Mavo Wants You to Want Him First

His father named him for a promise. You know, you’re going to be famous, he told him, back when Marvin was young enough to still be asking what his own name meant. Today the industry knows him as Mavo, 22, an optometry student from Ekpoma who built a movement out of a private dictionary of invented slang, a genre he calls Burbur Music, and a label, Kilogbede Records, that he and his team built from nothing. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, he told me something I’ve never heard an artist say out loud before: fans don’t get the next song until they’ve proven they want it badly enough.

Mavo doesn’t talk about songwriting the way most young Nigerian artists do, in terms of hooks or bars. He talks about it the way you’d gist about today’s weather. “I feel like music is something that comes to you. You don’t go to music,” he said, when I asked whether this had always felt natural to him. “If there’s no passion for music, it just doesn’t... you’d like what you think, like the way you expect it to be. There has to be passion. There has to be that urge to go to the studio by yourself, not somebody calling you.”

That urge, by his account, runs closer to compulsion than routine. “Sometimes I’m in studio like fourteen hours, eighteen hours a day. I was in studio on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day,” he told me, describing a December spent racing his collaborator P Prime’s travel schedule to the US, locking in as many records as possible before the flight out. Nobody was enforcing a deadline. “I don’t have anybody that’s going to tell me you must submit the album before April,” he said. “I do my things on my own time. So for me to be in the studio on Christmas Day, that shows you like I actually want to be there. I love this thing.”

Mavo sorts his own catalogue by emotional register rather than theme. “I like my songs into feelings,” he explained. When a project starts leaning a certain way, he says so to his team directly. “I told my team, guys, I feel like we’re moving so fast. Let’s make a project, the fast theme. So we started putting fast sounds, car sounds, a lot of voice-overs on the EP to make it a fast EP.” That instinct shaped Kilometer II. The next tape needed to feel like an escalation, so the concept jumped somewhere bigger. “We need to do something like an upgrade, like an uplift. Let’s take them out of the earth. Let’s blow their mind,” which is how the project’s cover ended up spacebound, a boy embracing the largesse of the cosmos from above.

Ask him how he knows when a record is actually good, and the answer stays inside that same emotional register. “When something is sweet, it feels different,” he said. “You don’t feel the same way if something is not sweet. You just chill.” When it does land, he says he knows it in his body before he knows it anywhere else: “I’m standing up in the studio jumping, like, yo, this one’s banging.” That’s how “Escaladizzy” felt from the inside, and later “Shakabulizzy.” When I told him that “Mofe” makes me feel luxurious, expensive, like the main character, he agreed instantly. “That’s it. Basically, that’s the way I felt when I was making the song.” He’d later learn, almost by accident, that Mofe is Yoruba for I want, a meaning that arrived after the song came alive.

Mavo studies optometry, and he’s precise, almost defensive, about what that word does and doesn’t mean. “An optometrist is a doctor of optometry,” he told me. “But we have specific roles. In the eye field, there’s an ophthalmologist, an optometrist, and an optician. These are different roles in eye care.” He’s tired of correcting people who assume he’s claiming a medical degree that isn’t his. “I don’t know what it takes to be a doctor. But yeah, I study optometry.”

That precision followed him straight into exam season. In January, he was sitting papers and shooting videos in the same week. “I was juggling shooting my music videos and going in between my exams,” he said. “I just had to find a way, calling my managers, can we plan this, can I complete these shoots, maybe my exams next week.” He doesn’t read the overlap as strain. He reads it as an edge. “I feel like multitasking is a good way of proving that you can be better than somebody else. It gives me an edge. It gives people to say, how is this guy doing school and music? So I want to try and finish my school, then focus on my music eventually.”

Some artists spend years finding their footing before they take the business seriously. Mavo says he never had that period. “I’m a professional from the start,” he told me. “Thanks to my manager, Stuart. Thanks to Beverly, Daryl, working with me for my first song. I’ve been professional from my first song, the Volcanic EP.” Before the breakout came, he and his team were quietly stockpiling songs they knew were strong and holding them back on purpose. “We knew if we had put everything out, it wouldn’t have, it would just be pointless,” he said. “So when we start getting deals, they will have something to go back to that’s ours. That’s our project, baby.” Only once that foundation was built, with Ukanigbe and its follow-ups already in the catalogue, did they start looking outward. “We needed our name outside, so we needed to pair with more people to put us to the front, but still have not lost our originality.”

His parents took longer to come around than his team did. “It was hard for me to leave my house, tell my parents I want to do music,” he said. “They didn’t say we don’t support your music. They just said this is not what you’re meant to do. But they didn’t do anything bad to me.” What eventually shifted things wasn’t a conversation, it was the music finding her first. “My mom started saying, oh, I heard your song. And I’m like, yeah mom, thank you. Then they just started coming around.” She was at one of his shows last year. “It was good,” he said, and didn’t elaborate further, which told me more than an elaboration would have.

The clearest piece of philosophy Mavo offered me wasn’t about a song at all. It was about how cheap he thinks the ordinary really is, and how badly the industry misreads that. “We can make a beautiful cover art for an album that’s going to win a Grammy from just sitting down here,” he said. “But people be like, no, we have to go to Atlanta to do this.” He shot a recent cover on a couch in the same room he’d filmed a video in, no set, no flight. “I just took the cover art for the song there. I told my friend, write ‘Mofe’ over there. That’s the cover.”

The same instinct governs how he talks about himself in public, or rather, how little he does. “The little you say, the more you get,” he told me. “It’s crazy, especially in Nigeria.” He named the artist he models this on without hesitation. “My leader Wizkid, he’s just big. Can you just see ninety K likes? How minimal is maximal? I’ve learned that the less you say, the more you get.” It’s a debt he’s carried since childhood. Growing up, Wizkid was the first artist he obsessed over closely enough to transcribe. “I loved Wizkid so much because it just made me feel like I was the guy. I was listening to ‘Holla At Your Boy.’ After a while I started writing his lyrics out, on my notes, just to know how it feels.”

He’s applied the same restraint to criticism. “I don’t even look at comments,” he said. “I have videos with eight thousand comments, people saying why is this guy looking like this, why is this guy doing this. But I don’t feel like I’m too busy for that. I have people that are working with me. Even if I’m doing that, they’ll be so angry at me.” He estimates he’s held the line for seven or eight months now. “Anybody that still does that, just don’t do it.”

The most striking thing Mavo told me had nothing to do with lyrics. It was about the shape of demand itself, and how deliberately he’s inverted it. Most artists spend a career convincing an audience to want the next release. Mavo has decided the audience should have to prove it first. “I feel like the spice of it is when they say, when is it dropping,” he told me. “I need your want. I need to see you want me for me to give it to you.” He landed, almost by accident, on the fact that this is the literal meaning of the Yoruba word already sitting in his own title. “Apparently that’s the meaning of it in Yoruba. I want. So yeah, I need to see the want. Bring it to me, then I post it to you.”

He backs the posture with numbers. “Ukanigbe has forty million streams already,” he told me, comparing it to a newer single his team pushed harder and spent more behind, which sits closer to twenty seven million. “You guys have to actually tell me you guys want this one before I give it to them,” he said, half laughing, half serious. “Don’t play with me like that.”

I asked him, at the end, what he holds back for himself, after an hour of him handing me everything else. He didn’t really answer the question directly. He proved, instead, that it doesn’t apply to him yet. “I’m quite too invested in my music to think about myself,” he said. “I love my music too much. This is actually what I love doing. That’s why, no matter how much you insult me or say what you want, it’s what I want to do.”

“I chose this,” he added, before I could ask anything else. “It’s my own.”

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