Afrobeats label flattens African music diversity — SkimNews
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- Tyla won the best Afrobeats award at the 2024 MTV VMAs for her hit "Water" but used her acceptance speech to reject the label, insisting she represents South Africa's amapiano rather than Afrobeats.
- Burna Boy, Tems, Wizkid, Ckay, King Promise and Davido have all publicly rejected or qualified the term — Tems describes her sound as "Afro, R&B, soul and alternative elements," while Burna Boy coined "Afrofusion."
- London-based DJ Abrantee coined "Afrobeats" in the early 2010s by appending an "s" to Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, creating a marketing label that now subsumes African pop, dance, rap, R&B, gospel, highlife and alternative music.
- The UK Official Charts Company named its new African music chart "Afrobeats" when it launched in 2020, cementing the term's grip on how the genre is measured and marketed.
- Mr Eazi's "banku music" — a fusion of Nigerian pop and Ghanaian highlife that captivated West Africa in 2015 — faded into obscurity rather than maturing into a lasting genre, unlike South Africa's amapiano, because it was never documented or marketed as its own sound.
- The MTV VMAs dropped the Afrobeats category in 2025 — but not because the term was limiting — leaving no African music category at all.
Why it matters: West African artists and nascent genres — banku music already faded, and emerging styles such as mara and afro adura face similar fates without adequate documentation — lose the runway needed to mature when collapsed into a single Western-coined label, while the MTV VMAs eliminating the Afrobeats category without replacing it removes the last major institutional foothold for African music on Western award shows.
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