The Long Night Between Afrobeat and Afrobeats

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 grandparent and a grandchild are related: continuous DNA, sixty years of life choices in between.

Afrobeat, singular, is the Lagos-based fusion that Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the drummer Tony Allen began assembling around 1968 — Yoruba percussion, Highlife horn writing, James Brown's funk vocabulary, and the harmonic restlessness of late-period jazz. Afrobeats, plural, with the trailing s, is a pop genre that crystallized in Lagos and Accra in the late 2000s and broke globally around 2016, built on dancehall, hip-hop, R&B, and a loosened version of Highlife's rhythmic feel.

Fela Kuti's afrobeat was the sound of African decolonization arguing with itself. The arrangements ran ten to thirty minutes. The band, Africa '70 and later Egypt '80, often carried twenty performers on stage. The lyrics, in Pidgin English and Yoruba, were political enough that Fela was arrested by the Nigerian state more than a hundred and fifty times across his life.

The embed is Zombie, released in 1976 on Coconut Records. The song called Nigerian soldiers mindless zombies, and the army's response was to raid Fela's commune — 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 died of her injuries the following year. Fela responded with the 1979 album Coffin for Head of State.

That is the scale at which afrobeat operated. The songs were not entertainment with a political coating. They were the political object itself.

Starting in the late 2000s, a new Lagos pop sound took shape around producers like Don Jazzy and Sarz and a generation of singers that would include Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, Tems, Rema, and Asake. 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 gait — the loose, percussion-forward feel — 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.

The embed is Essence by Wizkid featuring Tems, from Made in Lagos (RCA / Starboy, 2020). When the Justin Bieber remix arrived in 2021 it became the first Nigerian-led song to enter the Billboard Hot 100 top ten. Critics called it a great-grandchild of Fela's long-form work, compressed to fit a Spotify playlist.

Fela died of complications from AIDS in 1997. His son Femi Kuti and grandson Made Kuti both continue to record and perform; they share the Grammy-nominated album Legacy+ from 2021 and they still play eight- and ten-minute pieces at the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, a venue Femi rebuilt after the original Shrine was lost in the 1977 raid.

Afrobeat, singular, has not been extinguished. But the distance between the music Femi and Made play at the Shrine on a Sunday night and the music Burna Boy plays at the O2 Arena in London is a real fifty-year distance, and it shouldn't be papered over. A father, a son, and a grandson, working in three different rooms in the same building — that is rare enough to be worth saying out loud.