Burna Boy gets YouTube Music profile

“Music isn’t a game to me. It’s real, it’s my truth. So I hope you enjoy this,” Burna Boy tweeted along with a link to the YouTube profile.

The video comes under the Artist Spotlight Stories, which has profiled such acts as Janelle Monae, Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello. The series, according to YouTube, presents “intimate and personal portraits of artists pushing the boundaries of creativity and connecting with fans in unique and powerful ways on YouTube.”

Burna Boy is the first Nigerian artist to be featured. His 18-minute video runs through scenes and events around the artist including a session with the artist answering questions from an off-camera interviewer, snippets from his concerts and members of his family talking about his childhood.

“From the start, it would be the Damini Ogulu story not the Burna Boy story,” his mother says, referring to his birth-name, as she talks about his pre-stardom days and his love for music that was perceived as unusual for a child.

“Other kids were proper singing nursery rhymes and my son was singing Naughty By Nature 'Hip Hop Hooray' with all the moves and everything," she says, adding that she "got over the initial embarrassment because I had come to realise that I probably wasn’t very normal myself. I knew he wasn’t going to be a great academic but he was interested in music.”

That interest would later get a recommendation when a call came in from a staff member from the future star’s school. The substance of that call proved to be prescient: “Your son is going to be a superstar,” she recalls being told. “Get ready for fame and fortune.”

Burna Boy’s influences are also stated, with his grandfather Benson Idonije, who once managed Fela Kuti and appeared on Burna Boy's first album, saying that the artist listened to his grandfather's collection of jazz records and Fela albums when he was growing up. “That was the grounding of what he’s doing,” Idonije says.

To commemorate the profile’s release, YouTube’s parent establishment, Google, invited Burna Boy to its Lagos premises yesterday. “Our pal Burna Boy came to hang out at Google Nigeria to talk about his YouTube Music Artist Spotlight Story video,” the company tweeted.

Watch the video below: