Singer Seun Kuti has shared his view on how Afrobeats should be regarded in the music world.
Naijabrain reports that speaking during an interview with The Beat Fm in Lagos, the Grammy-nominated artiste explained that Afrobeats is not a genre but rather a label used to describe music coming out of Africa.
He said that many artistes under the Afrobeats umbrella experiment with different sounds, moving from dancehall to blues, Nigerian pop, or even amapiano, depending on what is trending.
Kuti stressed that this shows Afrobeats does not function as a proper genre, since both musicians and industry executives do not treat it like one.
According to him, Afrobeats is best understood as a tag created to identify African music in general, similar to how amapiano has become the latest trend carrying that label.
He argued that what people call Afrobeats is simply a broad title used for identification, not a fixed musical style.
He said: “I think Afrobeats is more of a title than a genre. You can see Amapiano is the new Afrobeats. It’s the new title, it’s the new thing in Afrobeats. So, Afrobeats is just a generalisation; it’s just a title to identify something from a particular place [Africa].
“I don’t think it’s a genre. Even the gatekeepers, the big names don’t deal with it like a genre, they don’t work it like a genre. They are [Afrobeats] artists that are eclectic in a way that they could do a dancehall track today, do a blue track tomorrow, do a Nigerian pop sound, jump on Amapiano, and whatever that is trending. So, I think it’s actually a title.”
