Music writing routinely flattens afrobeat and afrobeats into one word, and the flattening costs the reader real information. The two genres are related the way a great-grandparent and a great-grandchild are: the same bloodline, with fifty-odd years of life choices in between.

Afrobeat, singular, is the Lagos-based fusion that Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the drummer Tony Allen began assembling in the late 1960s — Yoruba percussion, the horn arrangements of Highlife, the funk grooves of James Brown, and the shifting, unresolved chords of late-1960s jazz. Afrobeats, plural, with the trailing s, is a pop genre that crystallized in Lagos and Accra in the late 2000s and broke through globally over the 2010s, built on dancehall, hip-hop, R&B, and a loosened version of Highlife's rhythmic feel.

Fela Kuti's afrobeat was the sound of a newly independent Africa arguing with itself over which way to go. The arrangements ran ten to thirty minutes, and the band — Africa '70, later Egypt '80 — often carried twenty performers on stage. The lyrics, in Pidgin English and Yoruba, were political enough that Fela was arrested repeatedly by the Nigerian state — by many accounts more than two hundred times over his life.

Below is Zombie, released in 1976 on Coconut Records. The song called Nigerian soldiers mindless zombies — and got a commune burned to the ground. The army's response was to raid Fela's compound, the self-declared Kalakuta Republic, in February 1977. His mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a second-floor window during the raid; she never recovered and died of her injuries in 1978. In 1979 Fela carried her coffin to the barracks of the head of state in protest, and the rage became the 1980 album Coffin for Head of State.

That was the cost of the music. The songs were not entertainment with a political coating. They were the politics itself.

Starting in the late 2000s, a new Lagos pop sound took shape around a generation of singers — Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy — and the producers behind them. By the late 2010s the British music press had settled on the label afrobeats, plural, to describe it. All of those artists know who Fela Kuti was. Several have recorded explicit tributes.

What they inherited from afrobeat was the rhythmic feel — the loose, percussion-forward groove — and a sense of Lagos as the center of its own gravity rather than a satellite of London or New York. What they declined to inherit was the duration, the band size, and the protest function. A typical afrobeats single runs three minutes and is structured for radio and TikTok. The songs are about love, money, status, and the dance floor, in roughly that order.

Below is Essence by Wizkid featuring Tems, from Made in Lagos (RCA / Starboy, 2020). Critics called it a grandchild of Fela's long-form work, compressed to fit a Spotify playlist. The track first entered the Billboard Hot 100 in 2021, and when the Justin Bieber remix arrived later that year it became the first Nigerian-led song to reach the chart's top ten.

On a Sunday night at the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, three generations of one family still play eight- and ten-minute pieces: Fela's son Femi Kuti and grandson Made Kuti. Fela himself died in 1997, of complications from AIDS — a diagnosis he had publicly denied. The Shrine they play in is the one the family opened in 2000, after the original Afrika Shrine fell into disrepair following his death. In 2021 Femi and Made put out Legacy+, the joint two-album release that paired Femi's record with Made's debut; it was nominated for Best Global Music Album at the 2022 Grammys.

Afrobeat, singular, has not been extinguished. But the distance between the music Femi and Made play at the Shrine and the music Burna Boy plays to a sold-out O2 Arena in London genuinely spans half a century. A father, a son, and a grandson, each playing in a different room of the same house — a generational gap clear enough to be worth naming.