On Sunday evening, Afrobeats megastar Burna Boy will electrify Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. While he has graced the UK’s biggest festival before, this marks his debut on the iconic main stage, a focal point of Glastonbury for decades. Fellow Afrobeats star Ayra Starr also performed on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday, while Tems had a slot on the Other Stage.
From West Africa to the global stage, Afrobeats has surged in popularity, dominating playlists and radio. On Spotify, the genre has grown by 1,200% since 2017. With its artists now performing at the pinnacle of the UK’s largest festival, it feels like another significant milestone has been reached. “It’s our time,” Starr told BBC News. “It’s been a long time coming and we deserve this.”
The genre has its roots in Nigeria and Ghana and began gaining rapid popularity in the 2010s, with early hits from artists like Fuse ODG and D’banj. It is distinct from “Afrobeat” – minus the “s” – a movement created in the 1960s and 1970s by artist and activist Fela Kuti. Kuti’s musical style is a fusion of traditional African rhythms with funk, jazz, and highlife. Coincidentally, Kuti himself played at Glastonbury in 1984, and this year, his son Femi Kuti played on the Pyramid Stage.
Afrobeats, with an “s”, is a completely different sound. It is generally seen as a fusion of traditional West African musical styles with Western pop, rap, and dancehall. “Afrobeat spoke to a much older audience,” said DJ Edu, who hosts BBC 1Xtra’s AfroSounds show. “Afrobeats has been driven a lot by social media,” he added, noting that young people traveling to different parts of the world also helped spread the sound.
There were challenges, of course. DJ Edu mentioned that many early Afrobeats artists were not well-versed in the music industry. “They were just kids making music from their bedrooms, not worrying about streaming or royalties. That was the big problem, there was no structure,” he said. However, as bigger artists started making headway, younger ones were able to learn from them and chart their own route in the industry.
DJs in the UK began fusing pop music with Nigerian and Ghanaian beats, introducing the sounds to new audiences. Songs from the genre regularly started crossing into the mainstream, with its first big global success being the release of “Oliver Twist” by D’banj in 2012. The song made the top 10 on the official UK Singles Chart and was number two in the UK R&B Charts. It is often described as the first time Afrobeats really took hold in the UK.
From then on, Afrobeats quickly spread around the world. It has often been described as one of Africa’s biggest cultural exports. “We’ve been waiting for the globalization of Afrobeats, and it’s happening now,” Starr said, speaking ahead of her Glastonbury performance. “But it’s not just what you’re seeing today. It’s years and generations of musicians and hard work that’s made it what it is now.”
TikTok and YouTube, where many people discover new music, have played a significant role in taking Afrobeats to new audiences in the UK, the US, and beyond. One example is Nigerian artist CKay’s “Love Nwantiti,” which went viral on the app and became the most Shazam-ed song in the world in 2021. Songs by singers Davido, Burna Boy, and Wizkid have also gained popularity through their TikTok dance routines.
Collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé, Drake, and Justin Bieber have also helped elevate the Afrobeats scene to new heights. For example, Drake featured Wizkid on 2016’s “One Dance,” which helped put a spotlight on the singer and the genre he represents. In the summer of 2023, Burna Boy made history by becoming the first African artist to headline a stadium show in the UK in front of a sold-out crowd of 60,000 at the London Stadium.
“The genre’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric,” Sheniece Charway, YouTube’s artists’ relations manager for black music and culture, told BBC News. “Afrobeats has ignited a global revolution, and its captivating trajectory shows no sign of slowing.” “Popular music is pop music and Afrobeats has become popular music globally,” she added. “We are seeing the likes of Wizkid, Libianca, and Burna Boy all having global success, which shows that their audience is everywhere.”
In a sign of the genre’s huge global popularity, it has been included as a category in several major awards. Billboard in the US recently added an Afrobeats category, with Burna Boy and fellow Nigerian star Rema both recognized at the event in November. Burna Boy, who has also been the recipient of a Grammy, dedicated his award “to Africa and every artist coming out of Africa now.”
Meanwhile, Rema won a gong for his near-ubiquitous song “Calm Down,” which has smashed multiple streaming and chart records. The track, which featured Selena Gomez, became the first African artist-led track to hit a billion streams on Spotify. Accepting the Billboard award for best Afrobeats song, Rema thanked his fans and called the prize “a celebration of unity and the global domination of Afrobeats.”
The MTV VMAs, Grammys, and American Music Awards have also recently added the category of best Afrobeats. DJ Edu says this recognition has meant a lot to Afrobeats artists. “[It] shows there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for this music,” he said.
For Starr, part of the reason for Afrobeats’ huge growth is the fact the sound is overwhelmingly positive. “Afrobeats is enjoyment. You have to enjoy yourself, you have to be at a club or at a party to make the music that people want to dance to. And we like to dance,” she said. “I feel like that’s why it’s our time. I think God has made it like that – because we make positive music, we make high vibrational music.”
Meanwhile, in the UK, British artists have been developing their own style and sound, such as Afroswing, which merges Afrobeats with dancehall, grime, rap, and R&B. Grammy award-winning producer Jae5, based in the UK, has produced mega-hits for Burna Boy and Dave. “The main influence that I’m infusing things with is the African culture,” he told BBC News. “I’ll make a hip hop song and it will still have a lot of percussive elements. I might make a ballad and I’ll have more percussive elements than a normal track. So the African sound is what is continuous in my music. The groove of Africa is very different from the groove over here.”
Having swept the globe and landed at Glastonbury, what’s next for Afrobeats? Jae5 can see it going from strength to strength, as people are “infatuated” by the sound. “The world is huge and Afrobeats has so much space to grow,” he said. “And the fact that [fans] are receiving it in the way they are is amazing.”
Source: BBC News, DJ Mag
