Burna Boy’s sixth album, Love, Damini, is as bulky as a doctoral thesis. Comprising nineteen songs, by the time you reach the last track, the Shackleton Ice Shelf would have completely thawed. Such elephantine albums are best consumed in dribs and drabs. Whether you go at it in one take or several sittings, expect this: Burna Boy is upbeat when he’s bragging, as in Kilometre; surprisingly cheerful when he’s heartbroken, as in the cynical Last Last; non-phony when he’s been gnostic, as in How Bad Could It Be?, where he sounds like the local coordinator of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
He echoes the Roman playwright Seneca in the last of the aforementioned songs. Seneca writes, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality”. Burna Boy sings, “Get nervous, then anxiety take over your mind / And your trouble just increase in size”.
One thing you notice is how similar the fifth track Jagele is to Gbona, one of the standout songs in his 2019 African Giant album. Both songs have the same slow but self-assured tempo. It’s not an accident: Kel P produced both of them. This isn’t the only familiar item Burna Boy puts our way. For one he sticks to his trademark reggae cadence — his obsession with all things Jamaican is well known. He affects Jamaican patois more times than Michael Jackson asks Annie if she’s okay. His head has as much tangled hair as you’d find on that of a marijuana-dazed Rastafarian. His ex-lover is of Jamaican descent. He even titles a song in this album after the Jamaican beauty queen Toni-Ann Singh.
More familiar things in this album: The world-famous Squid Game tune runs like underground cable wires through Different Size, where he features Canibus’s lookalike, Victony. In All Power — not in this album — Victony ascribes spiritual import to the female derrière. So his appearance in Different Size is apt, given it’s a song about backsides. The song preceding this track is Last Last, a dirge for an erstwhile relationship gone sour. But Burna Boy is back in the dating Squid Game, where the loser is whoever falls in love first. He says he is over his ex-lover, and why not? There are different sizes — God-given and surgeon-given — in the sea.
For the chorus of It’s Plenty, Burna Boy borrows melodies from The Nights by the late Swedish EDM god, Avicii. Familiarity is the soul of pop music, and Burna Boy knows this all too well. But while Avicii eulogises his father in his song, Burna Boy eulogises himself. In fact, many of the songs in the album are self-written and self-aimed encomiums. This will surprise no one familiar with either Burna Boy’s music or Twitter account. This is a man who demands to be respected. He once quarrelled with Coachella because a hapless graphic designer spelt his name in small font. Standing next to Burna Boy, Kanye West would look like the emissary of soft-spoken humility. Let’s cut him some slack though: An outsized ego and ambition — things he confesses to have in Wild Dreams, featuring Khalid — are to be expected when you are your country’s only homegrown Grammy winner. Also, he turned 31 last week. Birthdays are the only times one can be fully narcissistic without reproach.
All great egos suffer a persecution complex. Scarface and Alexander the Great make good examples. At the hilltop of their dangerous careers, both men imagined everyone was out to get them, the former trusting only cocaine, the latter only his horse Bucephalus. Perhaps their paranoia was justified: Look what backstabbing betrayal Caesar suffered for being too trusting. A Byronian hero, Burna Boy talks about his enemies almost as much as he talks about himself. He has often sang (and said) that certain people are envious of his success and want nothing more than to see him fail. This shadow-boxing with nameless, formless foes continues here — in the song Cloak & Dagger, amid grime rap supplied by J Hus, Burna Boy boasts about his enemy-evading tactics. In Kilometre his vulgarian streak finds naked expression; he calls his foes “the product of a torn condom”.
Things drag at some point in the album. It’s to be expected: Even the wittiest talker, if he talks the span of nineteen songs, is bound to run out of interesting ways of saying his mind. The lull is particularly remarkable in the songs where Burna Boy, with Ed Sheeran and Popcaan, is being a mushy lover. It leads me to conclude Burna Boy is most interesting when he is singing about himself. There’s joy in several other parts of the album. Listeners would enjoy the fusillade of syllables in the chorus of How Bad Could It Be?. Baritone and suave, his voice in Cloak & Dagger does to the ears what a chiropractor does to the body.
It is only in Whiskey he tries to be political. There’s a line about the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta. But its inclusion feels obligatory, performative even, like a misanthrope helping school children cross the street, but only because people are watching him. Did Burna Boy feel watchful eyes burn into his back? Did he decide to throw in some socially conscious lines because he has built for himself the public image of a part-time everyman crusader and must often perpetuate the legend? Or does he truly care about the effects of oil spillage? This writer is sceptical — Burna Boy has often sang in protest of the undue privileges the Nigeria elite enjoy. Yet recent reports have it that police officers, whom no civilian should be allowed to privatise, comprise Burna Boy’s body-guarding retinue.
Love, Damini is Burna Boy’s story, as he avows in the opening track Glory. His is a story of hubris, love, lust, God’s grace, paranoia, ambition, and success. It is also one of failures — he has often failed to keep his anger in check, he admits in the final track Love, Damini. He also admits to being self-absorbed, failing when vital to be attentive to family and friends. He vows to become a better man. We wish him good luck, but hope his sojourn of self-transfiguration doesn’t rid him of his ego. Not even Burna Boy can make better music than egoistic Burna Boy.