Afrobeat or Afrobeats; Why the Added "S"?

Most casual and ardent listeners of African music have come across the terms "Afrobeat" and "Afrobeats." Some might not even notice that the latter term has an added "s" while some might just casually dismiss it or even use the latter and the former interchangeably. 

Read about the difference between these two musical styles and why clarifying really matter or make a difference? 

Apart from terms like Afro-pop, Afro-fusion, and others, Afrobeat and Afrobeats are more frequently used to categorize popular music that comes out of Africa, thanks to radio, television, and the internet. There are different kinds of music across Africa; traditional African music is the purest and most original form of African music. It is a type of African music void of foreign influences. Under traditional African music, some subcategories are particular and unique to each African society - properly explaining that will be beyond the context of this article. 

Photo By: Daniel James

There are contemporary African musical styles like the highlife of Ghana and Nigeria, Fuji, Juju, Apala, Mbalax, Soukous, Makossa, Afrobeat, and many other genres/sub-genres being created every day by emerging African musicians. Although this is amazing for the African popular music scene, it also makes categorization a tedious and confusing task. For example, in Nigeria, it is prevalent to hear fusions of drastically different genres and styles. An excellent example of a musician who does this is Burna Boy, who also happens to be one of the first Nigerian musicians to win a Grammy. 

In similar cases, you would hear a secular hip hop musician rapping to a hardcore hip hop or rap instrumental in their local languages and tonal inflections, creating a very complex blend of popular music with traditional African music. To understand what I mean, check out Nigerian rappers Phyno and Terry Apala and the gospel music group known as the Midnight crew. Now, let's get back to "Afrobeat," or "Afrobeats." How are they different? 

Afrobeat

Afrobeat (without the "s") is the music genre pioneered by Nigerian musical icon Fela Kuti. Afrobeat fuses American funk, West African highlife/rhythm, and jazz music. To understand the funk influence in Afrobeat, listen to the track "Get on the Good Foot" by James Brown, listen out especially for the rhythmic groove, the overall role of the rhythm, lead and bass guitar, and then carefully listen to the horn section. Hold it there! Now, carefully listen to Fela Kuti's "Suffering and Shmiling." Listen out for the similarities, the funk, and James Brown's influence in Afrobeat. 

As for the influence of Jazz music in Afrobeat, it is evident in the Jazzy horn lines, piano comping, and improvisation, which is very prominent in Fela Kuti's Afrobeat music. Fela would take very long horn solos (often built from scales like the harmonic minor, natural minor, pentatonic and blue scales). These solos would last for up to ten or fifteen minutes before finally singing very simple lyrics in Nigerian pidgin. "Audience participation," one of the significant features in African artistic performances, is also quite clear in Afrobeat through the intense use of "call and response" or Antiphonal singing. To spot the jazz comping style in Afrobeat, take a listen to Unknown Soldier, and Swegbe and Pako

The lyrical style in Afrobeat is similar to that of West African Highlife music, which uses very simple everyday language and mostly Nigerian pidgin English. An excerpt from the song African Woman by Fela goes like this:  

"If you call am woman, African woman, she no go gree, she go say I be lady." 

To deeply understand Afrobeat, you need to listen to Fela Kuti extensively. Before embarking on that extensive listening, I recommend you start with songs like Gentleman, Lady and Teacher don't teach me nonsense. Other notable Afrobeat artists you should listen to are Tony Allen, Seun Kuti, and Femi Kuti. 

Afrobeats (with the "s") 

Photo By: Hangula Lucas

Afrobeats (with the "s") is the general classification for contemporary African musical styles, which are mainly fusions of the original African music genres like Highlife, Hiplife, Makossa with Afrobeat (without the "s"). Fela's Afrobeat is always the basis of this genre. It fuses elements from genres like pop, raga, rap, trap, and others with Fela Kuti's original Afrobeat style. Also, it can be used to loosely describe African popular styles which are mainly fusions. These types of music are heterogeneous in the sense that they are made up of elements from many kinds of music and thus would be wrong to classify them under any of this genre it borrows from.

To hear how Afrobeats sound, I recommend listening to some tunes from musicians like Burna Boy, Davido, Wizkid, Oritse Femi, Yemi Alade, Simi, Phyno, Terry Apala, Tecno, Dbanj, Uhuru, Sauti Sol, Vanessa Mdee, and others. They can all be found by a simple YouTube search of those names. 

However diverse or subtle the differences between these two genres are, one name remains synonymous with both genres, and that name is Fela Kuti.