Into The Music
Afrobeats is everywhere now, which is both obvious and worth sitting with for a moment. It is in the Beyonce catalogue, it is on pop radio, it has reshaped what the Billboard charts look like in ways the chart editors are still catching up to. Artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Tems, and Davido are playing arenas in cities they could not have sold out a decade ago. The genre, or the sound, or whatever you want to call it, has completed a journey from Lagos clubs to the global mainstream that nobody predicted would happen this fast.
It is worth getting some terminology straight first. Afrobeats with an “s” is a catch-all term for the contemporary sound that emerged from West Africa, primarily Nigeria, in the 2000s and accelerated through the 2010s. It is not the same as Afrobeat without an “s,” which refers to the revolutionary genre invented by Fela Kuti in Nigeria in the late 1960s and 1970s. Fela’s Afrobeat was politically charged funk jazz, long-form and confrontational, the sound of resistance. Modern Afrobeats borrows rhythmically from that tradition but is something distinct: it is pop music, it is dance music, it is made to move you and to stream well and to exist across multiple platforms simultaneously. Conflating them is a category error that irritates practitioners of both, and understandably so.
The modern sound coalesced in Lagos. Producers like Don Jazzy and artists like D’banj were central to early formations in the mid-2000s. What they were building drew on highlife, which has been the dominant popular music of West Africa since the mid-twentieth century, and juju, and hip-hop, and R&B, and dancehall, and recombined these influences into something that sounded both deeply local and immediately legible to international ears. The rhythm is the core: the Afrobeats groove has a particular bounce, a slightly delayed kick, a percussion pattern that is identifiable within a few seconds regardless of what language the lyrics are in.
Wizkid’s “Ojuelegba” in 2014 was a turning point. Drake heard it, remixed it with Skepta, and suddenly the international music industry was paying attention in a different way. Skepta’s involvement brought UK grime’s audience into contact with Lagos, which was its own significant collision. Afrobeats and grime have continued to cross-pollinate, and the results have pushed both in productive directions.
Burna Boy is the figure who most comprehensively forced the global audience to take the music seriously on its own terms rather than as an exotic novelty. His 2019 album African Giant was a statement of intent. Twice as Tall in 2020 won a Grammy. He plays the O2 Arena now, not as a novelty booking but as a genuine draw. His interviews are as interesting as his music, full of articulate frustration with the ways African artists have historically been required to code-switch or dilute their work for Western acceptance. He has refused to do that, and it has worked.
Tems occupies a different space. Her voice is distinctive in a way that very few voices are, a controlled, smoky thing that can anchor a sparse production or cut through a big beat with equal authority. Her collaborations with Drake and Future have introduced her to mainstream pop audiences, but her solo work is where the full picture comes through. She is not just a feature vocalist. She is a songwriter and an artist with a clear vision of what she is making.
What the global success of Afrobeats has produced is complicated, which is the honest way to describe it. There is a genuine celebration here: music rooted in African cultures and languages and rhythms is now moving through the same channels as American pop and British pop and Latin pop, on equal terms or close to it. That matters. It represents a real shift in how the industry thinks about where music comes from and who it is for.
But there is also pressure that comes with mainstreaming. Producers working in the Afrobeats tradition are increasingly asked to sand down the edges for Western playlists. Some have done that happily. Others have pushed back. The internal conversation within the genre about what is authentic and what is product is getting louder as the money gets bigger, which is a version of a conversation every music scene has eventually, and never resolves cleanly.
The sound is still evolving. Amapiano, the South African genre built on a slow-building log drum bass pattern, has crossed into the Afrobeats world and produced new fusions that are their own thing. Afropop artists in France and Portugal and the diaspora communities across Europe are making music that sits in the tradition without being identical to what is coming out of Lagos. The family tree is sprawling and still growing.
What is certain is that the global center of popular music is no longer where it was. New York and London still matter, but so does Lagos, so does Accra, so does Johannesburg. Afrobeats did not just add a new genre to the mix. It changed the map.
Reading this as someone whose musical world is mostly Norwegian folk and black metal, the Afrobeats phenomenon genuinely moves me in a way I didn’t expect. There is something in the relationship between rhythm and joy in Afrobeats that reminds me of how traditional Norwegian music ties community to landscape , it is music that carries a place with it, music you cannot separate from where it came from. The fact that it has travelled so far without losing that rootedness feels almost miraculous to me. Beyoncé’s engagement with it on the Renaissance project felt respectful in a way that crossover often isn’t.