Posted by Ama Serwah Genfi, best known by her stage name Amaarae, is a Ghanaian-American singer who has criticized the Grammy Awards’ organizer, the Recording Academy, for lumping all African music subgenres together into one category.
The Grammys recently added a category for “Best African Music Performance,” as reported by 460play.
The category is open to both modern and traditional African music, such as Afrobeats, Afropop, Amapiano, High Life, Fuji, etc., according to the award’s organizers.
However, in a recent interview with Metro TV, Amaarae referred to the Grammys’ decision to lump all African musical genres under a single category as “reductive.”
“I think it is reductive,” she remarked of the Grammys’ African category, adding that it is a beautiful idea in theory. There are far too many types of music to lump them all together as African music.
“Take a song like ‘Sad Girlz,’ ‘Calm Down,’ ‘Calm Down,’ or ‘Last Last,’ which all performed well not just in Africa but had enormous global effects. So they seem like popular records to me.
“So, in my opinion, a song like [Rema’s] ‘Calm Down’ with the Selena Gomez remix should be able to compete in pop categories [at the Grammys],” said the author. I believe that “Last Last” by Burna Boy should be eligible to participate in hip-hop, R&B, or pop categories rather than being restricted to the African category because it is a denigration of the groundbreaking work done by [African] artists.