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The Grammy Awards has a dedicated space for African music, but just a year after the category’s introduction it is already proving contentious. The Best African Music Performance made its debut with South Africa’s Tyla winning for her hit song Water, a blend of South African amapiano and Afropop. It was a move welcomed across the industry, especially by African artists.
But the nominations for this year’s award have raised eyebrows, especially with the inclusion of US R&B star Chris Brown. The 35-year-old has been nominated for his chart-topping single Sensational, which incorporates Afrobeats elements and features guest vocals from Nigerian artists Davido and Lojay.
Should non-African artists be considered in a category meant to showcase African talent? Music is about inclusivity. We don’t want to fence people out of genres, Grammy CEO Harvey Mason Jr tells the BBC. If we start deciding who can or can’t make a certain type of music, we lose the essence of creativity.
Another bone of contention this year is the dominance of Afrobeats, which has its roots in Nigeria and Ghana. There is a feeling that the Grammys remain too focused on it, to the exclusion of other African music genres, despite calls for inclusivity.
For example, amapiano, a genre that in 2023 surpassed 1.4 billion streams on the music app Spotify. Raphael Benza, head of Johannesburg-based record label Vth Season, says the very name Best African Performance goes against pigeonholing.
Coming from the home of amapiano, I would say [musicians] are doing extremely good work and I think next year you’ll see amapiano artists being nominated in this category, he tells the BBC. African musicians have won Grammys long before the Best African Music Performance Award was established.
South Africa’s Mariam Makeba was the first to win one – Best Folk Recording – in 1966 for her collaboration with Harry Belafonte, called simply An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba.
African artists became more of a feature after 1992, with the introduction of the Best World Music Album. That category has gone through various guises over the years – including being split into traditional and contemporary world music awards – and is now known as Best Global Music Album.
But African musicians have often broken out of that category, for example, South Africa’s Black Coffee won Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2022.
The hope is that to counter the dominance of Afrobeats, more categories from Africa will be offered at the Grammys in years to come.
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