He keeps the vibe alive on Giddem but instead of singing about the hustle, he is in the mood to showoff to the girl(s) but the line, ‘remember nothing for this life na accidental,’ left an impression on me. It’s a song for the dream chasers, the hustlers, the ‘woke ones’. The song carries a get-it-at-all-cost theme and Oluwa Burna took a cut from Fela’s Sorrow, Tears & Blood to drive his point home. On the song he sings about his drive and ambition. Ye woke the ‘Oluwa Burna’ that bears the title ‘master of vibe’. He might have left an explanation on why he appears like a daredevil when he said ‘where me come from make you turn animal.’ Listening to Burna Boy sing about his origin, his formative experiences and the influence of the oil-rich city, made me feel like I knew all about him but it was on Where I’m From that he really embraced his PH-boy identity as he sings about how the ‘glocs’ and police raids made him tougher than “steel and copper.”
Outside dropped as scheduled and although More Life is the first track on the album track list, PH City Vibration sets it off for me, with a reflective mood. The rush of Koni Baje, Sekkle Down, Streets of Africa as lead-ins, got me all skeptical & shii but the release of the Lily Allen-assisted Heaven’s Gate held promise of a coming sensation even though I still heard someone refer to him as “by-force by-force Fela.” So on the ‘ Outside’ album, I was hoping that more of his brilliance would manifest with little or no character blemish at all. Sometimes I imagine that his mind hosts tug-of-war between angels and demons, leaving us with a bitter-sweet taste of his artistry. Today, he is seen as the sour-loser who walks out of award ceremonies, tomorrow he is in the news for sponsoring an attack on another colleague, but he usually wins back some portion of love and sympathy with his singing as he freely explores different genres to define his craft.įor Burna Boy, it’s been a hard struggle between character and talent. He came as a new intake with his own set of rules but from time to time his non-conformist character finds controversies for him. I think a lot of people know enough about his brilliance, but they’d rather have his music as an alternative to their favourite pop sounds and I take this as a premise to imagine that we do not deserve him, if there’s even anything like that.īurna Boy has always been an outlier, an artiste who defied the industry norms with his genre-establishing song, ‘Like To Party’. I’ve heard them refer to him as under-appreciated. Like when you interview a group of 10 music lovers and about 8 of them raves about Burna Boy but no one picks him as their fave. I mean, it’s hard to explain how an established artiste, whose brilliance is widely acknowledged, still struggles to get the rating he deserves. I’ve heard someone say ‘there’s a difference between underrated and hasn’t made it.’ It didn’t make much sense to me till the topic of Burna Boy came up. Label: Bad Habit//Atlantic Records (2018)
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