Grammy award winning Burna boy has been selected as the cover star for June’s issue of British GQ magazine. In a magazine interview and shoot, he discusses winning the Grammy award, being African, his music and more. The shoot was done by Thompson Ekong popularly known as TSE, and styled by Ronami Ogulu. The interview was conducted by Aniefiok Ekpoudom.
Discussing his past, the artist mentioned he will sit, watching the Grammy Awards and dream. For as long as he can remember, for as long as he has released songs, the Grammys have floated somewhere in his periphery, a milestone he was certain he would one day reach.
March 2021 was the month where he finally achieved this milestone, as he won the award for the Best Global Album.
“Africa is in the house, man,” he said proudly, staring down into the screen as he was announced winner. “Africa, we’re in the house.” After shouts of joy, he settled down and continued “This should be a lesson to every African out there: no matter where you are, no matter what you plan to do, you can achieve it, because you are a king.”
The win, he says, “should just make everybody understand that there’s power in where you’re from and you are that power. No matter how bad the situation is, there’s something to take [from it]. There’s diamonds in the earth, you understand? Where I come from, there are so many diamonds.
“I wasn’t celebrating because of myself,” he said further “It was almost as if I’ve broken a mental cycle of our people. Because our people have been very mentally oppressed to feel like they can’t do certain things and that certain things are unreachable. You are what you think, at the end of the day. [It is] time to start thinking about ourselves, not what the society said we should be or what our limitations say we should be. I’ve come from Port Harcourt, the bottom of the map in Nigeria, and now I’ve become a champion. It may not mean anything to someone else, but to me, and to us, it means more than you can imagine.”
On the publics reaction to him winning, he was thrown a homecoming ceremony in his hometown. “It really tipped me off balance, super emotional,” he explains. “For me, I never have any expectations for these things so I never get disappointed. It was the best reaction I could ever hope for, even better.”
He also discussed the state of social issues worldwide and in his country, Nigeria. “If me and you go to war,” he says, explaining why he believes they were taught half-truths, “and you win that war, then automatically what is mine is yours. So you’re going to want to teach my children the history that will make you smell like roses and make me look like... Step one is re-education, because we’ve been miseducated. As soon as we were born, miseducation began. I think a deliberate effort should be made to re-educate us, because a very deliberate effort was made to miseducate.”
On his music, and its impact, he says “Music is the strongest way to get a message across. I feel like that’s the role of music in all this. And now there’s a few people playing that role, so we’re heading in that direction...In Africa, we’re the place that everything comes from,” Anything that makes any powerful country powerful comes from Africa. We have all the resources. We have gold. We have everything. What don’t we have? Why are we still not the world power? It’s because we’re not united. We’re not able to carry that kind of weight because of our lack of unity and our lack of understanding of each other. That’s simply what it comes down to.”
When questioned about the future, he said “I’m just making my music and just saying what my spirit is telling me to say, I don’t know about all the rest. All the rest is what’s supposed to happen. It’s – how do you say? – God’s will.”
He has recently dropped a single titled Kilometer, which is available on all streaming platforms.
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