The last decade and a half has been an incredible period of international growth for African popular music, led by West Africa’s Afrobeats and South Africa’s Amapiano. But the buzz I’ve been picking up from people in the music business who are all in Los Angeles right now for Grammys Week is that this is a special moment for African popular music taking its rightful place on the global stage.
This didn’t happen by chance. Lots of artists, managers, agents, label executives, and others have been working on what veteran Nigerian-American music executive Efe Ogbeni likes to frame as “Africa to the world.” Ogbeni, who helped chart the early international careers of acts including Davido and Tiwa Savage, says the new category and live performance will help consolidate the much higher expectations for a continent whose DNA makes up much of modern popular music. “These events are great opportunities for discovery, a lot more people are going to discover Afrobeats and African music after this,” he says.
For Timi Adeyeba, co-founder of Amplify Africa, a Los Angeles-based event organizer, this has been a long time coming. “When we started doing events in 2016, we did it out of the need to create a lane and opportunity for Africans in the diaspora to enjoy their culture because no one was really paying attention to us,” says Adeyeba.
Now, he says, that’s changed significantly of course with the rise and rise, in particular of Afrobeats artists like the nominated super stars. The genre hasn’t just filled dance floors globally, it’s also raised awareness and curiosity about an African continent which too many people around the world had typically only seen through a geopolitical or macroeconomic lens of war and poverty.
Music is just one part of the wider conversation about the influence of African youth culture that goes beyond borders. We can thank digital distribution platforms like YouTube and Spotify for the ease with which that happens today but, ultimately, it’s still all about great music.
