Vonenzonians, the grass is green here where 👁️ am.
That sentence started as a caption. It has since become something closer to a position statement — a refusal of the idea that the interesting things are always happening somewhere else, to someone else, with a bigger budget and a louder room.
The Grass Is Green Here
Gqeberha is not a music industry city in the way that Johannesburg or Cape Town are. There is no dense cluster of labels, no constant carousel of showcase nights, no easy proximity to the people who sign things. What there is instead is space — literal, acoustic, mental — and the kind of quiet that lets an idea finish forming before you have to defend it.
Most people spend their creative lives waiting to arrive somewhere. The unspoken assumption is that the work only counts once it is validated by a city that does not know your name yet. I have watched enormously talented people from this region wear themselves down chasing that arrival, and I have watched others build quietly from exactly where they stood and end up further ahead.
The difference is not talent. It is the decision to treat your current location as the site of the work rather than the waiting room for it. That decision does something to the quality of what you make. It stops being an audition.
What “Here” Actually Means
Here is a small studio with an imperfect room and a good pair of monitors. Here is a scene where the people who show up are the people who genuinely care, because there is no clout available to attract anyone else. Here is a place where a collaboration costs a phone call instead of a contract negotiation.
There is an advantage buried in that. When the industry is not watching, you get to develop without an audience’s opinion arriving before your own. You get to be bad at things in private for as long as it takes to become good. Artists in the dense cities rarely get that grace period — the first version of them is public, and they spend years being compared to it.
Contentment Is Not Complacency
It is worth being precise about this, because “the grass is green here” can sound like settling. It is not. Being at peace with where you are is not the same as having no ambition for what you are building. The two coexist badly in most people and beautifully in the ones who last.
The version that works looks like this: fully present in the work, permanently dissatisfied with the craft, entirely unbothered by the geography. You are not trying to escape. You are trying to make something from here that could not have been made anywhere else — because the location is part of the material.
The grass is green here where 👁️ am.
Vonenzo Baschello
The Vonenzonian Idea
The word came out of this attitude. Vonenzonians are not a demographic and not really a fanbase in the conventional sense — they are the people who recognised the frequency and decided to stay close to it. Some are in Gqeberha. Many are not. What they share is an orientation rather than a postcode: build your own thing, own it properly, do not wait for permission that is never coming.
That is why the membership work matters — Vonenzonian Prime exists so that belonging to this is something you hold rather than something a platform can revoke. And it is why the catalogue is documented the way it is, release by release, so the story is legible to anyone arriving late.
Green, Not Greener
The phrase is usually “the grass is greener on the other side” — a warning about envy. Flipping it is a small act of refusal. There is no other side to get to. There is only the ground you are standing on and what you decide to build on it, with the people who decided to stand there with you.
😇💚😈
Photograph: @2860_bobby — view the original post on Instagram.
Follow the VBWLD world at vonenzobaschello.com — music, membership, and independent creative infrastructure built from Gqeberha outward.
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