“We keep secrets because we’re afraid”: Guvna B on porn addiction and recovery | music

TThe past five years have been punishing for Isaac Borquay, also known as British rapper Jovna B. In 2021, he was left blind in one eye for several months after being targeted in an unprovoked racist attack at his local cafe in east London. It left him shaken, but it also motivated him to write his poignant 2023 album The Village Is on Fire, which questioned structural racism. The album cover showed a close-up of his bloody eye.

In the opening verse, the 36-year-old musician intersperses his own lyrics — “Coffee in his hand and he sprayed it in my face / Five seconds later, right hook in my socket” — with voice notes his cousin, actress and writer Michaela Coel, left him in the days after the attack. The recording instantly became one of his most-streamed recordings, with listeners drawn not only to his frank account of the attack, but also to his thoughts on youth violence and gentrification, and his grief over his father’s death in 2017. His new, equally confessional album — which we’ll get to shortly — tackles thornier topics.

Starting his career in the gospel-influenced rap industry during the silly music explosion of the early 2000s, Borquay has long been a stranger to introspection in a genre known for its bravado and excess. While Wiley’s party-focused 2008 single “Wear My Rolex” saw grime enter the mainstream and reach No. 2 in the UK charts, Borquay released “Pray As You Go” that same year, urging listeners to “glorify the Lord every day”, because “the future is not orange / the future is heaven”. It won Best Gospel Act at the MOBO Awards in 2010 and 2016, and was nominated again in 2020. With his clean-cut appearance and careful not to spend too much time cursing, Borquay has developed an established, non-controversial public persona as a man of faith, and is happily raising his two young children.

His brand of no-fuss made the anger and desire for revenge expressed in The Village Is on Fire all the more shocking. “I was five minutes from my house getting coffee, and when I got back to my car, these two white guys were standing next to the driver, blocking my way. When I asked them to move, they threw coffee in my face and punched me. They were clearly looking for a fight,” he says, sitting in a dark basement studio in central London. Although he reported this, the Metropolitan Police closed their investigation six months later due to a lack of evidence.

Fortunately, Borquay’s physical injuries healed, but the attack sparked a broader moment of self-reflection. “It brought me back to the kind of street nature I developed growing up on a council estate in east London,” he says. “From as young as I can remember, my head was always spinning, and even though I thought I did a good job and moved to a nicer area, I was still watched. It’s exhausting.”

Writing about it, he says, was “the only way I thought I could feel closure because the perpetrators would never be found. The albums are like chapters in the book of my life, and I can’t move forward until I document and communicate.”

In the years that followed, his personal life became increasingly fraught. In 2023, he separated from the mother of his two children and faced pornography addiction, which he described as “a battle I have fought for most of my life.” In the same year he entered a rehabilitation center. “It was hectic, and I was hurt from all of it,” he says. “But I have to process this issue, and music is usually my way to get my thoughts out and find some catharsis.”

Borquay’s new tenth studio album, This Bed I Made, explores shame and secrecy on this journey to recovery. Filled with jazz-influenced instrumentation, the 11 tracks cover everything from the psychological prison of addiction on To Be Free, to the possibility of relapse on What Now, and the indignity of confessing your secrets on Shameless, all interspersed with clips from lectures by physician, author and addiction specialist Gabor Matej.

“Every time I think the next album is going to be happy, something happens in my life that makes it take a different path,” Borquay says. “In The Village Is on Fire, it was vulnerable, but the racism and the attack is something that happened to me. It wasn’t my fault.” But his latest album is different. “It’s all things I did to myself. I was hiding things and wearing a mask, and it’s hard to talk about because I contributed so much to what happened,” he says.

Dressed in a leather jacket and smart white shirt, Borquay has a relaxed personality, but when it comes to talking about his addiction and relatively budding recovery, it’s clearly an uncomfortable subject. “I don’t want to be a recovery advocate, but it was weird not to address that in music when I’ve put so much of my life into it over the years,” he says. He wants to be as open as possible: “This is the only way to break the stigma and let others who may be struggling know that there is no shame in getting help.”

This stigma, he says, “comes when people pretend like something isn’t a problem and don’t want to talk about it.” So, for the benefit of the many other men suffering from pornography addiction – according to more than half of the therapists recently surveyed by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, this addiction has been on the rise among British men over the past year – he’s talking about it.

Although he doesn’t feel comfortable delving into why or how he was coerced, he says shame was a major factor that led to him hiding his behavior for so long. “Culturally, I grew up in a family that didn’t speak, and faith was also a big part of my life. In those environments, everyone seems perfect… If you have anything shameful that you’re fighting, it’s hard to be honest about it,” he says. He also says: “I was in denial and probably felt like it’s not that deep – it’s not like drug or alcohol addiction.” And this is not just Borquay’s opinion: according to the World Health Organization, it is registered as an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction, while the American Psychiatric Association has no official diagnosis.

However, Borquay explains, this leads to the same kind of dependency. “You might enjoy something, but you can’t stop it, and it starts to negatively impact other areas of your life,” he says. “I ended up getting divorced and I wasn’t as present a father as I wanted to be. All the relationships in my life were suffering and I thought, ‘I’m either going to stay in the rocks or be forced to rebuild.’”

He did not seek help until those close to him discovered the secret of his addiction. “People were shocked that I could function at a relatively high level while hiding all this stuff,” he says. There was catharsis in the end to be honest. “We keep secrets because we’re afraid of what people will think,” he says, but when he puts it into words, “Any shame I feel is absolutely liberating.”

During his time in rehab, Borquay describes doing the “unglamorous work” of reshaping his life and finding repetitive daily habits that could help him calm his urges. He began limiting his time on social media, as well as delving into the work of Mattei, who writes about addiction as a response to pain rather than a moral failing. He also began treatment, which looked at childhood causes for his addictive behaviors.

“My parents didn’t have the tools to process emotions, so they didn’t transfer to me as well. I had all these big emotions but I didn’t know how to deal with them,” he says. “Addiction numbs a lot of the things you’re supposed to feel, especially difficult emotions. When you’re sober, the good thing is you get your feelings back — but the bad thing is you get your feelings back.”

Borkwai was raised by Ghanaian parents who worked long hours at multiple jobs to make ends meet. Often left to his own devices, he describes himself as a contemplative kid drawn to writing and storytelling, a skill that soon blossomed into the rap verses he performed in a local church-run youth group. It wasn’t until after a friend was murdered in his home when he was 15, that he started taking rap seriously.

“When I was growing up, a lot of the rappers I saw on TV were talking about money, girls, sex and jewellery, but when my friend lost his life, I clearly remember thinking it was strange to promote this kind of lifestyle or negative behavior in my music when I had seen first-hand the consequences of youth violence on society,” he says. “I naturally gravitated towards rappers who were a little different, like Kano, who talked about relationships instead of sex. It was very helpful.”

In the years since his 2008 debut album, The Narrow Road, other UK rappers have gradually followed his lead in promoting self-awareness and vulnerability towards masculinity. For example, artists like Lowell Carner and Dave have released popular recordings that explore everything from fractured relationships with their parents to mental health and racism. There may be a movement in the making, but Borquay still sees a lot of work to be done, especially with the impressionable youth he works with in high schools and prisons. “I hold creative writing workshops to try to help young people delve into their feelings,” he says. “It can be a humbling experience.” “Maybe they’re feeling angry, and instead of channeling that into, ‘I’m going to stab you or shoot you,’ I want to get them to open up.” Success is more likely to come from “trying to have genuine empathy and care for their situation,” rather than “describing them in terms like atmosphere.” He says it “will go a long way in helping men shed that bravado and begin to develop the emotional toolkit that everyone needs, regardless of upbringing, wealth or creed.”

At home, where Borquay now shares custody of his six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, he is trying to implement the same lessons. “There’s something beautiful about being open to discovering things together,” he says. However, he is in a middle ground when it comes to his addiction, as he wants to protect his children until they are old enough to understand it, while also releasing an album that will make him known to the wider public. Although it may be too early yet, he says he one day wants his son to listen to his latest recordings and think, “It’s too bad his father was so honest.”