Rockstar has given Burna Boy a radio station. On the AfroBank FM preview that went up on the Grand Theft Auto VI site yesterday, he introduces himself as Burna from AfroBank FM, Vice City, and tells whoever is listening that they are “now here to make your deposits and withdrawals.”
He shares the booth with Palmsy, played by the Berlin-based DJ Palms Trax, and Rockstar sells the pair as “curating the best in African music, from 20th-century classics and undiscovered gems to contemporary sounds like amapiano, 3-step, and more.” The preview covers that distance in three songs. Asake’s “Joha” comes first, then “Gye Wani,” the Ghanaian highlife veterans Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor together, then “Shay’sana” from the Durban producer DJ Lag with Robot Boii and Kamo Mphela, with a voice up top calling out Lagos, South Africa and Ghana “all the way to Vice City.”
Fan pages have spent the past day calling Burna the first African artist to host a station in a GTA game. Femi Kuti had one first. In Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008, Liberty City’s IF99, “International Funk,” was his to present, and the playlist put his father at the centre of it, with Fela’s “Zombie” and “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” next to Femi’s own “Truth Don Die,” Manu Dibango, Gil Scott-Heron and The O’Jays. Rockstar picked the songs without him. “They chose quite my tastes,” Femi said that year. “It was just like I went into the studio, and everything was set.”
Burna’s own line back to Fela runs through his mother’s father.
Benson Idonije joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1957 and was one of the people who built Radio Nigeria 2, the station now called Metro FM. In 1963 he met a young Fela Ransome-Kuti at the NBC studios and became the first manager of his band, Koola Lobitos, years before the music they were making turned into Afrobeat. At a celebration in Lagos for his 90th birthday this June, Burna took the stage and called him “the greatest man in the world.” “This is a toast to my hero, my grandad,” he said.
GTA has been bringing Burna closer to the microphone for a while. “Killin Dem,” his song with Zlatan, went onto GTA Online’s iFruit Radio in December 2019, alongside Naira Marley’s “Opotoyi,” and a year later he wrote “Gettin’ Money,” the theme for The Cayo Perico Heist that plays as players first fly into the island. Both times he was a song in someone else’s rotation.
AfroBank FM gives him the voice between the records. When the game comes out on Nov. 19, the African station in Vice City belongs to the grandson of Fela’s first manager.