop’s strong influence, a fight that has been previously undertaken by many—from 2baba to Wizkid—in solidifying their Afrobeats adeptness. You see, Victony’s early music sounded plush but quite distant, more Atlanta than Ojo Road. It was an extension of his interests in animation and worldbuilding; his debut 2017 mixtape, The Outlaw King, swirled with influences from trap music, not yet adapting the innuendo-streaked style that would come three years later on Saturn and his later music.  

Outlawville was an important element of said worldbuilding, with Victony using it to represent a colourful, extra-terrestrial world where anything was possible. It’s a world the artist has described as more than an idea, with his conceptualization of the character Tredax further deepening its narrative possibilities. Uniting the sonic with the visual, I wonder if the artist knew then how distinctly he was branding himself. He was crafting what Paul Celan described as ‘the wild joy of shape’, which he did by understanding the motions of his creativity. In that blossoming blog era of the mid-2010s, musical nerds such as Victony were rife—those who’d spend hours on the Internet reading up on the most obscure information about their interests. But unlike Victony, few of them knew how to translate this knowledge into movable bits, ones that could be re-arranged like chess pieces across the black-and-white board of their creative life.  

THE POTENTIALS OF IMAGERY

Throughout his career, Victony has progressively matched his imagery to the sound he’s creating. After gaining mainstream relevance with ‘Holy Father’, he continued using the image of a wheelchair to depict his mind state. The rolling motion of those wheels on the visuals of ‘Rosemary’ contributed to its appealing air of mystique, as it did in ‘Pray’, whose haunting music video was released in late 2021, sometime after he survived the accident that claimed a close friend and had him using a wheelchair for a period of time.  

The cover art of ‘Pray’ is an image of someone, presumably Victony, sitting on a wheelchair and looking up at a mega screen with Tredax, the original Victony character, standing beside him. On the screen are goodwill messages from peers in the music industry, with tweets speaking prayers and possibilities into his life (and legs, considering). Featured in the two-track offering titled Dark Times (2021), the artist showed a willingness to allow his audience into the process of his comeback, and it was a moment that further entrenched him positively into popular culture. It’s quite impressive, the heart and intentionality it takes to make one’s real life visually coherent, especially for an Afrobeats-focused star, a scene where ‘vibes’ typically take centre stage. 

On the cover of Outlaw (2022), the tone is ostensibly more positive. The dark blues that perfuse Dark Times have been replaced by blossoming pink and glinting purple, with floating rocks and flowers that give an intuitive sense of the place being Outlawville, Victony’s original world. A brooding-looking Tredax is the imagistic centre, pointing at something or someone we obviously can’t see. The implications of his presence are a dual one, bringing all the complications of the past, but also by this simple motion of his hand, he’s pointing towards the future; or, more simply, this is the prelude to a groove. Indeed, the music bore these qualities, as it’s the initial showcase of Victony having come into his full powers as an Afrobeats stylist. If the nerdy associations of sci-fi brought Victony the narrative framing necessary to stand out, then his ‘Nigerianness’ supplied his language. It was a language dispensed at the throbbing intersection of the rich and poor, wielding middle-class idiosyncrasies. 

Admittedly, mostly delivering in English meant Victony was more heralded by the middle class, whose perception of his articulation painted him in a different light, say, from Omah Lay. But in this regard, Victony owned the narrative, as he’s always done. It was around this time that he began experimenting with headwear as a branding device. On the TG Omori-directed visual of ‘Apollo’, it was an expressive but incongruent bucket hat that he paired with a white shirt and green trousers, suggesting the figure of an eccentric white-collar professional (which is a middle-class association) in a garb that tended to be straitlaced and required conformity. The house party vibe of the ‘Soweto’ video featured him wearing a white hat known as ‘bicycle seat’ in Nigerian circles, due to its design resembling just that. This hat resonated the most with Victony’s audience, coming into fresh vogue when young people began wearing it around the country. This was a strong, noticeable run-up to Stubborn, where his imagery would reach a new peak. 

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING STUBBORN

Victony’s artistry engages the whirlwind of his life. Right from his depiction of the accident, we’ve seen how he translates the mundanities of existence into striking art. He tells me that growing up in a strong Catholic home was ‘very instrumental’ to his creativity and that all those experiences and teachings he got in the church ‘remained a part of me, and me being an artist is me just expressing all I’ve known up until this point in my life. And that’s what the Stubborn album was about too.’ 

The Nigerian ethnic group that Victony belongs to, the Igbo people, were historically recorded to be ardent admirers of the Catholic church. Beyond the educational and societal establishments by the Catholic church, it was the artistic practices of service that made Catholicism appealing to the Igbo people, whose perception of worship borders on faithful, careful veneration. Victony carries this attentiveness in his music. Stubborn’s opener ‘Oshaprapra’ establishes divine protection, going from the brag of ‘You fit dun see say we no be mate’ to the affirmative couplet of ‘You fit dun see something for my face / you fit dun see anointing for my forehead, oh.’  

References to God and the church abound. Using it in a ‘religious’ subtext isn’t the major application, as Victony rather subverts it to showcase the heights of his affectation. There’s the obvious celestial church nod in the witty query of ‘Shey make I kneel down start to shout Mimo, eh’ in ‘Everything’, the fifth song in the album. With Victony, romantic tension is amplified when paired with religious imagery, but it is on the album’s penultimate track, ‘Sunday School’, that he achieves the finest alchemy of both worlds. Although it’s a record detailing post-fallout hurt, the character jokingly infers that taking the wrongful lover to Sunday school will remedy their troubles. One doesn’t perceive the depth of the pairing because the execution is so seamless, so attuned to the qualities of playing something as emotionally consequential as heartbreak, a cheeky touch to the otherwise sordid:  

You say make I do this and do that, I deliver 
If e too sweet, e no mean say e no fit bitter 
Truth e be truth, e no get sister 
Na still this kind thing turn man unbeliever  

Operating often from the aforementioned perspective of play, Stubborn harkens to a time in one’s childhood when the hard-headed way was the only way. The visuals of the titular track cast an actor playing a younger Victony in a nostalgic family home—in the first scene, his mother drags him to the room and kneels him down. Fast forward to the present, and he’s the superstar we know. Almost as though Victony is saying, the world will belong to the stubborn. And we’ve seen how probable it is that kids with a streak of defiance turn out to be creatives, sportspeople or something of the sort, their ideal selves fed by the fire of their wildness. Stubborn calls up a host of aunties and neighbourhood icons and signposts, most poignantly on ‘History’—a song that reminds you what a purposeful writer Victony is, able to submerge sentimentality into the compass of the album, always propelling the narrative forward in several different lanes.  

Given this vastness of source material, I wanted to know Victony’s selection process—how he filters the stories. Essentially, what is worthy of being in a song? Of the communal lifestyle, he didn’t know ‘how special it was.’ As he says in an interview for this essay: 

When you look at how the world is today, even Lagos, everything has changed. The sense of community has reduced drastically, especially in places like the Island. Everybody is very much on their own. Families are only raised by families, and while working on the album, track two especially, with ‘History’, that was a time when I just missed that feeling where everyone could rely on people in their community to help do things, like just take care of their kids. My mom could trust me with one other aunty in the neighbourhood; those times, we didn’t used to like it, but now as a grownup, I really just miss that feeling. I knew that was something special that we might never have again.  

In the Afropop block, creative instincts are quite high, and Victony resides on the highest floor. Right now, it’s a space he shares possibly only with Rema, whose alliance of sound and visual has also led him to levels where so many of their peers are unsure of going. Victony finds this experimentation exciting, which is why it’s been a recurring feature in his life. He tells me cheekily: 

Trying out new stuff is not exactly the greatest challenge for me. One of the most interesting challenges in trying out new stuff is making it look or feel familiar. It just keeps my creative juices flowing, because it makes me wanna check out stuff from the past or just look through a bunch of stuff that has existed. Every artist who’s done something before me that I like, I use their discography as my library. 

‘Pier 46’ embodies this idea the most on Stubborn. A wistful and soothing track, its atmosphere takes after the fever dream of a poet. ‘Hold up, I’m on my way,’ he sings lovingly across the string-awoken production, which is handled by KTIZO, a frequent collaborator across the album, alongside other established names such as P2J, Blaisebeatz and P Priime. The resonance of ‘Pier 46’ comes from its melody, the sticky, filmy hues of a dream, but the lyrics are like light sparingly punching through. Victony infers that what makes a melody stand out is ‘how original it feels when I listen to it.’ 

Because I’m someone who has very wide taste in music, I feel that often when I hear certain types of songs and I feel that originality. And that’s when you feel something, that’s why you are able to feel something. If your melody can do that, then I’d say that’s a good melody. 

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THE GRIT OF PRE-STUBBORN VICTONY

One just knows the story—of an ascendant Afrobeats star who’d been in an accident. It’s one of those things; one of those news stories that quickly shoots up to national prominence, if not for the artist’s own fame then for the notoriety of similar misfortunes. Swept in the tide of popular media, it’s easy to forget about the man in the middle, how he may have felt about this brutal thing that happened to him. Never one to shy from the scars of his battles, Victony embraced them, sinking their rough edges into the minds of the audience, who watched him now more keenly than ever.  

‘Kolomental’ was the first record to reference the car crash. Not directly, but in the wistful wisdom of ‘I no fit reason am, e go kpai me.’ That song would become one of the fan favourites on Outlaw (2022), not just because it was a triumphant ode but because, compared to the space given to groove on other songs, its role was quite minimal. It was only complemented by the patois-introduced anthem of the titular opener, yet those two records demonstrated an artist whose translation of pain didn’t succumb to the easy thrill of nihilism. But unlike the cherry matter one heard on ‘Fasta’ and ‘Jo Riddim’, both from Saturn, on Outlaw Victony was deeper immersed in the language of Afrobeats. He was bolder in his references, using the colourful landscape of Nigerian popular culture as a mood board. When one plays ‘Jo Riddim’ and ‘Jolene’ back to back, they’ll likely hear similar sonic undercurrents. But where the former’s writing was more traditional, Victony was playing with sounds in the latter. It makes for a less literary experience but a more experiential one, placing the writing on the wings of melody.  

When I interviewed Victony for the first time on OkayAfrica, some days before the release of Stubborn, he told me:  

I would say I’ve really grown in the aspect of understanding music, how to apply different techniques to give me different sounds. And going from rapping to singing, and not just singing, but Afrobeats—it’s a huge jump, right? Cos it needs its own understanding of the sound. [On the Saturn EP], I was still in the process of understanding what it means 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.’ 

A lot of people around the world definitely found the Outlaw hit ‘Soweto’ pleasant, especially the floating whistling of its closing movement. A swathe of listeners in Nigeria especially resonated with ‘All Power’ and ‘Apollo’, two records that bring us closer to a wholesome perspective of Victony’s ingenuity during this period. The latter was given the push of a lead single, a seemingly easy choice given the production’s vibrance and Victony’s lucid capturing of a carefree persona, utilizing the satisfying pun of ‘Apollo dey oh, I no fit come dey look Uche face.’ However, from the fringes rose ‘All Power’, an even brazier record whose shout-along line—a Victony specialty—was the suggestive, ‘All power belongs to your bum bum!’ 

For the uninitiated, it was just another remark about buttocks in a tradition that runs deep in Afrobeats, with musicians often depicting women’s bodies in lewd terms that sometimes attempt veneration but often land at obscenity. But for most Nigerians who knew a gospel tune with a similar line progression, Victony’s record was a catchy transposition, even if one that stood on shaky ground due to the level of sexism and religiosity in the country. The singer had even said his mother didn’t want him to promote the song due to the sanctity of the source material. 

But against these odds, ‘All Power’ came into its own as a key project record, demonstrating Victony’s juggling of the terms of his Christian faith. From the emo-informed depictions of crosses in his first arc, around the time he put out The Outlaw King, the artist has reflected sparsely, but poignantly, the union between the sexual grippings of a young man who’s yet close to the influences of the familial, which in his case inevitably leads to the spiritual. It was a turn consistent with his narrative genesis as an emo kid, the nerdy loner who found family in obscure knowledge and craftsmanship.  

Now, he was growing into a more communal figure and had to learn to seek fun in ways that include other people. This was the defining mark of Victony’s music before Stubborn, that search for his people. Even when he named them outlaws, at least they had themselves, and this was a necessary embrace, coming from an accident that claimed a close friend of his. The groovy music represented the deepening of this wholesome perspective, as Victony carried his listeners along from the pain and into the glory—glory as strength against something deeper, a struggle that wasn’t this time external, but rather inborn.  

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AN EVENING WITH VICTONY

On 20 December 2024, I and hundreds of eventgoers assembled at a concert centre at the Landmark premises in Lagos. Themed as a bonfire get-together with Victony, it wasn’t the least surprising to see the engaged passion on the faces of mostly young people who came to the show—the album’s reputation had strengthened throughout the year, with songs like ‘Tiny Apartment’ and ‘Slow Down’ even coming into their own as listeners’ favourites, after the Nigerian-centric records like ‘Anita’ and ‘Stubborn’ had been the earliest faves. 

Before one walked into the venue, there was a metallic band placed in front of the door, on which the word ‘Outlawville’ was written. My friends and I took some pictures here, communing with cool-dressed youngsters whose very aura gave life to the idea of being stubborn. This experience centre was quite artistic, featuring cut-out life-size images of warriors wearing chainmail, which was the central visual totem behind the album’s run.  

After a swathe of performances from rising musicians which included YKB, TAR1Q and FOLA, the crowd’s excitement was palpable, especially since these artists also had something of the vivacious originality that makes Victony so beloved. When Victony got on stage, he was quick to perform the most-loved songs on his discography. The party-starters: ‘Risk’, which had become a TikTok sensation; ‘Anita’, which got the girls grooving and the boys hopeful; ‘Bastard, Don’t Be Silly’, which he performed with an energetic group of black vest-wearing dancers; ‘Ludo’, which he performed with the featured act, Shallipopi. This was a turning point of the night as few people expected to see Shallipopi, who’d become a legit sensation across the country. It wasn’t just because of his level of popularity, but because Victony’s brand and persona didn’t seem to fit in with the more street-ready brand of Shallipopi. We couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Throughout that night, Victony brought out a collection of artists that gave a profound realization of his communal vision, as a major theme of Stubborn was connecting with one’s flagrant childhood self. When the Afro dancehall scion Patoranking got on stage, it was quite a fulfilling sight, seeing a loved forebear alongside a loved contemporary. Perhaps the biggest surprises of the night were the appearances of Bracket and Terry G. The former, at some point, had been among the biggest groups in Nigeria, only rivalled by the legendary P-Square. They performed classics like ‘Me & You’ and ‘Yori Yori’, both great records that haven’t been given their due in the canon of Afropop love songs. Terry G’s energetic charisma was in fiery form throughout his performance, and before he left the stage, he anointed Victony as his most-loved Gen-Z artist of the times. ‘You know say I be old man,’ he laughed. 

When we spoke for this piece, I asked Victony about the connection between Outlawville and the Stubborn universe. It was a connection I had perceived on that memorable December night, but one needed to be sure. 

They just really show different phases in my life. The Outlawville is forever, that’s the world I created at the start of my musical career. In the beginning, it had the energy I wanted to show people: I’m happy to be here; I have all these creative ideas. I was basically expressing the bright energy I felt in me. With Stubborn, it’s kind of the same thing. I’m still expressing myself, I’m just trying to show people that internally, there’s a battle between Victony the artist and me, Ebuka. Me as a human being

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