Music
All You Need to Know about Burna Boy’s Upcoming “Twice As Tall” Album
With the release of his world celebrated album, “African Giant“, Burna Boy has cemented his standing as one of the kings of Afrobeats.
While the world awaits the arrival of “Twice As Tall” on August 14, fans are certain the upcoming album is nothing like they’ve ever experienced before.
The award-winning Afrobeat singer is letting us into his world of music, giving us all the deets on the upcoming album, the featured artists, producers, and the representation of the African continent.
We can never forget how Angelique Kidjo dedicated the 2020 Grammy Award for world music to Burna Boy and “African Giant”. The three-time Grammy winner held up the trophy, praising him as a young African artist who is “changing the way our continent is perceived.”
Burna Boy, speaking to the New York Times, revealed that “Twice As Tall” houses 15 tracks featuring international acts such as Sauti Sol, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Naughty by Nature, and Youssou N’Dour. With production credits to Sean Combs a.k.a. Diddy, Anderson Paak and Timbaland.
Admiring Burna Boy for his style of music and the representation of Africa, Diddy said:
The thing that I learned about him is the importance of what he’s doing for his nation and representing the people that aren’t really heard globally. Through this album, I think it’s important for Africa to be heard. And so it’s bigger than just an album. He’s not just on a musical artist trip. He’s a revolutionary. His conviction is serious.
For his new album, he said, he’s “basically continuing the mission I started, which is building a bridge that leads every Black person in the world to come together, and to make you understand that without you having a home base, you can’t be as strong as you are.”
According to the New York Times,
Burna Boy’s Afro-fusion is omnivorous and supremely catchy. Its beats are often programmed, but their stops and starts evade expectations. Instruments, sampled or hand-played, bounce against the rhythms or deftly dodge them, while his voice — which can be as staccato as a rapper or as cottony as a crooner — glides easily across and atop everything else.
The song on the album takes stock of his accomplishments, vulnerabilities, and how he “encourages ambition and perseverance against long odds”. He also lashes out at “racism, exploitation and widespread misconceptions about Africa”.
The songs on “Twice as Tall” hold echoes of Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica and the United States… The momentum is crisp and nonstop as the songs draw on — among many other things — Zulu choir singing, electronic dance music, alt-R&B and the patterns of West African marimbas and Zimbabwean thumb pianos
Talking about the countries and cultures of Africa to uniting as one continent, he said:
I want my children to have an African passport, not a Nigerian passport… I do not identify with any tribe. I do not identify with any country. I do not identify with anything, really. I identify with the world in the universe — I believe I am a citizen of the world, and I have a responsibility to the world. But at the same time in the world, it’s my people who are really getting the short end of the stick. It’s just doing what I have to do when I have to do it.
Visit the New York Times to read more.
Photo Credit: DanielObasi
