American record label owner, Baus discusses how he ignored Wizkid but signed Burna Boy

Matthew ‘Baus’ Adesuyan is the owner of Bad Habit, an imprint of Atlantic Records, to which Burna Boy is signed. He was born to a Nigerian father in the US. At the age of 14, his dad used to put him on to 2Face and other older Nigerian artists. But as he got older, he discovered Wizkid, who was closer to his age.

On April 27, 2021, a video of Adesuyan chatting with Samson Shulman surfaced on YouTube. Adesuyan says, “At first it was like 2Face, which was like when I was 14. 2Face had a song called ‘African Queen’… Then [My dad] put me on to Wizkid and Wizkid was close to my age and I was just like ‘Naw, this ain’t it.’

“I think it was like a competitive thing. Like no, it could be better than this… Then I got deeper and deeper into my own culture and just listening to music… One day, I cued Burna on like a PartyNextDoor playlist… Six years ago…. I played this artist and I was like this artist is fire. I go to his page and I had no idea he was Nigerian, he sound Jamaican on the record… I was like this is sick, this is cool.

“Then one of our A&Rs sent a list of artist we should listen to and on it was Burna Boy. I was like, I f*ck with this dude.'”

“I’m like this guy is next level, he is the most versatile artist I’ve ever heard period, not from Africa or [The US]. He could do everything; he could do Afrobeats, he could do Dancehall, he could do his own sh*t, he could rap, he could sing…”

In 2017, Burna Boy met Adesuyan and his business partner, Kirk Harding over dinner at 805 Restaurant in South London.

He continues, “We had to go to London and at the same time, Burna was doing his homecoming show, first time coming back to London… We had been exchanging with [his mom] and she was still freaking out… We came in a day after his show. Two days later, we had dinner at 805 Restaurant in Peckham, South London… Me, Kirk and Cody…

“Dinner is at 8 [but] Burna shows up at like 10, walks in and everyone in the restaurant starts going crazy, waiters were crying and I was like ‘What the f*ck?’

We talked for like two minutes and he was like ‘You wanna go smoke?’ We were in his car for two hours, smoking and talking about everything and playing music. We did go back into the restaurant at like 1 am, but he wanted to know how serious we were… He had been talking to labels, but it was just the regular label bullsh*t…

“We even talked about Grammys and I told him that he could become the biggest artist in the world. I was like, ‘You could change the way people look at African people and we could break down the walls, that’s what this music is about…”