Grammy award winning Nigerian artist, Damini Ogulu, popularly known as Burna Boy, has said that Afrobeats has no substance.
Burna Boy made the comment in a chat with an American music producer ahead of the release of his 7th studio album.
According to him, most Nigerian artistes have no real life experience inspiring their music.
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“Not even experience because 90% of them have no real life experience that they can understand, which is why you hear most of Nigerian music, African music, or afrobeats as you 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.
“But at the end of the day, life is not an amazing time, no matter how nice of a time you have here now or you had at some point or you plan to have, you’re still going to have to face life, for me, I felt like music should be the essence of the artist as a person. The artist is a person who has good days, bad days and worse days.
“For me if I give you something like this (album) with my face and name on it then I should be giving you that experience, a window for you to see some of that essence,” he said
“What I’ve realized is the times are really funny, because Fela in his time was going through things that if he was here today it might have been a whole different feeling, like a bunch of people, almost only from Nigeria who you see today celebrating Fela that he’s great, are the same people that will be tagging the police to go and arrest Fela,”
Afrobeats is an umbrella term to describe popular music from West Africa, especially Nigeria and Ghana.
The genre takes elements of Fuji and Highlife music and combines it with American funk, jazz and soul music.
Earlier, Burna Boy released the tracklist of his new album titled ‘I Told Them’.
The 17-track album includes features from American rapper J-Cole and British rapper Dave.