My music, afrofusion not afrobeats – Burna Boy

 

Grammy winner, Damini Ogulu, also known as Burna Boy, has stated that his genre of music is not Afrobeats but Afrofusion.

The Ye crooner in an interview with the hosts of the Million Dollar Worth of Game podcast, said all songs made in Africa should not be labelled as Afrobeats.

He listed various genres of music in Africa. According to him, the one who started Afrobeat is the late Fela and because other singers had to stay under one umbrella at that time, they decided to call all their songs Afrobeats.

Burna Boy stated that he started Afrofusion because he wants to be known as a different genre and not what everyone does.

The interview was aired on Sunday, July 3.

He said the western world has so many genres in music and not referred to one particular genre according to their continent.

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.

“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.”

He went further to give the reason he chose Afrofusion. He said he needed an identity so he came up with the move for Afrofusion.