Review: Burna Boy’s Ego Casts a Shadow Over “No Sign Of Weakness”

On No Sign Of Weakness, Burna Boy finally peels back his last layer of restraint, exploding with venom aimed at fellow artists, former lovers, fans and haters alike. If I Told Them… was a belated retort to those who doubted him at his ascendence, NSOW reveals his need to confront as unresolved. Burna Boy has not yet gotten his satisfaction from trampling over perceived enemies. His unflinching self-confidence has persisted as long as his career: it hoisted his debut album, where he declared he was Leaving An Impact For Eternity (L.I.F.E); it brimmed in the poise with which he announced himself the African Giant, and later, proclaimed he was Twice As Tall.

But Burna Boy’s growth to occupy the pinnacle of African music in the past decade has inevitably thinned the ranks of his doubters. For a man who feeds off hostility, recent successes have left him somewhat on a lean diet. As a result, No Sign Of Weakness sees him reaching out for the first time to tackle opponents that are either no longer relevant to his story at this time, or just not relevant at all. An examination of Burna’s central subjects on NSOW reads like a flick through his petty skirmishes in the last year: his clash with social media provocateur Speed Darlington is covered on the frantic opener No Panic (“Them say I kidnap one of them/ But I just dey laugh all of them”); while the controversy over his alleged transactional intimacy with model Sophia Egbueje fuels the playful Dem Dey (“I no buy Lambo’/ Is that why you are shouting?”), where a Lagbaja sample is fashioned into a modern Afropop banger, complete with tinges of Galala and the infusion of a talking drum.

Burna’s search for worthy opponents takes him far and wide, and he reaches as far back as Davido to reignite a cold war that has been inactive since Davido’s smash hit, Fem, one of the few times in modern Nigerian music that a beef between artists spilled into the studio. Burna Boy’s reply, on the titular NSOW, arrives a little too late, and leans into unnecessarily melodrama: “The likkle frog better not jump up and leap/ The .44 gon’ make am slumber and sleep/ See, the perimeter to the governor them reach”, he sings over a well-produced Otis number that reverberates with the intensity of his threats.

Burna embraces his darker side on the energized No Panic, an unhinged, scattergun opener that does a fantastic job of setting the album’s tempo. In many ways, it is a mask-dropping moment for Burna Boy—who was never really wearing a mask anyway—as he finally owns up to some of the biggest controversies that have followed him for years: the incident at a Lagos concert where he planted a boot on a fan’s head, and his skirmish with Cubana Chief priest earlier this year.

But his rage only poorly masks the sense that NSOW exposes Burna’s diminishing creativity and loosening grip on the zeitgeist. Speculation about his “creative fatigue” first surfaced with the release of the album’s singles—Bundle By Bundle, Update, TaTaTa, as well as his feature on Shallipopi’s Laho II—none of which lived up to Burna’s documented genius. At its release, NSOW shows itself to continue largely on that path: a collection that preserves all of Burna Boy’s arrogant, larger-than-life spirit, but not enough of the musical brilliance that once justified it. On certain tracks he is able to tune down his aggression to express his underlying emotions with some clarity and depth. Love does this particularly well, framing Burna Boy’s hostility as a defensive mechanism against those who hated him first—”Na who love me I go love/ Na who love us we go love”—while a string and a background of children’s voices provide a feathersoft backdrop.

Empty Chairs pushes this further, flashing back to a time when a teenage Burna ran into legal troubles in the UK and discovered his stark loneliness—“Was in the courtroom/ It was me, the judge, and the jury, and some empty chairs”, in a Rap-inspired beat awkwardly paired with a Mick Jagger feature. While he does eventually fold this story into the continuing thread of his egocentric worldview—“My enemies… they’re on the internet or the blogs/ And in my sold-out shows looking for empty chairs”—he does allow some depth and texture to peek through. NSOW sees Burna Boy particularly struggle with the distinction between the stanship-fueled celebrity hate that emanates from “rival stan” groups, and genuine resentment from his countrymen. I Told Them… was also fueled by the same misplaced targets, but despite its often comical narcissism (“Is this the motherfucking thanks I get for making my people proud every chanceI get?,” he asks J Cole on Thanks), that album struck a balance between ego and invention that allowed it sound much better than it read. NSOW rveals his maturity may have slipped even further since then.

When Burna Boy steers the subject away from himself, it often lands on a woman of interest. Musing on matters of the heart are hardly his staple, but when he does dip into the emotional bag he can switch between the tender (For My Hand), the sensual (On The Low) and the melancholic (Last Last). On NSOW he revisits this territory with some unexpected freshness. Sweet Love finds him embodying a Lovers Rock reggae outfit—one of the few sounds the genre-fluid artist had yet to explore. It does come out sounding a little left-field, but Burna Boy and producer Major Seven make a genuine effort to give this love ballad the heart it needs. The Stromae-featuring Pardon fares even better, blending Burna’s afrocentric roots with the Frenchman’s romantic sensibilities.

Come Gimme and TaTaTa draw from his sensual side, more closely echoing his discography, but they are sonically diverse—the latter is a soft-hitting Afropop number, strongly reminiscent of the excellent Tested, Approved and Trusted; the latter continues Afropop’s ongoing cross-pollination with Baile Funk. NSOW clearly aims to stretch Burna Boy’s Afrofusion worldview, placing Lagos club bangers and Street Pop-adjacent creations side by side with his Brazilian and French-inspired experiments, including Change Your Mind, a half-hearted attempt at Country music that features everything from genre (the guest star, the music video) except the music itself.

The result is an album that isn’t especially cohesive, but at this stage of Burna’s career, it never promised to be. He remains the thread that ties it all—his staggering confidence, his desire, his love of self that is invariably attached to a burning aversion for who he considers the enemy. He continues to present himself as a figure larger than life, but on No Sign Of Weakness, Burna amplifies his persona so intensely that the album starts to collapse under its own weight—like he did in those grandiose Instagram declarations in which he assumed a new alter ego. Burna Boy’s image of himself has finally outgrown realism, and his latest album, for the first time, can not live up to its name.