Grammy Award-winning Nigerian artiste, Damini Ogulu, popularly known as Burna Boy, has again insisted that his genre of music is not ‘Afrobeats’, the new trendy tag with which Nigerian hip-hop and pop music is described.
The Port Harcourt-born celebrated artiste says his brand of music remains ‘Afro-fusion’.
Afrobeats, according to Wikipedia, is an umbrella term used to describe popular music from West Africa and the diaspora that initially developed in Nigeria, Ghana, and the United Kingdom in the 2000s and 2010s. “It is less of a style and more of a label of the fusion of sounds flowing out of Ghana and Nigeria.”
But Burna Boy, while speaking during an interview with the hosts of the Million Dollar Worth of Game podcast, which was aired on Sunday, said that all genres of music from Africa should not be labelled as Afrobeats as there were diverse sounds from the continent.
He said the generalisation of all African music as Afrobeats is unfair and needless to African artistes.
He said: “For me, it’s like the same way you’re going to say Nas is an R&B singer because he’s from America or Whitney Houston was a rapper because rap is the most popping thing now,” he said.
“I can’t accept that because I’m not a rapper. So now in Africa when you talk about music, the first thing they say is Afrobeats. Afrobeat is a legend called Fela Kuti.
“Years went by and Nigerian musicians started dropping music that was becoming something. So they needed to call it something to be able to identify with it.
“Somehow they just said Afrobeats and added an s. I don’t know what sense that made but that’s what happened. Somewhere along the line, all the music that comes from Africa just writes Afrobeats.
“We have Highlife, Juju music, Fuji music, South African Kwaeto music, Amapiano, Afropop, we have all types of genres in Africa. To be really sincere, for you to just call everything Afrobeats kind of does a disservice to the artistes.
“For me, when I started the Afrofusion thing, it was like my music was not the same with anything that was out. It was like everybody else kind of sounded the same.”
According to him, it was as a result of wanting something to identify with that he coined the ‘Afro-fusion’ term.
“It was one kind of move and for me, there was nothing I could identify myself with. So I just decided that I’ll call it Afrofusion because it’s a fusion of everything. The Afro-Africaness is the thing that covers it.
“It’s the bottle that holds the whole drink. That is why I always make sure that everybody knows this is what I do, it’s Afrofusion.”
Burna Boy’s declaration is coming barely few days after the premiere of Ayo Shonaiya’s ‘Afrobeats: The Backstory’ documentary on Netflix. The docu-series chronicles the rise of Afrobeats and how it has gained global acceptance in the last 20 years. One of the episodes in the 12-part series is also devoted to constructive arguments on whether the afrobeats term is necessary or not.
However, contemporary artistes like Davido, Niniola, Simi and a host of others who featured in the documentary also did not align with ‘Afrobeats’ as an umbrella name for the Nigerian genre of music that has become one of Africa’s biggest exports.
As a matter of fact, Wizkid who is another force in the Nigerian music industry labelled his music ‘Afropop’.
In a 2017 interview with Channel 4 News in the UK, Wiz Kid’s said: “What we make now is… I would call it Afro-pop, you know. Because it has the influence of Afrobeats music, and we draw inspiration from pop records, you know, dancehall records, reggae, and stuff.”
Wizkid’s stance even became solidified when in September 2021, GQ dubbed him “the King of Afropop.”
