Jennifer Lopez: New Grammy Category for African music got almost Nothing from All of Africa

Nigeria’s global superstar Burna Boy (center) is nominated in the new Grammy category “best African music performance.” Nominees are all from Nigeria or South Africa. Other African musicians feel neglected. Mulatu Astatke (left) is a pioneer of Ethio-jazz in Ethiopia, which has never earned a Grammy nod. North African musicians have rarely been nominated. At right: Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi.

New Grammy Category for African music Ignores almost All of Africa

The 2024 Grammy awards will see the introduction of a new category: “best African music performance.”

When the category was announced last year, Grammys CEO Harvey Mason Jr. stated that it would be “able to acknowledge and appreciate a broader array of artists” than the two existing global Grammy categories, where African artists have traditionally had the only real chance of scoring a nomination.

The actual nominees represent only two countries: Nigeria (Burna Boy, Davido, Ayra Starr and Asake & Olamide) and South Africa (Tyla, and producer Musa Keys, who is featured on Davido’s track).

The Academy had even specifically listed some of the genres they hoped to include in the category, from chimurenga (traditional thumb-piano music from Zimbabwe played on electric instruments) to Ethio-jazz (Amharic melodies from Ethiopia blended with 12-note jazz scales).

But only the two most mainstream African pop styles were represented — Afrobeats and Amapiano — with one nominated track even named “Amapiano,” a South African form derived from house music whose name translates roughly as “the pianos.”

And though there are an estimated 2,000-plus “living languages” across Africa, the lyrics for all seven nominated songs are either entirely in English or largely contain English words. The nominees have other commonalities. They’re all based in cities and hail from either Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, or South Africa, the continent’s third largest economy. Those two nations together account for nearly 20% of the nominations historically in the Grammys global categories.

The Burna Boy phenomenon

As for the category’s goal of highlighting artists in this new category who might not otherwise get Grammy recognition: Burna Boy is also nominated in the two global Grammy categories this year, plus he has a fourth nod for “melodic rap.”

And he is a true international superstar. Burna Boy, whose grandfather once managed the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, records for Atlantic/Warner Music, one of the largest record conglomerates in the world. In June, he became the first African artist to sell out a U.K. stadium— the 80,000 capacity London Olympic Stadium.

“The commercial success of Burna Boy dwarfs that of any of his African Grammy predecessors,” says Banning Eyre, lead producer for the Peabody Award-winning Afropop Worldwide radio program and magazine. “It does raise the question of what exactly is being rewarded — artistic excellence or market success?”

Of course, that is a question that’s asked of many Grammy categories, where some artists get nominated time and time again in their respective fields — classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, reggae, pop. We reached out repeatedly to the Recording Academy for comment; they did not respond.

Musical voices from the rest of Africa

For this story, I interviewed a number of artists from across Africa. Many of them are from the three quarters of African countries that have never seen a single nomination for their artists. In the interest of transparency, I will note that I am a Grammy-winning producer of music from Africa and other parts of the Global South. But I will not be referring to or quoting any of the musicians I’ve recorded.

Aziza Brahim, 46, a respected “desert blues” singer from the displaced Sahrawi people in the disputed Western Sahara region, says: “These two nations— Nigeria and South Africa— are not the only ones in African music. Africa is diverse in cultures, languages and music. I don’t even know Burna Boy. I’ve never listened to him.”

“I feel like there’s some laziness with the Global Grammys,” notes Emel Mathlouthi, 40, a Tunisian singer who rose to fame with her protest song “Kelmti Horra” (“My Word is Free”) when it became an anthem during the Arab Spring. “Once the Grammy voters identify an artist that works for them within the global category, then that person is gonna be present over and over and over and over. There’s not a huge effort to really be representative of diverse people globally.”

The facts back her up: For example, South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo have won five Grammys and been nominated 17 other times. Angelique Kidjo of Benin has won five Global Grammys and been nominated on 14 other occasions. And Burna Boy himself has already been nominated 10 times and won once, all in just the past four years.

By contrast, since 2008 only three new African countries have entered the list of Grammy nominees: Ghana, Malawi and Niger.

“The award is just the West’s vision of what world music or global music should be,” says Mathlouthi… More @ NPR

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