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Burna Boy – African Giant

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The Nigerian singer blends the personal and political into a new benchmark of Afro-fusion music.

The music spread across West Africa’s many cultures have been frequently miscategorized, lumped together under the racist “world music” banner, or altogether ignored. There are still mix-ups surrounding Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and the current umbrella pop genre Afrobeats. Somewhere in between the not-so-ambiguous space of that “s” is Nigerian cross-pollinator Burna Boy. His grandfather was Kuti’s manager, his dad introduced him to the music of deejay Super Cat and dancehall great Buju Banton when he was a kid, and a girl he liked at 10 gave him his first Joe CD, initiating a love of America R&B and subsequently rap. He is a musical omnivore who left Nigeria to live and learn in London but never strayed too far from home.

Burna Boy is one of West Africa’s brightest rising stars, and he has long been poised for a crossover moment here in the States, but his position on the Coachella billing earlier this year illustrated a disparity between who he is in Africa and who he is in America. “I am an AFRICAN GIANT and will not be reduced to whatever that tiny writing means,” he wrote on Instagram. The memo was loud and clear: Africa will not be marginalized. When his mother accepted, on his behalf, the award for BET’s Best International Act (an ill-defined category that reinforces just how noncommittal we are as a society about most non-white imported music), she reminded an audience full of black musicians that they are part of a larger whole: “The message from Burna, I believe, would be that every black person should please remember that you were Africans before you became anything else.”

This idea of tracing all blackness back to the wellspring is the crux of Burna Boy’s new album, African Giant; his mother’s words, sampled from the BET speech, are the last ones spoken on the album. Burna’s compositions are all based in something he’s dubbed Afro-fusion—blending pop, American hip-hop and R&B, Jamaican dancehall, and hard UK rap with Nigerian music—and he puts Africa at the root of that expanding lineage while also pushing the more traditional sounds forward. The album is a splendid hour of jams, both personal and political, that never sacrifices its bewitching groove even when it’s dressing down corrupt officials. African Giant is more cohesive, more robust in sound, and significantly broader than his previous music. He siphons external sounds to enhance the shape and texture of his homegrown slappers.

Use this Download Link Below To Get this Song From Burna Boy Which He Titled: Always Love You.

 

 

 


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