TG Omori: Evolving The Nigerian Pop Identity

Nobody sets out to become Nigeria’s most influential music video director by wanting to direct music videos. From the streets to betting on himself, the defiant filmmaker has his sights on legacy.

Joey Akan Sep 28

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“Money can’t buy this,” TG Omori told me, describing the moment his life split into a before and after. “This is what greatness look like. And this is what I want. This is the level I want. I don’t care what I’m doing. Even if I’m a shoemaker. I want to be so great being a shoemaker.” He was talking about watching a crowd turn its back on the artists already performing onstage at a concert, the second Burna Boy walked through the entrance gate. That unmistakable pull, is what he desires for his work.

The Backup Career

Nobody sets out to become Nigeria’s most influential music video director by wanting to direct music videos. Omori’s route ran through a church drama department, and only because singing wasn’t an option. “I couldn’t sing because my voice was always cracking,” he told me, so instead of the choir, he joined the storytelling and acting groups, chasing visibility more than craft. “I was good in storytelling, so I joined the drama department just to be seen, just to be part of a community in church.” Film school was meant to sharpen that acting, nothing more. It was there, sitting in on classmates who actually wanted to be video directors, that he stumbled into the career that would define him. “I stood and I stole their dreams. I never even knew that there was a career called video directing. We only saw music videos. We never even thought of the people behind it.”

The pull wasn’t artistic at first. It was immeidately financial. “Instantly, like my first shoot, somebody’s going to invest, an artist is going to pay you to make a video.” Fifty thousand naira for his debut shoot felt, in his words, like “a big deal for me” as a kid from the hood, and after covering equipment rental he still cleared enough to buy sneakers. What followed was ambition inspiring momentum. “I wasn’t trying to be number one. I wasn’t trying to be the biggest. I wasn’t trying to win awards. I was just hustling, neighborhood hero, just doing it for all my guys in the hood.” Money came, hotels came, and for a while that was the entire dream. “The dream was there was no dream. It was just a career. I was just making money off it.”

The Night at Transcorp

What changed everything happened at an event in Abuja. T.G was watching from backstage as Burna Boy arrived and, in Omori’s telling, Burna’s arrival physically rearranged the room. “Everybody left the performance and turned their backs to him. As he was walking, the whole crowd was… I could see everything.” Omori is careful to frame what moved him. It wasn’t the celebrity of the Nigerian superstar. It was the specific, earned weight of it. “I want to get into a space and everybody recognize me, not just because of who I am, but because of the work I have put in, because of my legacy… imagine the whole place boiling because one person stepped in. That was like an eye opener for me.”

He didn’t sleep that night. By the time morning came, in 2019, the decision was already made. “This is going to be my last year being an ordinary guy.” He’s precise about the fact that he intentionally flipped his switch. “That night I was like, this is going to be my last night being just… being regular.” What followed was total, deliberate overcommitment. A major song came through soon after, and he threw resources at it he didn’t fully have. “I used everything. I added my own money. I was not even trying to be rich. I didn’t even care for money or anything. I just want to. I was ready to pay any price for greatness. I was ready to give up my sleep, my money, everything.” The payoff, when it landed, felt less like success than sensory overload. “My phone started buzzing like it was like drugs. I just sit back at home. I’m laughing, I’m laughing at nothing, because you just sit there and you see everybody you’re looking up to… trying to get a video from you.”

The Camel to the River

To Omori, talent isn’t what separates artists (and directors) who make it from those who stall out. It’s whether someone has genuinely reached the point of being unable to tolerate their own mediocrity. “You can force a donkey, a camel, to the river, but you can’t force them to drink,” he told me, describing the wasted PR budgets he’s watched labels pour into artists who were never actually hungry for the work itself. “Is the artist really ready to be great? Some people just, they think it’s cool.” He’s blunt that reaching that point isn’t gentle. “You need to have that encounter. You need to wake up one day and get tired of the situation. It has to annoy you so bad that you need to hurt yourself first.”

That audacity, once switched on, showed up as raw output. At his peak he was directing as many as two hundred music videos in a single year, driven by an internal state of competitiveness. “If they’re shooting fifty videos , I’ll shoot five hundred… I don’t care, whatever it takes, we are going to make it happen.” He traces the same instinct in the artists he considers the industry’s biggest names. “I always believe that I can’t be last among my peers. If somebody can do it, I can do it.”

Shaolin

The comeback video that reintroduced Omori to the industry, Seyi Vibez’s “Shaolin,” carries a backstory he’d never told publicly before our conversation. He shot it in the narrow window before what would become his second, successful kidney transplant surgery, after roughly a year battling kidney failure and a failed procedure. “I wasn’t shooting, I was sad, I was depressed. That was when I was going to have my second surgery. I’d waited for it for over six months.” What broke him was the inability to create. The physical pain could be managed. It “The pain wasn’t my problem… it was the fact that I couldn’t create for six months. I was losing my mind.”

Taking the job at all meant negotiating with his own doctors, who agreed to medicate him strong enough to get through a shoot. When the surgery date slipped by another month, the delay pushed him toward the video rather than away from it. “Since I have three months, let me just use this one month to do Shaolin.” What ended up on screen, he says, was closer to an unfiltered release than a directed concept. “The video had no treatment. It was just a lot of rage, a lot of anger, and me not being able to create for a very long time… fuck this shit, this is me being aggressive.” A tight five-day post-production window, forced by the approach of Ramadan, meant entire CGI-heavy scenes never made the final cut. When D’banj later called “Shaolin” out, unprompted, as the height of African music video creativity, Omori’s reaction was relief. Relief that the version of himself who made it under that much duress had actually landed the plane.

Professor X

Unable to be on set during the worst of his illness, Omori didn’t stop creating, he redirected entirely into work he could do from a hospital bed: designing glasses, building out artist personas and brand identities, sketching album art and stage concepts for other people to execute. He compares the period, half-joking, to running an operation from a distance. “I might not be present, but I do the primary sketches and send them out to people to get it done. So I was just like Professor X… I was just in the hospital bed distributing ideas, because the ideas were just, because I was alone. Just me and my ceiling. Just thinking.”

He describes the decision to keep creating in any form available to him as close to a survival instinct. “I’ve taken my oath to creativity. No love life, nothing. I was just creating. And now it was almost been taken away from me. So I had to start looking at other means.”

The Mind That Doesn’t Turn Off

Solitude, for Omori, was a chosen default long before illness took away his ability to alter anything. During the worst stretch of his recovery, alone with nothing but his own ideas, I asked him directly whether he still valued isolation once the choice for anything else was taken from him. His answer was heavy. “To be honest, I imagine if I was never by myself… I don’t know how life would have been. I think that was what it felt like. I was preparing myself for the worst days. It actually helped me. That’s why you don’t see me. I can actually be by myself for, like, a year.”

What that solitude actually feels like from the inside, he described almost clinically. “I don’t know if it’s crazy, but I speak to myself so mu ch, I’m always in my head. It’s sometimes scary. But as long as I have YouTube, I have my phone, I just… because sometimes I get tired of people, sometimes I want people. But then we start conversations, and then sometimes I want to be by myself. I like having people around, but I get bored having people around. I don’t know if I’m trying to get a diagnosis.” He’s learned to manage the people in his life around that rhythm rather than fight it, even when it means turning them away. “Most times people want to come visit me, but I don’t know how to explain to them, I think I’m better by myself, because it gets exhausting sometimes.” The company inside his own head, he says, never actually thins out. “I have podcasts in my head, two thousand podcasts, whereby I ask myself questions and I answer. Sometimes I might sit down a whole day in my house and I’m having a conversation, I’m interviewing myself… my mind is a very wet place.”

That same overactivity is exactly why he’s drawn a hard line around what he lets into it. He limited even weed use once he understood what an already overactive mind could do if pushed further, a caution that started, he says, in the hospital itself. “That’s why I had to limit it, even when I was using some substance, like just weed, I had to limit it to a certain level, because if I try to go beyond that, I might lose my mind, because my mind is always very, very… Even when I was in the hospital, when some anesthesia was given to me, it was always a struggle in my head.” He’s never touched anything harder, for the same reason. “That’s why I’ve never tried popping any drug or anything. If I try it, I feel like I’m going to run mad immediately, because my mind is super, super, super active.” He described one specific night in stark terms, without dressing it up. “There was one night I was literally crying. I felt like I was going to cross. I smoked so much weed, I felt like I don’t want to cross over.” His conclusion wasn’t a warning aimed outward so much as a rule for himself. One he thinks most people skip. “It’s good for people to know their limit. Understand your mind and then know what’s good for you. I think that’s why a lot of people get addicted quickly, because you don’t even know there’s a level to what your head can take.”

What Changed While He Was Gone

Coming back into an industry he’d been forced out of by illness, Omori’s clearest observation is about how completely the format he built his name on has been devalued. Cheap, constant visibility, TikTok clips, Instagram stories, and iPhone footage has replaced the music video as the place fans actually meet an artist. “Before, you only have to wait for a music video to see a superstar. Now you can see them on Instagram, on TikTok. So it has dropped down the value of music videos.” He reaches for a specific, local metaphor to explain why familiarity has killed the format’s power. “If you see a masquerade every day, you are not going to want to come out to watch the masquerade festival.” The artists who still get real mileage from a music video, in his read, are the ones who ration their own visibility everywhere else. “I see artists like Wizkid… they are quite mysterious, quite laidback, they don’t give out so much. I feel like as an artist you need to also, for music videos to actually hold, come clean.”

The economics have shifted just as sharply. A video he could once produce for two and a half million naira now costs, in his estimate, a hundred times that for comparable quality, in a market with far fewer investors willing to fund it. “Now there are no investors. Music videos are very expensive now.” The disposable content culture, he says, actively undermines the branding work a proper video is supposed to do. “I finish making you look like a mega superstar in the music video. Tomorrow you are inside shooting TikTok content. You have spoiled everything we’ve created.”

The Last Bridge

Asked what’s left for a music video director in a world where every artist has an in-house creative team and every phone shoots broadcast-quality footage, Omori doesn’t dress up his answer. “I think the tag that music video director is actually dying down. We are the last bridge.” What still gives him an edge, he says candidly, isn’t just craft, it’s the personal following and cultural cachet he’s built alongside it. “With my followers on Twitter and on Instagram and my personality, it could also expose your video to a new client or new audience.” He’s clear-eyed about AI accelerating the same devaluation that TikTok started. “There’s no amount of VFX you want to even do that is going to blow anybody’s mind, because they can just put the prompt on AI and get it done.”

His response to a shrinking, harder format isn’t to shoot more, it’s to shoot rarer and heavier. “Every video has to be, you have to first of all think for everybody, and then think against everybody before even shooting, because the video just needs to stand out.” One of his more recent video for the highlife veteran Flavour, built around African identity and heritage rather than spectacle for its own sake, is the clearest statement of where that shift has landed him. “It’s about Africa. It’s about who I am, where I’m from, my people. It’s about culture, it’s about art. To me right now, it’s about creating art. Everlasting art. Long lasting art.” Asked plainly what creativity means to him now, after everything, his answer had none of the ambivalence of a man still negotiating with the question. “Creativity for me right now is just all about legacy.”

 

TG Omori on Greatness, Creativity, Legacy & The Future of Music Videos Joey Akan/ OkayAfrica Episode

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