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…
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