Tyla’s second Grammy win has reignited debate across Africa’s music industry, raising hard questions about fairness, genre definitions, and whether Nigerian Afrobeats stars are being consistently overlooked on the global stage.
By Chiedu Nnaedozie
For the second time in as many editions, the Recording Academy has handed the Grammy for Best African Music Performance to South Africa’s Tyla, this year for Push 2 Start, once again edging out Nigeria’s most dominant Afrobeats heavyweights: Davido, Burna Boy, Ayra Starr, Omah Lay, and others whose sounds currently define Africa’s global musical moment. On paper, the result appears defensible. In mood, however, it feels disquieting. In implication, it is deeply provocative.
The question now circulating, quietly in some corners, loudly in others, is not whether Tyla is talented. She unquestionably is. The deeper, more uncomfortable question is whether the Grammys are misunderstanding African music, misclassifying Afrobeats, or deliberately privileging a version of “African sound” that is more legible, palatable, and export-ready for Western pop markets; often at the expense of Nigeria, the engine room of modern Afrobeats.
At the heart of the controversy lies genre. Afrobeats, classically speaking, is not merely African pop made south of the Sahara. It is a specific Nigerian-led musical tradition: rhythm-forward, percussion-heavy, indebted to highlife, Fuji, juju, hip-hop, and dancehall, and deeply rooted in Nigerian social life. Tyla’s music, by contrast, is firmly grounded in Amapiano, a South African genre built around log drums, minimalist grooves, and slowed-down house textures, layered with contemporary pop and R&B sensibilities. Water and Push 2 Start are elegant, atmospheric, and global. But they are not Afrobeats in any rigorous musical sense.
Why, then, does Tyla keep winning an award that implicitly places her above artistes whose work more clearly embodies African popular music’s most influential movement of the last decade?
One answer may lie in how the Recording Academy defines “excellence.” The Grammys have never been a simple popularity contest. They reward polish, cohesion, branding, and crossover appeal as much as cultural dominance. Tyla’s artistry arrives perfectly packaged for this logic. Her sound is sleek, restrained, and globally intelligible. Her songs travel easily across borders, radio formats, and streaming playlists without the need for cultural translation. In this sense, she represents a version of African music that does not demand too much of the Western listener.
Nigerian Afrobeats, for all its global success, often does the opposite. It is exuberant, maximalist, sometimes chaotic. It leans unapologetically into local slang, inside jokes, phonetic hooks, and “vibes-over-vocabulary” songwriting. Davido’s music, for instance, is engineered for collective joy: weddings, clubs, street corners, stadiums. Burna Boy’s work, while more politically textured, still thrives on rhythmic density and Afrocentric swagger. Ayra Starr and Omah Lay push emotional vulnerability, but within a sonic grammar that remains distinctly Nigerian.
Ironically, what has made Afrobeats globally dominant may also be what limits its Grammy success. Nigerian artists often “farm” streams, prioritising virality, repetition, and regional resonance over the kind of tightly curated albums and singles that awards bodies favour. Songs become moments, not monuments. Hooks overpower structure. Energy eclipses restraint. The result is massive popularity, but not always the kind of sonic minimalism and aesthetic coherence that appeals to Grammy voters.
Tyla, on the other hand, plays a longer, quieter game. Her music is sparse, controlled, and brand-consistent. The log drum becomes a signature, not a frenzy. Her lyrics, while no more profound than her Nigerian counterparts, are clean, sensual, and globally legible. She is not competing with Nigerian artistes on their own terms; she is competing on the Grammys’ terms, and winning.
There is also the uncomfortable issue of optics. Tyla fits neatly into the Recording Academy’s historical comfort zone: the “breakout global pop star” narrative. She crosses over quickly, charts faster, and is framed as a fresh discovery rather than a product of a long, crowded ecosystem. Nigerian stars, by contrast, arrive as a collective force; too dominant, too loud, too ubiquitous to be novel. Familiarity, even when earned, can breed Grammy indifference.
This does not mean Tyla’s wins are illegitimate. They are instructive. They reveal what the Grammys reward: cohesion over chaos, mood over movement, polish over mass appeal. They also expose the academy’s unresolved confusion about African music itself. By collapsing Afrobeats, Amapiano, and pan-African pop into a single category, the Grammys flatten crucial distinctions and force fundamentally different traditions into competition with one another.
There is another layer to Tyla’s success that cannot be ignored: representation. Her rise carries enormous cultural weight within South Africa’s “coloured” community, a complex, historically marginalised identity forged under apartheid’s brutal racial taxonomy. Tyla’s global visibility is not just musical; it is symbolic. She embodies a story of cultural survival, hybridity, and affirmation that resonates powerfully, especially in Western liberal spaces attuned to questions of identity. That resonance matters, even if it sits uneasily alongside purely musical criteria.
So, is the Grammys deliberately shortchanging Nigerian Afrobeats artistes? Perhaps not deliberately; but structurally, yes. The awards reward a specific idea of African music: refined, digestible, genre-blended, and safely global. Nigerian Afrobeats, in its raw, communal, and often excessive glory, does not always fit that mould.
The lesson for Nigerian artistes is not to dilute their sound or chase validation. Afrobeats has already won the bigger prize: cultural dominance. But if Grammy recognition remains a goal, then the Tyla question is unavoidable. What does the academy hear as “excellence”? And how much of African music must be softened, slowed, or simplified before it qualifies?
Until the Grammys answer that honestly, or expand their categories to reflect Africa’s sonic complexity, the controversy will persist. And perhaps it should. Because African music is too vast, too varied, and too powerful to be reduced to what feels most comfortable on a Grammy ballot.
What this moment ultimately demands is not resentment, but reckoning. The Grammys must decide whether Best African Music Performance is meant to reward the music that most faithfully represents Africa’s dominant contemporary movements, or the music that best fits an already familiar Western grammar of taste. These are not the same thing. Until that distinction is clarified, the category will continue to feel less like a celebration of African plurality and more like a narrow gate through which only certain sounds, aesthetics, and narratives can comfortably pass. Africa does not lack excellence; it suffers, instead, from being endlessly interpreted rather than truly understood. For Nigerian Afrobeats artistes, the challenge is not one of relevance or reach; they already command the world’s dance floors, but of authorship over their own story. The genre must resist being quietly reframed by external validation systems that reward moderation over magnitude. Afrobeats was never designed to whisper; it was built to move bodies, bend cultures, and overwhelm borders. If the Grammys cannot fully hear that thunder yet, history almost certainly will. And when it does, the question will no longer be why Nigerian artistes were overlooked, but how long the world took to recognise that the centre of gravity had already shifted; and decisively so.
