Burna Boy apologises for criticising Afrobeats music: “I wasn’t the happiest man in the world”
Burna Boy has apologised for his comments criticising Afrobeats music, saying that they stemmed from a place of unhappiness.
The initial comments divided fan opinion back in 2023, when the Nigerian singer, songwriter and record producer spoke to Zane Lowe for Apple Music, and shared that he thought the Afrobeats genre as a whole was devoid of any deeper meaning.
“Half of them, [actually,] 90 per cent of them, have almost no real-life experiences that they can understand,” he claimed. “That’s why you hear most Nigerian music, African Music, or Afrobeats, as people call it, is mostly about nothing, literally nothing.”
“There is no substance to it, like nobody is talking about anything. It’s just a great time, an amazing time,” he added. “But at the end of the day, life isn’t an amazing time.”
Now, two years on, the artist –who became the first African artist to headline a stadium show in the UK in 2023 – has looked back at his comments and said that it came in retaliation for feeling like he was being confined to one genre.
“I didn’t understand why people wanted my music to be inside one box,” he said when speaking to BBC 1Xtra’s Eddie Kadi, in a new interview.
“The way I saw it, if you just put everything into Afrobeats, you’re now comparing Socrates to Kendrick Lamar because they both said two things that rhyme so they both must be rappers,” he added, before adding that the Apple Music interview came at a time where he was “in a dark place mentally” and not “the happiest man in the world.”
He went on to say that the way his comments led to “division” between fans helped him “come to terms” with his opinion.
“I got the point of the Afrobeats tag in that moment. I totally get it and I apologise for that confusion,” he added, sharing how he is happy to embrace the label following the release of his new album ‘No Sign of Weakness’. “I learnt to embrace the fact that I will always be different…I’m not going to be the favourite, but I’m going to be the best.”
Later in the interview, Burna Boy looked back at his time performing at Wireless over the weekend, and said that playing live is his main focus. “I want to be able to do this until I die. I want to be doing this the way someone like Coldplay has been doing it for a long time, or The Rolling Stones,” he said.
“These people are still doing what I’m doing now, so why don’t I see anyone that looks like me, on those levels, at that age?” he questioned. “And it’s simple, it might sound crazy, it’s because they just don’t love it as much as I do.”
Last week, Burna Boy’s latest album was given a three-star review from NME, with Kyann-Sian Williams writing: “‘No Signs Of Weakness’ plays more like a curated playlist of experiments rather than a fully realised body of work: it lacks direction, the momentum sputters, and even some of the more ambitious tracks could’ve used another round of sculpting.
“In an attempt to reach as wide as possible, Burna Boy ends up clipping his own wings, delivering more of a flex than a fully-formed vision.”
The post Burna Boy apologises for criticising Afrobeats music: “I wasn’t the happiest man in the world” appeared first on NME.
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