Burna Boy: I Told Them review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Atlantic)
Eschewing the political controversies of his interviews, the Nigerian musician’s seventh album is streamlined, swaggering and rich with perfectly deployed vocal samples

You could view the title of I Told Them as defiant: Burna Boy’s seventh album arrives preceded by controversy after its author told a journalist about his desire for Black Americans to return to Africa. It is a regular topic with the 32-year-old Nigerian, who is very big on pan-Africanism: he has claimed his ultimate career goal is “the eventual unity of Africa”. This time, however, he unwisely suggested that the reason Chinese and Italian immigrants in the US have “respect” and “don’t go through the things that African Americans go through” was because African Americans lacked knowledge of their own roots. You can understand the storm that followed: as more than one outraged commenter pointed out, he seemed to have overlooked the fact that Chinese and Italian Americans came to the US of their own volition, rather than on slave ships.

In fairness, Burna Boy is no stranger to controversy: in 2020, an interview with the Guardian went unexpectedly off-piste when he announced his admiration for Colonel Gaddafi. Nevertheless, the timing of the latest uproar was unfortunate: he seems to be on the verge of becoming a huge mainstream star in the US, transforming a handful of gold-selling singles into something bigger still. He recently became the first African artist to headline a US stadium concert, drawing 41,000 people to New York’s Citi Field (shortly before, he had become the first African solo artist to headline a stadium show in the UK, packing out the London Stadium).

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