African Music Gets Grammy Recognition

Ferdinand  Ekechukwu

A head of the 66th edition of the Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy, which is in charge of the organisation, has added three new categories to the annual award ceremony that celebrate musical excellence across the globe. In the update of events, the Grammys will now have three new categories: Best African Music Performance, Best Pop Dance Recording, and Best Alternative Jazz Album.

It is believed that the success of African stars like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, Tems, CKay, Rema, Black Sherif, Yemi Alade, and a host of others have contributed to the new African category (Best African Music Performance), which is expected to be highly competitive, considering that the new category isn’t just limited to the popular Afrobeats genre but cuts across highly rooted genres like Fuji, High Life, Kizomba, and many more.

Recall that the clamour for categories that largely recognise contemporary African sounds has been widespread in recent times. According to reports, the additional categories and further amendments were voted on and passed at the Recording Academy’s most recent semiannual Board of Trustees meeting, making the Grammys possess a total of 94 categories in the 66th edition, which take place in 2024.

Noteworthy that many music lovers were left disappointed when Nigerian singer Burna Boy first failed to clinch the Grammy awards. Burna Boy was as it were was nominated for Best World Music Album for his 2019 record ‘African Giant’ but lost out to Beninese singer-songwriter, Angelique Kidjo. Same for Wizkid at the last Grammys with his phenomenal and globally acclaimed album ‘Made in Lagos’, which lost to same Angelique Kidjo in the Best Global Music Album category (formerly Best World Music Album), including the album’s hit song ‘Essence’ lost to Pakistani Arooj Aftab in the Best Global Music Performance category.

Not a few influential figures were pissed and disappointed following the loss. Among the lots was supermodel Naomi Campbell who took to Instagram to criticize and urge the Grammy organisers to reflect on their view of ‘World Music’ and called attention to the lack of recognition for the Afrobeats music genre. Soon commenced the process to create a Grammy Award category for Afrobeats sometime last year.

This would be confirmed by Harvey Masson Jr., the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Recording Academy who then in October last year revealed that the academy has kicked off the first process in the long road to adding an Afrobeats category to the Grammys in a chat with the media while speaking to the press at the Global Citizens concert in Ghana.