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My music is Afrofusion, not Afrobeats – Burna Boy
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Burna Boy clarifies his genre of music
Damini Ogulu, better known as Burna Boy, has clarified the genre of music he does, stating that his style of music is dubbed Afrofusion and so cannot be classified as Afrobeats.
The Last Last performer asserted that not all African music styles should be classified as Afrobeats and that the region produced a variety of sounds.
This claim was made by Burna Boy during an interview with the Million Dollar Worth of Game podcast hosts, which was broadcast on Sunday.
According to Burna Boy, the generalisation of music as Afrobeats was unfair to African artists.
“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,” he said.
He added, “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.
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“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 artists.
“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.”
Revealing how he wanted something he could identify himself with, he said,
“It was one kind of move and for me, there was nothing I could identify myself with. So I just decided that I’ll call it Afrofusion because it’s a fusion of everything. The Afro-Africaness is the thing that covers it, it’s the bottle that holds the whole drink. That is why I always make sure that everybody knows this is what I do, it’s Afrofusion.”