The last three years have seen music from West Africa, mostly Nigeria and Ghana, take over the world; ruling dance floors and clubs, finding chart success, selling out the biggest arenas, and clinching awards worldwide.

In the frenzy, the world quickly adopted 'Afrobeats' as the catch-all term for all the new music coming out of West Africa. But there has been some pushback by artists and other music professionals insisting on differentiating themselves from the Afrobeats horde and refusing to be labelled with a name that is so diverse and lacks a widely accepted sonic definition. From Ckay calling his music Emo-afrobeats to Rema’s Afrorave, and the more popular Burna Boy’s Afro-fusion, there is a long trail of Afrobeats being rejected as a definitive term for music from West Africa.

This begs the question, what exactly is Afrobeats? Can it be used to describe music from West Africa? What is a genre, and when can artists decide they’ve created a new genre? Do the different names by which Afrobeats have been called exist only as marketing terms?

As a term, Afrobeats' first use can be traced back to London in the 2000s, where the music first found success outside the continent. Pushed by a growing number of Africans in the diaspora, pop music from West Africa began to receive airplay on radios and in clubs, eventually getting named Afrobeats by British-based Ghanaian DJ Abrantee, who launched the first ever Afrobeats show on radio in the United Kingdom.

Afrobeats became used to tag new pop music from Africa, different from those of established legends like Angelique Kidjo, Fela Kuti, and Brenda Fassie. This new music had a more modern appeal, was influenced by Western pop and hip-hop and saw the birth of stars like PSquare, 2Face, and more. With this success came lazy generalisations; by the 2010s, most of the music from Africa which made its way to the international scene began to be referred to as Afrobeats. South African artists like Casper Nyovest, who made hip-hop and East African singers who made Bongo Flava, started to be grouped under Afrobeats.

This was controversial for various reasons, all mostly tied to the erasure of the unique and diverse music cultures and scenes that were starting to spring up across the continent. Sonically, the sounds from West Africa, where Afrobeats originated from, were widely different from the music coming out of East and South Africa despite sharing modern Western pop and hip-hop influences.

In the last three years, Afrobeats, Afro-fusion, and Afropop have become the more widely used terms to refer to West African pop music. Causing a naming and branding crises. While Afrobeats is the more common and older term, it is often criticised and dropped in favour of Afro-Fusion or Afropop, both terms whose early use can be traced to refer to the music of Angelique Kidjo and King Sunny Ade.

As an alternate term, the rise of Afro-fusion can be traced to Nigerian singer Burna Boy, who, seeking to set his unique individual take on the genre, has used the term to describe his fusion of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat with modern pop sounds, hip-hop, and reggae.

But how different is Afro-fusion from Afrobeats, especially if Afrobeats is a fusion of African sounds with Western sounds?

Fusion generally means amalgamating separate entities to create a new entity. In music, Fusion means taking elements from one genre and adding them with elements of other genres to come up with something new. Afrofusion means there is an element of foreign music with African sounds laying the foundation of this new sound to give it a new form.

All music is a fusion of various influences before it; Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat was born out of a Fusion of Jazz with Highlife and other genres. It begs the question, is Burna’s Afro-fusion just a unique individual interpretation, the same way Wizkid, Davido, and others’ music differ due to individual differences? Sonically, the genres Burna Boy draws from are the same as other artists who are comfortable with the term Afrobeats.

Pop has been used to describe popular music worldwide at a particular period. It’s a genre whose sonic style changes with time depending on whatever genre is mainstream. Africa has seen the rise of several mainstream sounds, from the Highlife of the 60s to the Disco of the 80s, the Makossa of the 90s, and Afrobeats or Afropop of the present. But the term Afropop refers not only to popular music in Africa but to popular African music that draws from Western pop influences.

Naming and branding our music is important not just for a sense of identity but for documentation and ensuring our success and culture are not lost to the void of time or appropriated.

Despite Afrobeats still being loosely defined, it has become the most used term to describe music from West Africa and has provided an umbrella under which African artists can build on the success of each other and a growing diaspora to break into new markets and push for world domination. The term Afrobeats has birthed festivals like Afronation; charts like The UK Afrobeats Singles Chart and The Billboard U.S. Afrobeats; and even rumours of a Grammy Award category.

But with the success that a widely used umbrella term has brought comes the danger of sweeping the various and diverse musical cultures across Africa under a fit-for-all term that fails to recognise diversity. Beyond Afrobeats exist modern popular genres with their distinct sonic styles, elements and cultures whose homes exist on the continent and command millions of ears, from South Africa’s Amapiano, to East Africa’s Bongo Flava, and Francophone and Central Africa’s undying Makossa and Soukous.

An image featuring pictures of some of the biggest Afrobeats artists, from Wizkid to Tiwa Savage, Tems, Rema, and Stonebwoy

The naming of a genre: Afrobeats, Afro-fusion, or Afropop?

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