Nigerian music has set the world alight in the last half-decade, with the biggest of its wins coming under the moniker Afrobeats, its foreign-given nickname. As it approaches the golden age of its existence so far, some of Nigerian music’s biggest artists have started to express reservations about continuing under this name. Burna Boy sparked controversy in August when he claimed in an interview with Apple Music that Afrobeats was a genre with “no substance,” and in its stead, he proposed Afrofusion, his self-styled creation with a description eerily similar to Afrobeats in everything but in name. Now, Wizkid appears a student of the same school of thought, as he expressed in a series of offensively-worded Instagram stories disowning the genre.
Music from West Africa is a cocktail of genres, blending Fuji, Pop, Dancehall, and Fela’s Afrobeat into fast-moving and stimulating compositions. It was christened “Afrobeats” by DJs based in the United Kingdom in 2011, to acknowledge the many “Afro beats” it bore parts of and as a nod to Afrobeat as its precursor. This label served multiple purposes for the growing industry; it was a nice wrapping to package Nigerian and Ghanaian artists as they waded their way abroad. Afrobeats show promoters like Cokobar exported Nigerian artists like Wizkid, Ice Prince, and P-Square as part of an Afrobeats festival, enabling them to sell out venues each star could not pull individually. After Wizkid made his first UK performance as part of an all-star line-up in 2011, he returned to headline his show the following year.
Over the years, “Afrobeats” has come to erroneously represent a genre as much as a movement, which hardly fulfills the purpose of its creation. Yes, there are some familiar elements in much of the music—big bouncy drums, lyrics favoring love, women, and sex, a predilection for pidgin delivery—but for each of these characteristics, there are several Nigerian artists creating music without it. Davido summed up Afrobeats’ place in Nigerian music when he was asked to distinguish it from RnB: Afrobeats is the term used to describe us African musicians, I don’t think it’s the music that we make”.
Retiring the Afrobeats term had been advocated for by Nigerian media long before its artists. As Nigerian music’s expansion began to spur the creation of exclusive categories and charts—like Best Afrobeats at the VMA awards, the Billboard Afrobeats charts, and the Best African Music Performance at the Grammys, we acknowledged the double-edged potential of these achievements. While they are a recognition of African music’s exploits of the last decade and an incentive for its creators to aspire to become the pinnacle of it, they threaten a limitation—that African artists would be boxed into a Best African category regardless of the music they created.
This is the fear that drives Wizkid’s reasoning to outrightly disavow the genre. When he finally calmed down enough to do without (most of) the expletives, he expressed as much in a new Instagram story. There he decried that “no matter how good or amazing the music we make be it RnB or whatever other genre, we all get nominated in one Africa category or the other.”
These posts were preceded by the announcement of his sixth studio album, Morayo. Wizkid, who is famed for being indifferent to award shows, is looking to make a serious push with his next project. 2022’s More Love Less Ego went through the award season without a nomination, not even when the Recording Academy introduced a “Best African Music Performance” category that widened the net for Nigerian music, which left many to speculate on whether he had submitted it for consideration. But it is probably the album that came before, Made In Lagos, that is the trigger to Wizkid’s current indignation.
At the 64th Grammy aAwards Wizkid’s acclaimed MIL lost its nomination in the Best Global Music Album category, while Essence, its breezy standout, also crashed in Best Global Performance. The track which accumulated hundreds of millions of streams, featured pop superstar Justin Bieber for its remix and was acknowledged by critics as a song of the summer was ultimately sidelined in the Global category when some felt it could have competed for Song Of The Year. He believes that the Afrobeats moniker restricts Nigerian music from fully integrating into the American scene.
He makes this denouncement, however, under the assumption that his music will be of sufficient quality and popularity to compete consistently with American music in other genres. This means battling for nominations with Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber in Pop, and SZA, The Weeknd, and Usher in RnB. A tough ask. Afrobeats may have limited Nigerian music to a certain circle, but it guarantees some representation of African music on all major music platforms.
Ideally, Nigerian artists should enjoy the best of both worlds. Utilize the Afrobeats brand to introduce themselves to a market that has already developed a taste for it, but still get recognized in other genres should they choose to diversify from it. The solution to the current predicament, however, is not the insulting denouncement from these artists, which lands somewhere between a faux superiority complex and outrage-fishing and is unlikely to effect any real change. A wiser, less inflammatory approach for artists would be recognizing Afrobeats as a community while carving out genres: Afropop, Fuji, Street Pop, Dancehall, RnB, and more. Nigerian music has only achieved everything it has through community and collaboration; for artists to abandon this ship before it has properly docked could mean squandering all the gains of the last decade.