True/False Miracle Berry Q&A Series: Nnamdi Ogbonnaya



By Owen Brock
For the longest time, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya was unable to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a delicious breakfast cereal intricately sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. When he was finally old enough, Nnamdi finally ate Cinnamon Toast Crunch, to which he stated, “Victory is mine.”
We spoke with Nnamdi after his show at Cafe Berlin during the True/False Film Festival in Columbia for a section of our Miracle Berry Q&A series. While eating a multitude of sour/citrus foods (including slices of lemon, straight lemon juice, clementines, and Warheads candy), Nnamdi explored his progression as a solo artist, his musical influences, and the style of his 2017 album Drool.
Now, while the foods consumed in the video are incredibly sour, they were eaten after eating Miracle Berries, a peculiar fruit that causes the consumer’s taste buds to be temporarily altered due to the chemical synsepalum dulcificum, making sour foods taste sweet.

KCOU: Can you identify yourself as an artist?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: Yeah, I sing and rap and play drums and guitar. And pretty much whatever I can find in front of me to make music.
KCOU: Who would you say has influenced your music the most?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: That’s a very hard question. Sum41.
KCOU: We noticed your large portfolio of various instruments. Why/what caused you to pick up so many? And at what age did you start playing?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: All of my family members play instruments so I kinda would just play what they left around. I never really learned bass or guitar or anything; my dad and brother played them. But yeah, I’d just play my siblings’ instruments. I always loved music.
KCOU: What’s your favorite breakfast cereal and why?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: Cinnamon Toast Crunch because I wasn’t allowed to eat it when I was younger and then the first time I did I was just like, “Hell yeah, victory. Victory is mine.”
KCOU: In many of the titles off of Drool the letter, “O” is capitalized often, regardless of whether it is in the beginning of a word or not (examples are “hOp Off” or “let gO Off my egO”). Is there a particular reason for that?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: I’ve just been doing that since I was little. Just always capitalizing “O’s.” Not even intentionally, I think I would just…always write them bigger than every other letter.
KCOU: How has your music progressed, from being involved in other acts, to becoming a solo artist?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: It’s always a lot different writing with a group of people than writing by yourself. Um, I like writing by myself a lot because I like having creative control over everything I do, but it’s very different because you have no one else to bounce ideas off or blame when something goes wrong. It’s all on you.
KCOU: How much of your recent album Drool was inspired by your own personal experiences that you wrote about at least?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: Most of it.It was either my own personal experiences or people really close to me and I kinda just shifted myself to be in their perspective.
KCOU: Would you rather have really long arms and tiny hands, or extremely short arms and giant hands?
Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: First one. Because if you have really short arms you’re kind of like a T-Rex and you can’t really grab things. And probably if you do you’d squish them with your giant hands, but if you have really long arms you can reach things and like hit them. I feel like that’d be better because you could use both hands to hold things together and reach higher up things. Yeah, for sure, give me the tiny hands.
Collaboration with Elena K. Cruz
Videography by Elena K. Cruz
 

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