Stubborn: The Genius Of Victony
Victony doubles down on everything that has made him one of the most fascinating Nigerian musicians: Expansive production, cohesive messaging, mind-altering melodies.
Victony offers a promise with each new release. Whether in bits and pieces as singles or guest collaborations. Or a larger serving of his expression as EPs, the composition has always remained the same. You get a singer who creates on a spectrum of genres, fusing melodies, lyrics and storytelling to alter your emotions. It’s a rare skill whose application pushes boundaries, extending the general knowledge of what it means to make Nigerian music. Whether in building complex imagery or deconstructing an idea, his music is rapacious, absorbing more and more as the years pass.
When Victony sings, you can find everything. A thinker’s thinker, his deep cuts like ‘Pray’ and ‘Many Men’ coax you into the melancholy of introspection. Love, hedonism and all their friends make themselves comfortable throughout his discography, taking the shape of outsized pop bangers (‘Holy Father,’ ‘Soweto’). Often, you find him in the middle, juggling through everything and anything all at once. That’s why records like ‘My Darling’ might start as a pamper session and devolve into a highly erotic scene, where “coconut oil no fit to fry your dodo.” This is a man who has all the infinity stones, bending the world as he sees it again and again.
Via multiple career iterations, Victony has approached his career by curating personal eras. First trying his virgin voice out as a rapper, he reimagined himself as a singer, spamming the world with dance ballads. He’s also created and shared “Outlawville — a utopia — where pink clouds sail over blue and purple humanoids, representing himself and the people who assemble under his banner. In his previous artistic bent, his outfits often feature a baker boy cap, reminiscent of the 70s-80s Nigerian style sense. It’s a familiar hunting ground for his creative process. That’s why “Angelus” conjures images of our parents and the ones before them. That’s why songs like “Jolene” and “Angelus” are throwbacks, longing homages to a time forever behind us.
Victony’s debut album “Stubborn” continues that streak—this time, Victony sells resilience, the culture code for the Nigerian condition. To exist in modern-day Nigeria is to swim against the tide. In a country where the economy nosedives on a whim, multiple infrastructural gaps are breeding grounds for poverty and impunity. Thriving in Nigeria is an endurance test, where human effort clashes against limited opportunities, each person fashioning a unique path for themselves. To do this is to build mental muscle. To oppose reality via by being stubborn. For this campaign, Victony presents himself with a chain mail coif, denoting medieval militancy. The Nigerian way is the stubborn way—the world’s largest gathering of stubborn black people.
Victony doubles down on everything that has made him one of the most fascinating Nigerian musicians. His expansive production, cohesive messaging, mind-altering melodies, and palpable individualism at its centre are all designed to improve the silence. His 16-song, 49-minute album is a journey, all selling the central idea of resistance, revelling in humanity, and staying present.
‘Oshaprapa’ and ‘History’ are twin openers, telling origin hardship stories over mellow instrumentation. There’s hardly time for pure introspection, with Shallipopi assisting the party-starting “Ludo.” It’s the start of a love journey where “Anita” and “Risk” are celebrations of melodic aptitude — the type of musicianship that commands spaces with a heady soup of sweetness. Victony has always distinguished himself as a premium collaborator, exploring complementary pockets when he marries his art to a peer. American crooner SAINt JHN is the perfect partner on “Tiny Apartment.” While yearning for the return of a lost lover, their combinatory effects provide the highest point of this album, as they paint a bleak picture of romantic grief. That strain of surrender waits around on the retro ‘Slow Down,’ creating a multifusion axis of flirtation.
For much of its duration, “Stubborn” simply confirms the heterogeneous nature of Nigerian pop music. Everything and anything is welcome. Every influence can take on a local flavour, no matter how distant the origins. No two records are alike here. Each sticks out by itself while maintaining the integrity of the whole. It’s a tricky feat that gets lost in the album’s psychedelia —a technical win dwarfed by the quality of Victony’s stimulus.