Is Burna Boy Aiming For Subversion in This Phase?

The past few months have seen Burna Boy steadily ramp up the roll out of his imminent eighth album, No Sign of Weakness, and with four singles leading up to its release, the album feels tangibly close. In the case of albums without sufficient lead singles, speculating about the artist’s direction with the project usually comes down to a little more than wild guesses based on tenuous information. In the case of Burna Boy’s No Sign of Weakness, however, the lead singles as well as the metanarratives surrounding the album provide us with sufficient information to objectively mull over Burna Boy’s direction with the album. 

In considering Burna Boy’s possible intentions with this album and the larger pop culture conversations the album has fomented, it’s important to note two things. First, the pre-album singles have shown BurnaBoy’s most carefree persona yet. Spurning his usual tendency for introspection and political commentary, these singles have found him more concerned with a constellation of lighter themes. In Bundle by Bundle, he evokes the feeling of a night at a typical Lagos club with lyrics about spraying bundles of money. By the same token, Update, which followed Bundle by Bundle, finds the artist exploring debaucherous themes. In Sweet Love, he dials back this insouciance and cheeky nonchalance that colors this era of his artistry, in favour of a supple treatise on love’s redemptive qualities. His latest single, the Travis Scott-assisted TaTaTa, finds him back in hedonistic terrain, exploring prurient themes with abandon.

The second important thing to note is that these songs, despite their overtly commercial bent and Burna Boy’s concerted promotional efforts, have failed to attain the level of commercial success that we have come to know Burna Boy for. It’s imperative to exercise caution when invoking commercial success to debate the quality of a piece of music. We live in extremely fraught times when music conversations have become an unending barrage of numbers and statistics. Qualities such as creative expression and inventiveness have taken the backseat to first day streams and chart positions. In a recent essay for Culture Custodian, I argue that music enthusiasts need to tamp down their obsession with vanity metrics and enjoy music for what it’s worth. Notwithstanding, given the heavily commercial tilt of the lead singles to Burna Boy’s No Signs of Weakness, their pallid commercial performance shows that these songs have not resonated with his audience, at least not nearly at previous levels.

These two facts—the marked stylistic difference of these new singles as well as the limp reception to them—have somehow given rise to the very interesting theory that, with this new album, Burna Boy is aiming for subversion. This might seem entirely implausible, absurd even. Proponents of this theory however argue that what casual observers might interpret as a lack of thematic consistency and Burna Boy’s conspicuous departure from introspection, is in fact a play at subversion. For so long we have come to expect depth and complexity from Burna Boy, they argue, and so to stake out new creative grounds, the artist has taken on the task of making laissez-faire music. 

While this theory might offer comfort to fans of the artist who have been left dazed by Burna Boy’s recent gambits, it falls apart when one considers that from the lead singles and snippets that have surfaced on the internet, the album has not supplied any consistent narrative or displayed any form of cohesion. Subversion is not simply unleashing chaos, it requires a carefully constructed narrative that challenges the status quo. Consider Rema’s Heis, which is unequivocally the quintessential subversive project of our time. While the album stirred a heady mix of confusion, excited anticipation, and concern due to its pointed otherness at the time of release, it presented a clear-cut narrative—Rema’s self-proclaimed ascendancy—and ushered listeners into a cohesive sonic universe flush with cascading percussion and theatrically ominous melodies. 

Burna Boy’s No Signs of Weakness, in contrast, has found the artist grasping, seemingly sampling every possible avenue in search for whatever will stick. Empty Chairs, which finds the artist petulantly skewering bloggers and his latest release TaTaTa, a ribald song in which he brags about committing adultery, couldn’t be more stylistically and thematically at odds with each other. It’s possible when the album arrives, Burna Boy would somehow have constructed an overarching narrative for these competing themes. For now, however, the only subversive thing about the album is how confused it is turning out to be.