MTV quietly killed its Best Afrobeats category this month, after three years and one South African winner too many. The award didn’t fail. It answered the question it was never meant to ask.
On 18 August, MTV published the nominations for the 2026 Video Music Awards, and Best Afrobeats was not on the list. The category had existed for three years, introduced in 2023 to acknowledge the global reach of African music, and MTV offered no explanation for its removal. It wasn’t alone — nine categories were retired in the same reshuffle, Best Rock and Best Group among them — so the tidy reading is that this is housekeeping, not commentary.
That reading is too generous. Because for three years, without meaning to, MTV ran an experiment. It took the word “Afrobeats,” attached a trophy to it, and let the industry decide what qualified. The results are in, and they are not ambiguous.
Rema and Selena Gomez won the first one for “Calm Down.” Tyla won the next two, for “Water” and then “Push 2 Start” — the only artist ever to take the category twice. Tyla is from Johannesburg. Her records are built on amapiano, pop and R&B, and she has never pretended otherwise; she used her 2024 acceptance speech to identify with amapiano and distance herself from Nigerian Afrobeats, which set Nigerian social media alight and got her called a hypocrite for accepting the award at all. Both of her wins drew accusations of misrepresentation from Nigerian fans and critics, and observers have linked those complaints directly to the category’s disappearance.
Nobody, in three years of arguing about this, seems to have said the obvious thing out loud. The voters weren’t confused. The category worked exactly as designed. A South African amapiano record won Best Afrobeats twice because the only criterion the word has ever reliably encoded is where the artist is from.
The origin story is well-rehearsed and worth rehearsing again, because the details keep getting sanded down. In April 2011, a London radio programme launched on Choice FM playing D’banj, P-Square and 2Baba, and its host, the British-Ghanaian DJ Abrantee Boateng, is credited with coining “Afrobeats” to describe what he was playing. His own account of the logic was frank: highlife, hiplife, juju and the rest had been separate things, and he wanted to “put it all back together as one thing again” under a single umbrella.
Two footnotes deserve more weight than they usually get. First, the NATIVE has noted that the attribution to Abrantee is itself popular rather than accurate — the coinage passed into the record largely because a British newspaper wrote it down in 2012. That Guardian piece, “The Rise of Afrobeats,” was the first major international article to use the word, and it handed Abrantee the credit. Second, Boateng moved early to trademark Afrobeats and its offshoots — Afrobeat Charts, Afrobeats Awards — with the stated aim of building it into a global business.
So: a word invented in London, for a London radio audience, canonised by a London newspaper, and registered as intellectual property. That is not the biography of a genre. Genres emerge from rooms where the music is being made and get named, usually badly, by the people making it. Afrobeats was named from the receiving end, by people organising an import.
Scholarship has caught up. A 2024 study in the Journal of Popular Music Studies argues that Afrobeats evades definition altogether, functioning less as a genre with sonic signifiers than as a hypernym — a social and aesthetic category on one side, a marketing category on the other. Hypernym is the right word. “Afrobeats” sits above the music the way “furniture” sits above chairs.
Take four records that all currently live under the label. Asake’s 2026 single “Worship” is fújì, EDM and street pop with a DJ Snake co-production. Tyla’s catalogue is amapiano and R&B. Burna Boy’s is built on dancehall, reggae and hip-hop. Rema’s “Calm Down” is a pop record with Bollywood-adjacent string figures.
Now name one sonic feature all four share that isn’t shared by half of global pop. Tempo? No. Percussion pattern? No. Key, structure, language, instrumentation? No, no, no, no. The only common property is a continent.
The absurdity is easiest to see from outside West Africa. OkayAfrica pointed out that when Major Lazer released an album titled Afrobeats, it opened with three gqom tracks — a South African house variant with no West African lineage at all.12 In the UK the same slippage runs the other way: Ladipoe was introduced in a magazine feature as an “Afrobeats rapper,” a description later corrected simply to “Nigerian,” and J Hus has spent a career being filed under a tag his own collaborators reject on his behalf.10
None of these are errors of fact. They are the label doing precisely what it was built to do, which is answer the question “where is this from” while appearing to answer the question “what is this.”
The pushback has been running for years and is usually reported as ingratitude. It reads better as taxonomy.
Wizkid’s formulation is the sharpest: calling his music Afrobeats, he said, is “like saying every American artist makes rap.” The line does real analytical work. It identifies the label as a geographic default rather than a description — the thing you say about a place’s music when you can’t be bothered to hear the differences within it.
Burna Boy prefers Afro-fusion and has argued that collapsing all African music into Afrobeats buries highlife, fuji and kwaito; he clarified in 2023 that the point was diversity, not dismissal. King Promise says he doesn’t mind the tag but accepts it only because it has become the yardstick for any African making global music, and Simi has noted that the West sorts its own output into genres while sorting Africa’s into one. CKay calls the term overgeneralised and has been building out “Emo-Afrobeats”; Omah Lay’s complaint runs along a different axis, that the Afrobeats story is disproportionately Lagos-centric.
Read together, these aren’t five artists rejecting a genre. They are five artists reporting, independently, that they have been handed a label that describes their address.
Place-words become genre-words all the time. Hip-hop is a Bronx word. Reggaeton is a Panamanian-Puerto Rican word. K-pop is nothing but a nationality with “pop” welded on, and nobody argues that K-pop lacks a sound. Labels can start as geography and harden into aesthetics through sheer use. Perhaps Afrobeats is fifteen years into that process and the discourse is simply impatient.
There is a harder version of the defence, too. The umbrella is what got the music through the door. The commercial breakthrough dates to Drake’s “One Dance” in 2016, which spent ten weeks at number one and made Wizkid one of the first Nigerian artists atop the Hot 100 — a crossover that happened because Western listeners had a single word to attach to what they were hearing. Ambiguity was the visa. And the alternative to a category is frequently not a better category but no shelf at all.
Except the VMAs have now demonstrated what the shelf costs. With Best Afrobeats gone, Burna Boy is nominated for Best Collaboration and Best Latin for “Dai Dai” with Shakira, and Tems for Best R&B for “Raindance” with Dave. Both are competing on sonic grounds, in fields defined by what the records sound like rather than where the artists were born. That is not a demotion. That is the first time these artists have been judged by the same criteria as everyone else on the ballot.
Which is where the new wave comes in.
It has been argued that Nigeria’s new class keeps coining its own subgenre names — Afrorave, Afro-cultist, Afro-Adura, Emo-Afrobeats — instead of aligning with the global genres those sounds plainly fit. The instinct is usually read as vanity or as branding.
It isn’t. It is a workaround. Artists coin downward because the word above them has no sonic content to inherit. If Afrobeats told you what a record sounded like, nobody would need a prefix to explain themselves. The prefix wave is a generation of musicians patching a label that never described anything in the first place — and the fact that they keep reaching for “Afro-” as the patch shows how completely the umbrella has colonised the vocabulary available to them.
So: is Afrobeats a genre, or does it just mean song from Africa?
It means song from Africa. It has meant that since 2011, when a London DJ said out loud that he was putting separate things back together as one thing. The honest position is not to abolish the word — it’s too embedded, and it did real work getting the music heard. The honest position is to stop asking it to do a job it has never once done, and to name the actual music underneath: fújì, amapiano, street pop, alté, gqom, highlife, drill.
MTV’s category didn’t die because African music failed a test. It died because it passed one, twice, in the wrong accent — and the industry finally had to look at what it had actually been measuring.
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