Obongjayar Obongjayar
Growing up in Nigeria at the start of this century, Steven Umoh was hooked on American hip-hop. He had a knack for remembering Nelly and Eminem lyrics, and making up his own on the spot. He would spit rhymes for his classmates in the schoolyard and rap the gospel at his grandmother's church. That was it, he thought: I'm going to be a rapper. But not long after moving to the UK with dreams of music career, he found himself stuck with the wrong accent, feeling like a fraud. "Who am I trying to reach?" he remembers thinking. "I'm lying to the audience, because I've never even been to America—how have I got an American accent?"
At university in England, he put a band together to play a few tiny shows and soon realized that he was more of a singer than a rapper—and that the only accent he could sing in was his true Nigerian one. "It was a sign to say you should be who you are, rather than try to be something else," he says.
These days, the 25-year-old makes music as Obongjayar and, in conversation at least, sounds like a Londoner. He looks like one, too. Drinking lukewarm coffee on a grey afternoon in the capital, he's decked out in rail-fresh Carhartt, copped on discount from the store job he works on the side. There's no straightforward way to describe his current sound, which folds in elements of spoken word, electronic, and Afrobeat. "I've been called a soul singer," he says, sounding not entirely convinced.
Growing up in Nigeria at the start of this century, Steven Umoh was hooked on American hip-hop. He had a knack for remembering Nelly and Eminem lyrics, and making up his own on the spot. He would spit rhymes for his classmates in the schoolyard and rap the gospel at his grandmother's church. That was it, he thought: I'm going to be a rapper. But not long after moving to the UK with dreams of music career, he found himself stuck with the wrong accent, feeling like a fraud. "Who am I trying to reach?" he remembers thinking. "I'm lying to the audience, because I've never even been to America—how have I got an American accent?"
At university in England, he put a band together to play a few tiny shows and soon realized that he was more of a singer than a rapper—and that the only accent he could sing in was his true Nigerian one. "It was a sign to say you should be who you are, rather than try to be something else," he says.
These days, the 25-year-old makes music as Obongjayar and, in conversation at least, sounds like a Londoner. He looks like one, too. Drinking lukewarm coffee on a grey afternoon in the capital, he's decked out in rail-fresh Carhartt, copped on discount from the store job he works on the side. There's no straightforward way to describe his current sound, which folds in elements of spoken word, electronic, and Afrobeat. "I've been called a soul singer," he says, sounding not entirely convinced.
