8 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020Pop
Burna Boy — the Nigerian songwriter, sing-
er and rapper who was born Damini
Ebunoluwa Ogulu — once thought he would
be content writing the sleek, self-assured
party tunes that first drew fans to his mix-
tapes in the early 2010s. But as his popular-
ity spread worldwide, the spirits who guide
his songwriting had other plans for him.
Soon, he was taking up broader, more con-
sequential ideas.
“Music is a spiritual thing,” he said via
video call from his studio in Lagos, Nigeria.
Wearing a white Uber jersey and puffing a
hand-rolled smoke, with jeweled rings glit-
tering on his fingers, Burna Boy spoke
about his fifth album, “Twice as Tall,” which
was still getting finishing touches ahead of
its release date, planned for Thursday.
“I’ve never picked up a pen and paper
and written down a song in my life,” he said.
“It all just comes, like someone is standing
there and telling me what to say. It’s all ac-
cording to the spirits. Some of us are put on
this earth to do what we do.”
Success has brought him “a very huge re-
sponsibility that I didn’t think I would
have,” he added. For his new album, he said,
he’s “basically continuing the mission I
started, which is building a bridge that
leads every Black person in the world to
come together, and to make you understand
that without you having a home base, you
can’t be as strong as you are.”
Burna Boy, 29, has assembled an interna-
tional following since he released his 2013
debut album, “L.I.F.E.: Leaving an Impact
for Eternity.” He sold out Wembley SSE
Arena in London last year, and songs from
his 2019 album, “African Giant,” have drawn
tens of millions of streams and views.
His fans include Beyoncé, who featured a
Burna Boy song, the irresistibly insinuating
“Ja Ara E,” on her album full of collabora-
tions, “The Lion King: The Gift,” which be-
came the visual album “Black Is King” last
month. Sam Smith shares his new single,
“My Oasis,” with Burna Boy as singer and
co-writer. And when the 2020 Grammy
Award for world music went to Angelique
Kidjo, a three-time winner, over Burna Boy
and “African Giant,” she held up the trophy
and dedicated it to Burna Boy, praising him
as a young African artist who is “changing
the way our continent is perceived.”
Burna Boy is a leader amid a bounty of
new African pop that has been increasingly
welcomed in the West: a confluence of
availability via streaming, discovery via
word-of-internet rather than gatekeepers,
and the sheer inventiveness taking place
outside music-business strongholds.
But he also sees interest in African music
as a turn toward refuge: “From what I’ve
read and from what I’ve studied and from
what I researched, the world started from
Africa. So music must have started from Af-
rica. And I feel like when everything starts
kind of going left, like what is going on right
now, everybody runs home.”
He calls his music Afro-fusion rather than
the catchall label, Afrobeats, that has been
attached to recent, electronics-driven Ni-
gerian music from performers like Wizkid,
Davido and Mr Eazi, and even more
vaguely to other current African pop as in-
ternational listeners discover it. (The term
Afrobeats also invites confusion with
Afrobeat, the complex, steadfast, hand-
made protest funk that Fela Kuti, also from
Nigeria, forged in the late 1960s and 1970s.)
Burna Boy’s Afro-fusion is omnivorous
and supremely catchy. Its beats are often
programmed, but their stops and starts
evade expectations. Instruments, sampled
or hand-played, bounce against the
rhythms or deftly dodge them, while his
voice — which can be as staccato as a rap-
per or as cottony as a crooner — glides easi-
ly across and atop everything else.
For “Twice as Tall,” Burna Boy enlisted
an American executive producer: Sean
Combs, a.k.a. Diddy, who has long guided
rappers and singers (including the Notori-
ous B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige) toward wider
audiences. “I’m on record that I like hit
records,” Combs said from Los Angeles. “If
they’re not hit records, I don’t like them.”
“A lot of times when an artist wants to be
coached or pushed to maybe a greater level,
that’s where I’ve come in,” Combs said. “He,
as every artist, he wants his music to be
heard by the world. He doesn’t care about
crossing over. You know, he’s not trying to
get hot. He’s not, like, ‘I want to be a big pop
star’ — he’s already a star. He wants his mu-
sic to be heard, his message, his people.”
Most of the album was recorded during
the pandemic, and Burna Boy and Combs
collaborated via Zoom calls and file trans-
fers. Combs brought in musical contribu-
tions, including drums from Anderson
.Paak on the foreboding “Alarm Clock,” and
additional production from Timbaland on
“Wetin Dey Sup,” a song punctuated by
gunshots and sirens that warns, “They only
respect the money and the violence.”
Combs also makes his presence audible
with voice-over intros on some songs,
briefly upstaging Burna Boy. But he said
that the music was about 80 percent com-
plete, including all of the songwriting, be-
fore he was brought in to provide “freshears” and his sense of detail. The album he
added, is “a modern but pure, unapologetic
African body of work.”
For the most part, Burna Boy hasn’t dilut-
ed his African heritage to reach his global
audience. Instead, he has placed an unmis-
takably African stamp on music drawn from
all around Africa and from across the Afri-
can diaspora. He has a calm, husky, resolute
voice that exemplifies the West African cul-
tural virtue of coolness: poise and control
transcending any commotion. His melodic
sense is rooted in pentatonic African modes
but unconstrained by them, and he has
producers who deliver some of the most in-
novative rhythm tracks in 21st-century pop
— usually working alongside Burna Boy in
his studio, he said. He sings, most often, in a
pidgin of English and Yoruba, confident that
his meaning will get through even if listen-
ers don’t recognize all the words.
“The thing that I learned about him is the
importance of what he’s doing for his nation
and representing the people that aren’t re-
ally heard globally,” Combs said. “Through
this album, I think it’s important for Africa
to be heard. And so it’s bigger than just an
album. He’s not just on a musical artist trip.
He’s a revolutionary. His conviction is seri-
ous.”
Hip-hop, reggae, R&B and rock were all
part of the mix of music Burna Boy grew up
on in Port Harcourt, the Nigerian city where
he was born, and then in London, where he
spent some teenage years in Brixton before
returning to Nigeria. His lyrics have often
mentioned that he kept some rough com-
pany. In “Level Up,” the brooding-to-tri-
umphant song that opens “Twice as Tall,” he
celebrates his own achievements, but also
notes, “Some of my guys might never see
the sun/Some of them still peddle drugs.”
On “African Giant,” he addressed Ni-
geria’s colonial history and lingering cor-
ruption alongside more hedonistic songs.
And with “Twice as Tall” he sought to make
music as, he said, “a citizen of the world.”
In the 15 songs on “Twice as Tall,” Burna
Boy takes stock of his accomplishments and
his vulnerabilities, and he encourages am-
bition and perseverance against long odds;
he also parties. And he lashes out at racism,
exploitation and widespread misconcep-tions about Africa.
“We’re not what they teach in schools out
here,” he said. “They don’t teach the right
history, the history of strength and power
that we originally had and that they should
be teaching now. They don’t really teach the
truth about how we ended up in the situa-
tion we’re in. They don’t teach the truth
about what’s going on now and how to over-
come it. And I believe that knowledge is
power.”
He wants all the countries and cultures of
Africa to unite as one continent. “I want my
children to have an African passport, not a
Nigerian passport,” he said. “I do not iden-
tify with any tribe. I do not identify with any
country. I do not identify with anything, re-
ally. I identify with the world in the universe
— I believe I am a citizen of the world, and I
have a responsibility to the world. But at the
same time, it’s my people who are really
getting the short end of the stick. It’s just do-
ing what I have to do when I have to do it.”
The songs on “Twice as Tall” hold echoes
of Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica and the
United States, and there are guest appear-
ances from Naughty by Nature, the Kenyan
band Sauti Sol and Senegal’s musical titan,
Youssou N’Dour. The momentum is crisp
and nonstop as the songs draw on Zulu
choir singing, electronic dance music, alt-
R&B and the patterns of West African ma-
rimbas and Zimbabwean thumb pianos.
On the album’s most vehement song,
Burna Boy, with Chris Martin of Coldplay
arriving on choruses, turns to stark roots
reggae in “The Monsters You Made,” an in-
dictment of miseducation, injustice and sys-
temic racism, delivered in clear English
with mounting fury. “When they’ve been
working like slaves/To get some minimum
wage,” he sings, “You turn around and you
blame/Them for their anger and rage.”
It’s the rare Burna Boy song where he lets
coolness fall away. “That song comes from a
lot of anger and pain, and me having to wit-
ness firsthand what my people go through
and how my people see themselves,” he
said. “I see how many people are deceived
and confused. I just try to blend all of that in
and make it understood that we’re all going
through the same problems. We just speak
different languages.”The Nigerian artist Burna Boy
aims to represent the voiceless.
The songwriter, singer
and rapper Burna Boy,
top, started out making
party songs. But his focus
shifted to music with
larger messages, like
“building a bridge that
leads every Black person
in the world to come
together, and to make you
understand that without
you having a home base,
you can’t be as strong as
you are.” Last year, he
performed at the
Coachella festival, above.
“Some of us are put on
this earth to do what we
do,” Burna Boy said.DANIEL OBASI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy JON PARELESAMY HARRIS/INVISION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSGlobal Citizen on a Musical Mission