Are Foreign Awards Leaving Nigerian Musicians Behind?

On the 26th of May, South African popstar Tyla beat an all-Nigerian lineup, including Wizkid, Asake, Tems, and Rema, to win the Favorite Afrobeats Artist category at the 51st edition of the American Music Awards. Her win has expectedly stirred a maelstrom of debates and public discourse about her deservedness given that Tyla, while being one of the most mesmerizing talents on the continent, is not primarily an Afrobeats artist. Taken at face value, the symbolism of her win is ominous—an artist who occasionally flirts with the genre winning over veritable stalwarts of the genre, some of the brightest and most innovative artists Afrobeats has to offer. 

But considering her win within the context of events that have happened in the past few years reveals an even more grim portrait, one that suggests that Afrobeats artists are being left behind on the stages of global award shows. Starting around 2016, Afrobeats began a dizzying ascent to global prominence. Artists and casual fans alike watched, with bracing enthusiasm, as the gap between Nigerian artists and their global counterparts shrunk in real-time. Soon after, foreign collaborations, global tours, and spots on global music charts such as the Billboard Hot 100, would all become commonplace, so much so that fans would start to take these monumental feats for granted. 

Dedicated categories for Afrobeats music at major global awards as well as statements from these award shows, affirming a commitment to better representation for Afrobeats music, would be the next frontier to open up. At the dawn of these happenings, the atmosphere at home was overwhelmingly celebratory. Afrobeats, African music in general, had long been sidelined on the global stage. Remember when African recipients of the BET awards used to be awarded their plaques at a separate, less-dignified event, away from the main action? This move towards greater representation for Afrobeats was supposed to correct years of error and usher in a new era for Nigerian artists—as concerns representation in global awards. The past few years have however seen this story dim several shades darker. 

It almost seems to be worse now because, despite the addition of new categories to many of these award shows and putative commitments to expanding the scope of existing categories, Afrobeats stars continue to be sidelined. As in the case of Tyla’s Favorite Afrobeats Artist nomination, many of these decisions betray a lack of understanding, on the part of these award shows, of the subtitles of the African music scene. In 2024, while receiving her MTV VMA award for the Afrobeats category, Tyla pointed out the tendency of Western award shows to erroneously categorize the broad sweep of African music as “Afrobeats.” “I know there’s a tendency to group all African artists under Afrobeats. Even though Afrobeats has run things and opened so many doors for us, African music is more than just Afrobeats.” This fact seems to be lost on these foreign awards shows. 

But it goes beyond this. It’s not just that the conveners of these awards lack a textured understanding of African music, that is part of the problem. The real issue, however, is that they have certain biases that obstruct a nuanced perspective on the panoply of sounds that constitute the African soundscape. The chief and perhaps most dangerous bias is the bias of optics. By “optics,” I mean that the nominees and eventual winners are chosen not just for the quality of their music but also for incidental factors such as how compelling their story is, how relatable they are to a global audience, and how digestible their music is to foreign ears. To some degree, this problem of “optics” blights most award categories but it’s especially prevalent in African and “world” categories. 

It’s why Rema’s Heis lost out to Matt B Alkebulan II in the Best Global Music Album category at the 2025 edition of the Grammys. Both albums are Afrobeats, but while Rema delivers a subversive spin on the genre which fuses foundational elements of Afrobeats with more contemporary influences into a stunning whole that may feel intense to uninitiated listeners, Matt B, who is American, delivers a staid, almost stilted, project which neuters some of the complexities that define the genre. It’s also telling that an artist like Seyi Vibez, who is one of the most exciting and prominent voices, is always left out at these awards. Even the most fervent of his fans would agree that he stands no chance at these awards. His distinctive style—which blends cascading drums, frenetic syncopations, lyrics delivered primarily in pidgin and Yoruba, and melodies that defy simple categorizations—is simply too much for them.

By the same token, fans, when pondering on why Ayra Starr continues to lose at these awards despite her ridiculous level of talent and commercial acclaim, invariably conclude that she needs to sing less in pidgin and more in English, and lean more into Western pop and RnB as opposed to Afrobeats which is her preferred medium of expression. Asake, they also argue, needs to transmute his often stylistically complex music into a simpler form that fits the predictable time signatures Western audiences are more familiar with. Likewise, Rema needs to do the “wise thing” by quenching his predilection for experimentation in favor of music that can be easily digested by Western critics. 

It’s important to note that these, mostly Western critics, are not inherently averse to complexity in music. Mavericks like Metallica and Nirvana have been hailed as intrepid iconoclasts. Complexity from African musicians, however, takes on a racialized, if barbaric, tenor in these spaces. Chinua Achebe in his deeply moving 1975 essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reflects on an epiphany about Conrad’s insidiously racist ideas about Africans. “The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans. I realized with horror that I was one of those ‘barbarians’ Conrad was talking about,” he writes. 

I’m not suggesting that there’s a coordinated racist agenda to discredit certain types of African music but there’s a reason why the winners at these awards tend to fit a certain stereotype. Certain forms of African music confirm their biases while others are deemed as barbaric, or, to invoke a gentle euphemism, “a bit too much.” Each time the topic of this subtle, perhaps graceful, bias against certain kinds of African music comes up in music conversations, I often hear people speak on the need to decenter ourselves from these awards. “We need to focus more on The Headies,” has become an inescapable refrain. 

While I wholly agree with this line of thinking, I sometimes wonder if this is not a coping mechanism against the sting of discrimination, yet another variation of Black nationalists in the 19th century clamoring for the forming of a new country, one free of the tyranny of discrimination. Of course, this was a valid agitation, but it was also a reaction to an untenable wrong. In the same vein, we can advocate for strengthening local institutions while recognizing the injustice of enacting tacit rules of civility on African music. Invoking a variation of a phrase from an earlier essay, If these award shows insist on nominating Afrobeats artists, it’s their responsibility to take on the task of resisting the temptation to succumb to biases and insular thinking. Anything short of that is a disrespect to the genre.