In 2024, South African pop star Tyla won the best Afrobeats award at the MTV VMAs. Beaming in a yellow dress, she began her acceptance speech in a celebratory tone. The global impact of Water,” – her hit single – “proves that African music can be pop music.” But as the audience’s cheers swelled, she became more sombre, describing the moment as bittersweet.
I come from South Africa, I represent amapiano”, referring to the country’s rolling, sensual dance subgenre. Her passionate entreaty notwithstanding, months later she’d reprise her win in the Afrobeats category of the American Music Awards. Tyla is hardly the only African artist to rail against the Afrobeats tag.
Tems has spurned the term, describing her music as a cocktail of “Afro, R&B, soul and alternative elements”. Likewise, Burna Boy prefers to call his music Afrofusion, a fitting characterisation of the smorgasbord of sounds that converge in his music. Wizkid, Ckay, King Promise and Davido have also chafed at the term Afrobeats, yet it persists and holds back African music.
The term emerged in the early 2010s as an umbrella label used to categorise contemporary dance music from west Africa, such as D’Banj’s Oliver Twist, spreading across European cities. London-based DJ Abrantee – per reporting in the Guardian – appended an “s” to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, creating a catch-all to market these sounds on radio and a burgeoning streaming marketplace. In recent years, however, as African music has exploded globally – underscored by hits like Water as well as Rema’s Calm Down or Moliy’s Shake It to the Max – Afrobeats has become the de facto label for all African pop, dance, rap, R&B, gospel, highlife and a sizeable amount of the continent’s alternative music scenes.
This might come across as a minor quibble to be slugged out by music buffs, and “Afrobeats” has undoubtedly been successful as a brute marketing strategy – when the UK Official Charts Company introduced a chart for African pop in 2020, it was named Afrobeats. But what happens when a western description becomes the dominant way a culture understands itself? Grammy award-winning Nigerian producer and singer Bloody Civilian, who heads out on tour with Tyla in October, says the label is “deeply limiting” and finds it “confusing that westerners continue to box the numerous ways Africans experiment with sound”.
Western popular music is allowed to exist across a wide spectrum of genres, while the music of an entire continent is routinely shoehorned into this single category. This does more than obscure its diversity; it flattens the nuances of distinct musical traditions and, in doing so, disconnects artists from those traditions. West African music, which has the biggest range of artists dubbed as Afrobeats, has also disproportionately felt the effects of the term: artists and producers from the region continue to synthesise new genres but these innovations are often treated as fodder for the larger Afrobeats machine, sustaining hype until they are discarded for the next shiny thing.
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