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Barely days into the New Year, Burna Boy presented Nigeria its first taste of celebrity brouhaha. Initially happy with him being on the set list for the Coachella 2019, Burna Boy wasn\u2019t the most impressed with his font size.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In a now-deleted Instagram Story, the Afro-fusion Nigerian artist hit out at Coachella organizers, writing: \u201c@coachella I really appreciate you. But I don\u2019t appreciate the way my name is written so small in your bill,\u201d he wrote on Instagram. \u201cI am an AFRICAN GIANT and will not be reduced to whatever that tiny writing means. Fix things quick please.\u201d<\/p>\n Many people took to trolling him, saying he didn\u2019t understand the rationale behind the Coachella font sizes. Some said his new found level of celebrity was getting to his head; a select few supported the \u2018Ye\u2019 singer, rubbishing the veiled \u2018politics\u2019 surrounding the fonts.<\/p>\n The words \u2013 \u2018Burna Boy\u2019, \u2018Coachella\u2019, \u2018African Giant\u2019 \u2013 trended, when the time came, Burna Boy performed on the Coachella stage, in an outfit as crazy as his performance. He wasn\u2019t done with the controversy, however, as he\u2019s been engaged in public spats with social media users, the unsavoury words of \u201cbackwards unprogressive fools\u201d coming up sometime.<\/p>\n Are these, however, in lieu of his current position in African music, enough to bring down Burna Boy? We look towards his history of controversy, of which its zenith was the reported involvement of the act in a stabbing which took place in London. According to a well-flouted story, Burna Boy was tried as a minor and sentenced to jail. Eleven months later, when he was released on parole, he came back to Nigeria. In a song, \u2018Freedom\u2019, he seems to hint at a troubled past as he sings, \u201ctell me what I gotta do to prove to you that I\u2019m a changed man?\u201d Then there\u2019s the Mr. 2kay incident, where Burna Boy allegedly sent robbers to his industry colleague\u2019s house. He\u2019s also had his peace about meting out violence to bloggers and pastors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In relativity to his more recent misgivings, one finds more \u2018lenient\u2019 acts from the dreadlocked singer. His fans recognize that he can\u2019t fully \u201cgive in\u201d to being an entirely likeable character. And there\u2019s a compromise. He\u2019s a musical genius, after all, they seem to say with a shrug when another \u2018forgivable\u2019 Burna Boy news comes their way. This also plays into a grander narrative of Burna Boy being a kind of embodiment for youthful revolution. His constant recycling of Fela chants and melodies, his public use of marijuana, his voice and personality, the intellectual quality inherent in his music \u2013 he is today\u2019s youth. And the drama is a part of what makes him so appealing.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Ye\u2019, unarguably the anthem of last year, was everyone\u2019s jam. From London to Nairobi to the Coachella stage, people loved \u2018Ye\u2019 and more often than not, would sing its lyrics word for word. That was, however, an exception: Burna Boy would become expert in utilising his versatility so that each demography that made up strong portions of his fan base got unique content.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It played into our very eyes with \u2018Gbona<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018On The Low<\/a>\u2019. Both songs were\u00a0afropop, catchy vibes and all, instantly recognizable as African. The man knew that he had to consolidate on his hometown success after he\u2019d given the largest cut of his album\u00a0Outside<\/em>\u00a0to the UK. He would later do the most with \u2018Killin Dem<\/a>\u2019, a collaboration with Zlatan Ibile, the hottest rapper in Nigeria, the one behind the Zanku dance rave. Expectedly, the song was a massive success, topping video and download\/streaming charts for quite some time. One would think that Burna Boy would rest a bit, enjoy the view of his shiny castle from an elevated place. He most recently released \u2018Dangote<\/a>\u2019, a song which, once more, glorifies the hustle inherent in today\u2019s youth. Name dropping Nigeria’s richest man, he asks rhetorically: \u201cDangote still dey find money\u2026why me no find money?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n He also served his outside (pun intended) market once more, releasing\u00a0Steel and Copper<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0a four-track collaboration with Los Angeles producer duo DJDS. The sound is switched, Burna Boy touches on themes of survival as if he was cast back into the world, naked in his sins. On \u2018Thuggin<\/a>\u2019, he sings \u201cI\u2019m still thugging anyway.\u201d The video, which has been described as \u2018impressionistic\u2019 is further proof of Burna Boy\u2019s understanding of<\/span>\u00a0his target market. Whereas the majority of the African gaze favours the outlandish in visuals, the outside community wants to sit before their TV screens, keenly eyed, asking: \u201cwhy did he do that?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This, more than anything else, has proven to be a serious tool Burna Boy has employed in dealing with the demands from fans with different cultural leanings. By giving parts of him strategically, he has managed to keep control of the what resides at the centre of his being: brute confidence that surely, he can do it\u00a0<\/span>all.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" He is today\u2019s youth.\u00a0 Barely days into the New Year, Burna Boy presented Nigeria its first taste of celebrity brouhaha. Initially happy with him being on the set list for the Coachella 2019, Burna Boy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":26874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9373],"tags":[4568],"location":[8172],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41624"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=41624"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=41624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pan-african-music-production.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Burna-Boy-Coachella-1.jpeg\")
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\nMarkers were being raised. If Burna Boy wasn\u2019t careful, he would fall out of the people\u2019s love, it seemed. Since 2012, he\u2019d been on his grind, steadily building his brand. Veer into the mind of the observer and the worry would arise: could Burna Boy, born through his antics, be responsible for his own downfall? A reviewer of Burna Boy\u2019s\u00a0Outside<\/em>\u00a0album, Dennis Peter, had written of the artiste, that \u201cEmbedded within Burna Boy is a flagrant character matrix with an unending penchant for causing controversy, and a constant fixation for an exciting press that\u2019s always eager to cast the artist in his controversial light. The ever prominent dramas probably wouldn\u2019t cause much noise or be of much consequence if Burna wasn\u2019t a generational talent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pan-african-music-production.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Burna-Boy-Coachella-3.jpeg\")
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\nHowever, since he has always been controversial, it would pose a serious question as to why he hadn\u2019t been as big as he is now then. It would appear to be that the answer to that question is \u201cBurna Boy finally understands\u201d. From early 2018 to the present moment, his moves on and off the studio has been latent with purposefulness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRead next:\u00a0Rising: the politics of Rema\u2019s Mavin deal<\/a><\/span><\/h5>\n
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