If you had referred to Burna Boy’s current album rollout as masterful or exemplary in 2019, there’s a good chance that you’d have been met with contemptuous sneering. The reality, however, is that the Afropop landscape today is radically different. Top labels struggle to break new acts or roll out songs and projects successfully. Leading acts often resort to controversy and slapdash tricks to garner attention. The standard strategy appears to be teasing a snippet on social media and hoping for the best. It almost feels like an industry that excelled at churning out new acts and seamlessly rolling out projects, in the space of a gavel stroke, suddenly forgot how to do that. To illustrate the extent of this problem, Magixx recently put out a tweet calling for ideas on how to promote his forthcoming album, suggesting that he doesn’t have faith in his label’s in-house marketing efforts. This frighteningly existential situation has managed to fly under the radar, mostly because, even though the industry is fraying at the edges, it has somehow managed to hold up.
In the months leading up to the release of his Morayo album, Wizkid enacted a head-turning smear campaign against his longtime friend-turn-rival-turn-friend-turn-rival Davido. His antagonism didn’t seem to stem from any particular reason, for the most part, it appeared incoherent if not juvenile. And yet he kept up the pressure, forcefully inserting himself into the public conversation and garnering millions of views with each vitriolic tweet. Only after the release of his album did he finally put a stop to the act.
More recently, other acts have courted controversy to promote imminent releases. Ayra Starr recently made a video of herself dancing to a Naira Marley song with the words “All the love drops Feb 11th.” There’s little doubt that the whole thing was carefully contrived to elicit conversation around her. While the video generated conversation around her—she was talked about for days and in certain corners of the internet, the conversation is still very much alive—it barely translated to the success of the song. It managed a little above a hundred thousand streams on its first day on Spotify. It has since continued to plummet steadily, despite a barrage of promotional efforts as an accompanying music video. Ruger similarly courted controversy to little success. It could be argued that Ayra Starr and Ruger did not intentionally incite outrage, and their respective moments of infamy were born out of poor judgment. The point however stands: artists and their management no longer know how to effectively roll out new releases and controversy barely moves the needle.
Considering Burna Boy’s current rollout efforts against this dingy backdrop, it suddenly becomes apparent why it has felt like a breath of fresh air so far. Last week he officially pressed play on a rollout effort that had mostly been passive for about a year now, appearing on the cover of the French division of Billboard Magazine for a story that bears the title of his impending album: No Sign of Weakness. It’s ironic how in periods of extreme absurdity, normalcy can come to feel subversive. Appearing on the cover of a venerable magazine is hardly a revolutionary act, but this time it felt disruptive, a protest against the absurdity that has interminably ripped through the media landscape in recent times. Pop culture enthusiasts seem to share this sentiment and have praised him. This is particularly interesting given that BurnaBoy is a frequent target of the public’s indignation—not undeservedly, however—he’s a perennial provocateur.
Days after his Billboard cover story, he changed his album covers across streaming platforms to alternate versions where his face has been blurred out or cropped —interestingly, before this stunt, all his albums bore his face. The reaction to this from fans was a mix of excitement and bemusement. Guessing what he has coming next has become a kind of game and every gambit he has made has been scrutinized by zealots like puzzles waiting to be fixed. They have theorized that his excising his image from his earlier album covers provides hints to understanding his forthcoming album. Perhaps No Sign of Weakness is the prelude to a vanishing act, a last dance before he bows out gracefully. Or maybe it symbolizes death to his old self, and the dawning of a new self; an iconography that a great many artists have deployed. Interesting as these postulations are, they mostly sound far-fetched. What’s more likely is that his actions are purely promotional.
As of the time of writing, Burna Boy has just changed his profile picture—across all social channels—to the loading icon. This piece of the puzzle is easy to decipher: the album is in touching distance—and yet, for all its simplicity, it has not failed to stir up excitement in fans. Though less sophisticated, Burna Boy’s rollout brings to mind a typical Taylor Swift album rollout. Every Taylor Swift album rollout functions as an integral part of the album experience; she teases and entertains her fans in equal measure through a mix of cryptic messages that allude to track titles or themes in the project. The whole thing becomes a game for fans who then rummage through and analyze her every post for information relevant to the album.
The average Nigerian album rollout is unimaginative, tasteless, and bland. The stagnation of the past few years only substantiates this fact. Artists and their teams must get creative and intentional about reeling fans in. Pop culture in its entirety exists for the primary purpose of providing entertainment. Album rollouts are not exempt from this. In the past few years they’ve become boring and one-dimensional, BurnaBoy’s rollout, however, offers a glimpse into making them exciting again.
