Art & Creativity Quote by Dennis Brown

Dennis Brown isn’t making a grand prediction so much as clocking a cultural shift in real time: a Nigerian juju star is starting to register in the places that usually decide what counts as “global.” The detail that matters isn’t Sunny Ade’s talent (assumed), it’s London. Brown frames the moment through a familiar gatekeeping ritual - being asked to “review the album” - and that’s the tell. Recognition arrives not first through African audiences, but through a metropolitan checkpoint that validates, packages, and exports.

As a reggae artist with his own complicated relationship to international markets, Brown speaks with the casual authority of someone who’s watched music get “discovered” late by the West, then rebranded as a trend. His tone is upbeat, almost offhand, but the subtext is sharper: global success isn’t merely about the sound, it’s about who is listening, where, and with what kind of institutional curiosity. London becomes a barometer of legitimacy, a reminder that the so-called world stage has a particular address.

The quote also captures a pre-internet ecology of hype. News travels via travel, conversation, industry asks. “The other day” reads like a dispatch from the circuit, where diasporic scenes, record shops, and critics create momentum before charts do. Brown is mapping an Afro-Atlantic feedback loop: African music influences Black popular forms, then returns, newly authenticated, as global culture.