'Afrobeats' Label Erases African Music Diversity — SkimNews
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- Tyla won best Afrobeats at the 2024 MTV VMAs but called the win "bittersweet" in her acceptance speech, arguing "there's a tendency to group all African music as Afrobeats" and saying she represents South Africa's amapiano — yet she reprised the same win at the American Music Awards months later.
- Tems, Burna Boy, Wizkid, Ckay, King Promise and Davido have all pushed back on the Afrobeats label — Burna Boy prefers "Afrofusion" and Tems describes her sound as a cocktail of "Afro, R&B, soul and alternative elements."
- London-based DJ Abrantee coined "Afrobeats" in the early 2010s by appending an "s" to Fela Kuti's Afrobeat as a radio-and-streaming marketing label for West African dance music, and the UK Official Charts Company named its 2020 African pop chart "Afrobeats."
- Mr Eazi's "banku music" — a 2015 fusion of Nigerian pop and Ghanaian highlife with a distinctive four-stroke kick-drum pattern that defined a regional dress culture of straw hats and dashikis — faded into obscurity because it was never marketed abroad or documented locally as its own sound.
- The MTV VMAs dropped the Afrobeats category this year, but not because the term was limiting — leaving no African music category at all, and culture journalist Tiléwa Kazeem says the disappearance "has not just obscured other genres but also affected their documentation."
- Emerging sounds such as mara and afro adura could develop the way grunge or hyperpop did in the West, but only with "enough documentation, enough lore, enough intentionality around them," per Dolapo Amusat, founder of Nigerian music network WeTalkSound.
Why it matters: The Afrobeats label delivered unprecedented global reach for African music — Tyla's "Water," Rema's "Calm Down" and Moliy's "Shake It to the Max" all charted internationally — but by collapsing an entire continent into one category, it erased nascent genres like banku music before they could develop distinct identities, and the VMAs' decision to scrap the category without replacing it suggests the flattening will outlast the label itself.
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