By Neone Adebayo
Fair Warning: These are simply my thoughts; they are fully mine. As of now, there isn’t detailed critical reception available specifically for Burna Boy’s “TaTaTa.” It is quite fitting as a case study. However, Burna Boy generally receives positive reviews for his energetic Afrobeat style and collaborations, and Travis Scott’s features are often well-received for adding a popular edge to tracks. For specific insights on “TaTaTa,” checking recent music reviews or fan reactions might provide more current perspectives. This is also rather ironically not about Burna Boy, or is it?
I, much like a little frog, often hop toward finding wonder and meaning in art. It’s this quest that has led me to argue with myself repeatedly about the role suffering plays in the making of good art and the deeper question of who an artist becomes when we can no longer see their pain.
At the heart of it, I believe artists—whether knowingly or not—attempt to answer a profound question: What do we do with suffering? As far as I can tell, there are two choices. We either transform our suffering into something else—something meaningful, something new—or we hold on to it and eventually pass it on, often without realizing.
To transform pain, we must first acknowledge that everyone suffers. Suffering is the great equalizer, the unifying force of the human condition. When we accept that, we begin to see people more compassionately. And perhaps, just perhaps, we start to see art for what it really is: one person’s suffering—or experience—lifted to the skies in the hope that others might find themselves in it.
This is not good.
This is beautiful.
And that beauty? It’s alchemical.
Take Llona, for example. His Homeless album feels like a shelter for the broken, the lost, the ones searching for language for their ache. When he sings about transience and estrangement, he is not just performing. He’s offering pieces of himself. What fans feel isn’t just , resonance, it’s recognition. People often underestimate what strong cords bind his listeners together. That kind of shared vulnerability creates community.
Contrast this with Burna Boy.
And I say this carefully, lovingly.
It’s become harder to feel the pain that once crackled through his older work.
Art that confronts suffering honestly becomes a kind of sacred work. And honesty, in art, doesn’t always look like pain. But it must always sound like truth.
So, I wonder: Has Burna transformed his pain or simply run out of things to say?
I do not believe that can ever truly be the case. Artists don’t draw from a clean well of untouched purity. They reach into the complicated mess of who they are. A song is torn from all of them—the chaos, the softness, the mistakes. It is the mess of them becoming the best of them. This, I think, is the very definition of hope: that we are not prisoners of our flawed nature but can transcend it.
This is the enterprise undertaken by all genuine artists.
Even when the art seems shallow, if it’s honest, it still counts. Even a flat expression of desire or detachment can be true to the self.
Still, something has shifted. And it’s not just in the music—it’s in the reception.
We are sent suffering because if we are able to overcome it and still act morally, we have achieved greater sentience and moral strength.
If Burna Boy has reacted to the once-shared pain his songs held—circa African Giant and “Whiskey”—on his Big 7 album, I wouldn’t know. But I do know this: my reception to TaTaTa is shaped by disappointment. Because for someone who speaks of rejecting shallow art, this is such shallow art.
It’s okay, though. Relationally, it checks out.
The remarkable utility of art lies in its audacity to transfigure a corrupted state and create something beautiful.
We look to artists and their art to do exactly this—to show us the dance between sin, transcendence, and genius.
This isn’t what Burna Boy has done here.
I do not know what that is.
But yes, to answer the burning question on everybody’s mind (or maybe just mine), I believe he’s still able to create the things that made us love him. Just as every artist who begins to tell a different story from the one we fell in love with still can.
After all, the art is never separate.
It is the artist, still speaking.
Still trying.
Still becoming.