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WRITTEN BY: Regula Rebel
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As Nigeria’s globally recognized music art notability with afrobeats has created the false impression that Nigerian artistes only do Afrobeats and awards schemes worldwide thus have only been boxing Nigerian artistes into afrobeats categories, a worried Wizkid felt the need to educate the global public and industry gatekeepers that the fact that he is a Nigerian doesn’t make him a strict afrobeats artiste but he does other genres as well and he implied that he should be nominated for those genres too other than just being boxed into afrobeats categories and h exampled his “Made In Lagos” album as a pure AfroFusion project, but Nigerians misconstrued his humble education as denial of Afrobeats.
Most Nigerians are not happy that Wizkid made such a statement, rendering his statement controversial or untrue and running a long hot debate on it on social media. They tagged him as an ingrate that is acting ungrateful to afrobeats, the very genre that shot him up high to global stardom. The most notable among the unhappy lot is Seun Kuti, a son of Fela Kuti [the originator of afrobeats].
Seun Kuti took it to Instagram to pour his wrath on Wizkid, but his wrath ran as a subtle spread over Burna Boy and a few other Nigerian artistes that talk down on afrobeats recently. Burna said in an interview during the release of his “I Told Them” album that afrobeats has no substance, that it’s a gibberish genre. Davido wasn’t not left out from the ingrate list, some fans implicate him Wizkid and Burna Boy.
Wizkid’s AfroFusion tweet reads:
Seun Kuti’s response reads:
It’s a common inference that Nigerians feel that they’ll lose the glory of afrobeats to AfroFusion, should their artistes claim that they are now AfroFusion artistes. Of course, afrobeats seems to be exclusive to Nigeria, though other African countries like Ghana also do afrobeats. Afrobeats’ seeming exclusivity to Nigeria has given Nigerian artistes a continental superiority over it, putting every other competitive African country that does afrobeats into oblivion — thus in the world’s perception is it held that Nigeria is the best-go-to market for afrobeats proper. This perception makes Ghana and other African countries doing afrobeats look bogus in the global music market whenever afrobeats is the music consumption conversation.
Fact is, should the name AfroFusion somehow win the creative focus of top awards schemes category creators and eventually take the top stage of music art affairs where and when modern time African music is being considered for commercial importance, afrobeats will lose its Nigeria-exclusivity status after AfroFusion has been the general name for all Africa’s modern hybrid music. Nigerian music stakeholders are aware of this AfroFusion future superiority reality, thus they feel threatened when their artistes, especially the top ones, speak lowly of afrobeats.
When the world replaces the name afrobeats with AfroFusion, the name-change of the genre will level the global music market ground for all African artistes that do modern hybrid music, thus Nigerians will lose a part or most of their current hard commercial reign with afrobeats.
