Narcissism and the Aggrieved Art of Burna Boy

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, The Age of Afrobeats. Buy the issue here.

Today, African music has again begun to impose itself on the global consciousness. Sounds that marinated in decidedly local cauldrons—shot through with transnational influences—now flash international credentials; and they very well should, given the reverberations African artistes have been making on different continents of the globe. Icons of the new music are very distant from the brutalized enslaved Africans who found in music an outlet for their repressed souls. These are global citizens, mobile members of a reticulated universe where transcontinental musical tours follow a trail already lit by the fluid itinerary of music. In fact, one could well be justified to sense in the new trajectory of African music a victory dance of the new African elite.

Within the heterogeneous zone of manifold sounds that constitute ‘African music’, none has so forcefully made a claim to global status as ‘Afrobeats.’ Afrobeats—not to be confused with Fela’s ‘Afrobeat’ even though it often claims the latter as predecessor—is not so much a style as it is a descriptor for a loose medley of sounds that developed in West Africa in the 21st century. The moniker was launched in 2011 by London-based DJ, Abrantee, as an umbrella term for Nigerian and Ghanaian pop music. More than a decade later, that form has now announced itself on the international stage with renewed vigour. When Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, managing director of Spotify, sub-Saharan Africa, describes it as ‘one of Africa’s biggest cultural exports right now’ it is with a consciousness that it is particularly in the last decade that this global ascendancy began to manifest with names like Wizkid, Davido, Tems, Rema, headlining major shows and hitting record-breaking numbers on streaming platforms all over the world. Rema’s Rave and Roses, for example, recently became the first music album by an African to hit over 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, while perennial Afrobeats acts like Wizkid and Davido have sold out the iconic O2 Arena on multiple occasions. In light of such achievements, commentators sometimes describe the latest iteration of the sound as ‘new wave’ Afrobeats, recognizing its evolution into an international genre of music.

Perhaps more than any other artiste, the name that has most closely mirrored the apical flight of Afrobeats is the Nigerian Damini Ogulu, known by the stage name, Burna Boy. Global hits like ‘Ye’, ‘Last Last’ (which, like the former, received platinum certification in the US), ‘On the Low’ and ‘City Boys’, have cemented his status as a frontliner of the sound. Twice as Tall, Burna Boy’s fifth studio album, won the ‘Best Global Music Album’ category at the 63rd Grammys in 2021, an as-yet unparalleled feat by any other Nigerian artiste. If there was any doubt left as to the popularity of the genre, Burna Boy’s Grammy triumph announced to the world that Afrobeats was now and truly here. Further nominations have followed up on the win, and Burna Boy’s standing as a global artiste has continued to burgeon through—among other things—collaborations with A-list names like Ed Sheeran and J. Cole. ‘Don’t nobody do it better, better than me / Can’t nobody do it better,’ he says in ‘African Giant’, and he may very well be right as far as Afrobeats is concerned. However, Burna Boy’s grand entrée onto the global stage provokes new questions about the relationship between the global and the local in relation to African music. Music, like every other cultural form, is inescapably enmeshed in politics—if politics is understood in the broad sense of the politics of race, class, embodiment or, in this case, the global. As the literary theorist and culture critic, Frederic Jameson, reminds us, ‘everything is “in the last analysis” political.’ The tendency for much of the critical commentary on Afrobeats to ignore the form as a ‘political’ artefact only serves to rehash and reinforce what is often avowed to be its disinterest in political subject matters. On the contrary, we ought to explore more of the connection between Burna Boy’s discography and the politics that subtends his art by situating the artiste within the local-global dialectic. The questions that will be posed about the relevance of his global success to the local industry are ultimately political.