ARTISH Presents: In Orbit with Terri
Credits:
Words: Toye Sokunbi
Videography: Djaji Prime, Toye Sokunbi.
Creative Direction: Debola Abimbolu + Shina Ladipo.
Styling: Bamidele Styling
Location: CCX Lagos.
Production: ARTISH
Terri’s right eyebrow has been skeptically raised since he arrived on the set of our shoot.
He barely flinches, when he airily poses for the camera. Occasionally he’d approach the photographer to calmly review the last series of shots, then re-pose for takes he felt could’ve turned out better. Otherwise, he offered no comment on anything that didn’t immediately catch his eye.
He cracks a sly smirk at the request of the photographer—the only person on set, who has actually gotten any kind of reaction out of him all afternoon. Click. ‘Raise your hoodie over your head’ the photographer directs again. Terri obliges, with a blank stare. Another click.
Terri’s calmness may be mistaken for coldness if you don’t know any better. In real-time, it plays off more like controlled composure. “I’m not actually bored”, Terri says with a soft chuckle, after a crew member teased him for a presumable lack of interest. Terri’s manager, Osagie Osarenz, who’d been typing into her phone for much of the afternoon, affirms Terri’s response from across the yard, without raising her head. “That’s how he is. I used to ask [him] a lot: ‘Are you okay?’”.
We’re on the artificially-rugged outdoor courtyard of a luxury restaurant-lounge in Victoria Island Lagos. When he’s not striking poses, Terri is alternating between sipping a glass of pinot noir and flickering through his Instagram. Eleven weeks ago, Lagos state government announced a state-wide lockdown due to the novel coronavirus, forcing all food service establishments to scale down operations to takeouts and deliveries only. Some of the restrictions have been lifted but most spots—including our set location—are still conservative about re-opening to the public. Except of course, on the rare occasion of this cloudy June Saturday, when the guest is Akewe Terry’.
Back inside the lounge moments later, I'm by Osagie, a towering figure, a few inches taller than I am (I measure at 6”1 by the way). We watch Terri’s interactions with the photographer in silence, from a distance. Osagie herself has built a reputation as a nexus of the point where market-ready artists may meet the most accessible Afropop audience of any given point in the last decade. She is most notable for her work in artist development and management for artists such as Wizkid, Skales, Reekado Banks, Aramide, Attitude and others. Her most recent portfolio includes GoodGirl LA, AttiFaya, Reminisce and Timaya. As a music entrepreneur, she was a co-founder of One Mic Naija (a music concert series for emerging artists) and is the founder of The Basement Gig, a premium showcase for new and emerging artists. If there’s an artist whose music you have heard and loved in the last 7 years or so, they have probably also been on Osagie Osarenz’ stage at some point.
Having this kind of pedigree behind your career, partly explains why Terri commands the laser-focused presence he does. It’s only 3 PM but outside, the sun has completely vanished behind grey clouds overhead. Heavy winds fling an effect of items around the courtyard, threatening a violent downpour. Terri will have to come inside to switch looks soon.
The photo-session continues indoors by the bar. Terri is in his last look for the day; a beach-friendly turquoise two-piece, patterned with palm trees. He’s in a visibly warmer mood than he had been for his entire first 30-ish minutes on set. His bond with the rest of the on-set crew had also improved, as he continued to review the outcome of each round of shutter clicks.
If you had no other context for why he’s so hands-on with quality control, Terri wanting to have some degree of influence on how he’s captured may appear a bit neurotic. “Wiz has to confirm everything” I hear him say to the photographer, from an ear shot. “He has to be like, this is what I want, this is what I don’t want”, Terri later tells me of the A&R process for his debut EP, Afro Series.
In interviews, Terri himself often hints at the CEO-like oversight and veto, Wizkid has over his brand. Many artists have been affiliated with Wizkid’s Starboy imprint over the years, but it’s hard to pin the kind of working relationship they have/had. 2018’s Soco, the track that introduced then 17-year-old Terri, was released under the Starboy banner, featuring Ceeza Milli and Spotless, who are now both represented by AristoKrats Records and Mockingbird Entertainment respectively. Before them, Mr Eazi, Efya, Maleek Berry, Legendury Beats and L.A.X were all known to have been part of the Starboy Records family, at some point in their careers. But if you’re looking for hard facts about Wizkid and Terri’s relationship, you’ll find it on the back cover for Terri’s Afro Series, where Wizkid is credited executive producer under his real name, ‘Ayodeji I. Balogun’.
“We went through nearly 80 versions of the album art before we concluded on the one we used because Wiz kept sending it back”, Osagie had told me earlier in the afternoon, while Terri and the stylist sorted through more looks in a soundproof section cordoned off the rest of the lounge.
During my research, I found out, journalists who had written about him in the past, often mirror his rise through the Wizkid connection. That limited exploration of Terri’s own arch played into a larger narrative that Wizkid has been lax about his development. The generic sentiment that Terri should be having a bigger, an even speedier big break is already way off mark, the real sin was not examining his style as a stand-alone sound.
“I used to mime Wizkid’s songs, and my friends used to make me come to their classes to perform”
Raised in Ifako-Ijaiye, Ogba, Lagos, Terri was the slick-talking unruly smart kid, teachers loved to hate. “I was always in the staff room for sagging my pants, or being annoying. But I also had to represent my school at competitions”. Terri says. His high school classmates got the best of his musical side. “I used to mime Wizkid’s songs, and my friends used to make me come to their classes to perform”, he says excitedly.
One day, a friend suggested Terri should take his music a bit more seriously by recording a track. “I was like, you and I know we don’t have the money to pay for a studio session. He was like, ‘guy, I know a cheap place we can record for ₦5000 ($13)’. I was like ‘₦5000’? For a song?”. At that age [14], even ₦5000 was a lot of money, Terri had to save up all of his lunch money for many months, plus whatever two of his friends could chip in to round up the numbers.
Terri didn’t necessarily have high hopes for the outcome of that studio session. But the actual output took him by surprise so much that he didn’t bother going back to mix and master the track, which would have cost another ₦2,500 ($6.50) he did not have. The raw demo also immediately found acceptance amongst his peers. “When we recorded the song, It was sounding so good. I told the guy to send it to me, I sent it to all my friends and everybody loved it”.
Not returning to the studio where he first cut his musical tooth, because of a potentially pending debt, came at the price of needing a new producer. This is how Terri met long-time collaborator and friend Vampire Beatz, who became an instrumental figure to his steady incline. “He took me in as a younger brother, gave me his time and developed me as an artist. I started out paying for my sessions, but after like 6 months, everything became free because he became really invested in my talent”.
In January 2018, Vampire Beatz helped Terri produce his cover of DJ Jimmy Jatt’s “Oshey” featuring Wizkid. At the time, Terri had just abandoned a Marine Insurance degree at the University of Lagos, to focus on music fully. He was merely dropping different covers on his Instagram to promote a planned mixtape release. What happened next, changed his life forever.
Terri’s Oshey cover caught the attention of one half of Legendury Beatz, Mut4y, who sent a DM commending his music style. In the weeks following Mut4y’s DM, Wizkid requested to meet him. “When I saw him [Wizkid], he called me by my name ‘Terri’, I was like ‘This guy! You know who I am!’”, Terri says wide-eyed. The rest is the real-time history we have all witnessed since the release of Soco, a song recorded during one of Terri’s earliest studio sessions with Wizkid in March of 2018.
“Imagine this kid from Ifako-Ijaiye, performing at the O2”,
Till date, Vampire Beatz is Terri’s most preferred person to record with. In Terri’s words, making music with Vampire helps him stay grounded. “When I record, I like to see my guys. I like to remember how it all started versus where we are now, where we used to record versus where we record now, what we used to eat versus what we eat now”.
The transition from relative obscurity into the world of celebrity is one of the defining denominators of Terri’s artistic sensibilities. “Wake Up”, the stunning Afrobeat-inspired hustler anthem and opening track off Afro Series, is immediately one of such tracks. Terri pep talks “brothers” and “sisters” to get active, while shrugging off the gaze of doubters, who still seem unable to move past his “Soco” moment. While narrating how he recorded the track, Terri tells me, “Everything I said on the song is just a reflection of how I felt at the time, moving from London to Lagos. I felt like I had reached a new level from where I was before”. He'd failed to gain entry into the UK due to visa problems five times, before that. “Imagine this kid from Ifako-Ijaiye, performing at the O2”, he added.
On earlier singles, Terri seamlessly transmutes his sound through a range of concepts. A touch of electric guitars, on the fuji-inflected “Shuu”, transform the track’s dramatic drum-led edge to an unassumingly brilliant experimental Afropop track. “Same You”, another pre-project single, is produced by NorthBoi, the same masterstroke that created “Soco”. The real kick of the track is Terri’s sleek delivery of an R&B-inflected song about feeling insecure after falling in love with a muse, who’s “feeling” him, but needs him to get his money up first.
Across seven tracks, Afro-Series thrives on live acoustics, gesturing a more refined Afropop balanced between R&B and Afrobeats. The first three tracks on the project open with a stream of guitar riffs that may inspire alternative moods, at least until Afrobeat drums set-in to even out the arrangement. “I am inspired by everybody around me” he says of how he builds melodies, pausing to take a big gulp of his now, near-empty, glass of pinot noir. “I feel like Afropop is a gift, artists are servants on the job”.
After the announcement of Terri as Wizkid’s first official signing to Starboy Records, speculators questioned Wizkid’s ability to sustainably juggle his own expansion as one of Africa’s biggest contemporary pop-stars with artist development. If serial fallouts between artists and Nigerian labels say anything about artist management in Nigeria, it’s that the task of talent development is delicate. The fast-rise and decline of countless Afropop stars who have had big moments and then vanished into deafening obscurity is also a cautionary tale for any young artist who thinks a big cosign is all he needs to smooth-sail to the top. This Pulse Nigeria article from May affirms the strength of Bia, a jazz-inflected, synth-set, Afropop love song Terri released back in October 2018. But the writer also suggests Terri’s current grounding in Afropop, paled in comparison to Rema, Joeboy and Fireboy.
Hype has long been a grounding element for what is considered Afropop. The lack of strong dependable metrics for the genre, however, means, what factors into an artist’s hype on any given new music Friday, is volatile. It’s not rare to see an artist with a sonically superior record enjoy the same spotlight as the creator of a comical track, getting spins off a social media challenge. In today’s fast-evolving world of Afropop, it’s even harder to tell what big moments are relevant to a young artist’s rise. What determines who’s hot or not, may depend on who you ask, or when you ask them.
“A lot of things come from when you have a big song, You get people trying to be your friends, or put you on everything. I got that at my first instance. I didn’t understand what I had, because I was young and it was normal to me”.
When I ask Terri if he has since been disillusioned by the hype around his Wizkid cosign, or under the pressure to “keep up”, he doesn’t avoid the answering directly per se, instead, he generalises his resolve. “A lot of things come from when you have a big song, You get people trying to be your friends, or put you on everything. I got that at my first instance. I didn’t understand what I had, because I was young and it was normal to me”.
Terri isn’t fazed by the pressure or the seeming demand for him to be more, but he’s also very realistic about what joining the Starboy family meant for his career. He knows that, though Soco gave him a much-needed boost, the work of evolving into a profitable artist largely falls on his shoulders. “It was from that point that I started to be like, okay, what am I trying to do, how can i make this [music] undeniable. That even if you have your reservations, you cannot deny this [music] is dope”.
Some of his confidence is goaded by support from Wizkid, who has also been keen for Terri to establish his own voice. In the same way Wizkid can be nit-picky about Terri’s outwardly affairs, the 2-time Grammy-nominated pop star, also insists he makes moves on his own. Terri tells me this is one of the reasons, none of the collaborations they have recorded together since Soco have dropped. “Wizzy is always telling me, ‘I know people are going to expect Wiz-Terri, Wiz-Terri but I want people to see you can do this by making music that people want to wake up and live by, then spreading that opportunity to more people’”.
This approach that allows Terri to explore his creative depth, comes coincidentally as the world around the Starboy family is also witnessing a transition. In the year that followed, Terri bagging his first global hit and major co-sign, the arrival of Rema, Fireboy DML, and continued expansion of the alté subculture—led by provocateurs Odunsi, Cruel Santino and Lady Donli—also introduced new guards for Afropop, and a range of sounds that tested sonic palates of old and new audiences. Terri’s refined approach with composition, imagery and storytelling, is an indicator, he is stylistically also in tune with the times.
For now, Terri’s plan is to be here for a long time, and as such he’s more focused on looking within to discover what separates him from the crowd. With a musical lineage, where a lot of success has been recorded at his back, he believes raw value is the thing that separates an artist of any form from their peers. In his words, “Wiz is on a different journey, and I have to find my own path. Cos It’s not enough to have it [the spotlight], it’s what you make from it that counts”