The Importance of Being Victony

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.