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Stubborn isn’t exactly the first word that would come up in an attempt to describe Victony. Since ascending to mainstream Afropop consciousness, Victony—with his crystalline voice and stirring sepia ballads—has always cut the image of the reserved superstar. Unlike many of his peers who actively court the public’s attention through antics, he’s never in the […]
Stubborn isn’t exactly the first word that would come up in an attempt to describe Victony. Since ascending to mainstream Afropop consciousness, Victony—with his crystalline voice and stirring sepia ballads—has always cut the image of the reserved superstar. Unlike many of his peers who actively court the public’s attention through antics, he’s never in the news for controversy. His strategy has always been to home in on his cult-adjacent fans, who he affectionately calls “Outlaws”, drop undeniably brilliant music and recede into the shadows until a new release is due. However, on the fittingly titled Stubborn, he pulls open the curtains on a different facet of his psyche steeped in the twinge of survivalist triumph. At once vivacious and affecting, Victony channels angst and defiance over the album’s 14 tracks.
Victony’s big break came in 2021 as a guest artiste on Mayorkun’s Holy Father. It came on the heels of a car accident that claimed the life of a friend and left him confined to a wheelchair for months. Since the incident, he’s steered clear of explicitly exploring the resulting trauma through music. And while Stubborn isn’t exactly an exorcism of whatever demons he has locked away, he peels back the layers, offering what is perhaps the first glimpse into his soul through music.
On Outlaw, his nimbly sung and breathtakingly brazen sophomore EP, Victony serves slinky RnB and harnesses the entrancing rhythms of Afropop to great effect. He contorts his voice to produce mesmerizing melodies and delivers lyrics that can only be described as prodigious. However, he doesn’t offer much in the way of personal stories. This tendency to separate music and his personal life, church and state, has threaded the needle between his projects. Stubborn represents his first attempt at blurring the gap between the two formerly parallel lines.
Victony describes Stubborn as his life’s summary and a chronicle of his tendency to keep trudging ahead in spite of life’s many challenges. The titular Asake-assisted Stubborn embodies this quality of relentlessness. Atop a shimmering mid-tempo beat, Victony plays the glib self-advocate, extolling his own composure and skill at weathering life’s storms. “so many things you dunno, so many things you dunno. Me I don dey fight since when I never tall reach Aunty Olisa bumbum”. On the Album’s opener Oshaprapra, which literally translates as “you’re shining”, he reprises this motif of self-adulation. However it’s not so much vain bluster as it is a self-congratulation for traversing a maze of obstacles and still coming out shining.
While he never directly makes mention of Lagos, several parts of the album feel reminiscent of the city. On History, surfing a pulsing beat that recalls the gritty Street-Pop of the early aughts, he constructs an riveting montage of his childhood neighborhood. “Obolo dey burn cigar, oh. When e mama been wan sit down. But she no fit to, she dey consider pikin.” He sings on the pre-chorus. Sunday School is the quintessential struggling Lagos boy confessional. Complete with the hustling-boy-meets-heartbreaker trope, he contends with the universal experience of chasing a love interest who increasingly drifts away, even as you channel more energy into salving the cracks in the relationship. It’s a brilliantly raw exploration of the turmoil of unrequited love. Sunday School is probably going to go down as a sleeper hit but it’s one of the best-written and poignant tracks on the project.
On Street Affair, against the backdrop of luxuriant keys punctuated by lush guitar chords, he interpolates the storied lagos epithet “Eko o ni baje!”, as he sings “Koni baje o” on the chorus. It’s a warning disguised as a prayer, a common habit among Lagosians. On the track, he ricochets between didactic missives to a close friend who’s crossed him and subtle warnings. It’s a cinematic portrayal of jousting between friends turned foes, told through the lens of the Lagos experience. These nods to Lagos don’t feel engineered into existence, they’re way too spontaneous and fleeting to be, from any point of view, engineered. He’s just a writer drawing from his lived experiences to create art.
For all the thematic consistency the album enjoys, much of the project sees Victony in his comfort zone, manipulating melodies and exploring pockets of space within the production, to conjure earworm Afropop bangers. “Girl, your booty get mind on е own. Bum-bum wey dey eye my pocket.” Victony sings on Anita, one of the album’s brightest moments. Any decent Afropop artiste could conjure that line; it’s quintessential Afropop speak. But his delivery, the way he exploits spaces within the production, transforms what would ordinarily be pedestrian or trite into a stroke of genius. On Ludo, featuring Shallipopi, he showcases his deftness at shapeshifting between styles. Ludo is a declaration of lustful yearning, it could almost be described as a mating call. Over drums that recall Burnaboy’s Alarm Clock, he trades bars with Shallipopi as they “rizz up” their muse.
The Saint JHN assisted Tiny Apartment finds him in pointedly unfamiliar waters, but he doesn’t feel out of place. Victony is more delicate but he’s simultaneously cavalier as he grapples with the heartache, confusion and desperation that comes with an elusive love interest. It’s a masterclass in storytelling. It opens with a monologue by a female voice recounting the details of a fight. Over wry melodies he pleads “Beg, make you no give me excess trouble. Sick if i no get excess bundle. Abeg, make you lemme breath before you wan go.” The writing on the song, both by Victony and Saint JHN, is unbelievably beautiful. It’s not entirely surprising, it’s just what you’d expect when two virtuosos come together. And it’s neither clever phrasing nor witty bars that make the writing shine but the poignance of every line and shared humanity it draws on.
Stubborn is at once a critic’s dream and a conundrum. On the one hand it checks almost every box. He brings the poise of a seasoned crooner: the ability to float above beats, morphing seamlessly to fit every style. His mastery of the pen is in full bloom. He can be wry and piercing or bubbly and heady; at every moment his vision is clear and his ability to deploy his musical chops to elicit a specific feeling in the listener is as keen as ever. But it’s this same clarity of purpose and deftness that poses a paradox to the critic. After all, what becomes of the critic when there’s nothing to criticize? This assessment may come off as too generous, since conventional wisdom suggests that there’s always something to criticize: nothing is perfect. However, the album’s flaws, whatever may be, are smoothed over by his execution.