From the implications of Billboard’s new ‘Afrobeats US’ category to the Afrobeats crossover records with Afro-descendant artists, Afrobeats may not be the catch-all label or lens we asked for, but it’s the one being used to describe the new wave of African music.
As we sway with other Black bodies to ‘Karolina’ by Awilo Longomba in a Chicago nightclub, part of me feels like I’d briefly entered a pan-African utopia, the Wakanda of my dreams. With every whine, hearing the Congolese soukous fills me with nostalgia for the early aughts. As I look around, I realize what’s been exalted as a dancefloor staple for decades, akin to hearing Bell Biv DeVoe’s ‘Posion’ or Montell Jordan’s ‘This is How We Do It’, is now being lumped into the ‘Afrobeats’, a category it supersedes.
The recognition that Afrobeats is becoming the catch-all term for any music emanating from the continent is coupled with fascination about what that could mean for Africans. As fans, protection is the first impulse: to safeguard the music against the flattening of the breadth of African contemporary music genres as one...
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