Ghanaian artistes Stonebwoy and Sarkodie have been bashed for comments they made about the dominance of Afrobeats on the international music scene.
The two Ghanaian music giants expressed their opinion on the music industry lumping all music from Africa as Afrobeats.
In an interview with France 24 (English) in Paris, the interviewer sought their take on having Afrobeats as a general description of sounds from Africa.
In his response, Stonebwoy said: “It is good exposure and same time it is lumping because there are criteria by which those are defined. And sometimes when you move away from those criteria, music still lives on and people still feed on, you know what I mean. I think some of the criteria they use is when you trend on tik tok and when you do all those things but sometimes some of us have come from schools where you just do the music and the music lives with people.”
.@stonebwoy and @sarkodie express their opinion on lumping all music from Africa as Afrobeats.
Source: France 24 (English) #GhanaWeekend pic.twitter.com/Q4L8uLXOAp
— Ghana Weekend (@GhanaWeekend) April 22, 2022
He added that it adds on to expose African music but there is more to Afrobeats and all the charts that comes with it.
On Sarkodie’s part, he said: “I think anything successful is definitely gonna have people want to come and join it so I’m definitely up for it. As he said, I think we just have to make sure we don’t have to lose the core of what the music stands for so we don’t lose the value of what the Afrobeats stands for.”
Thanking God he was part of the generation that projected the Afrobeats agenda, Sarkodie added that he knew this was going to happen, even though he did not know when.
“I think if it stayed in Africa, that would have been just an African thing. And now everybody wants to join it. Whether you like it or not, Afrobeats is the new cool – that is the song that turns the club up,” he noted.
This comes on the back of most streaming platforms categorising all music from Africa as Afrobeats; the latest of which is the introduction of Billboard’s US Afrobeats Chart.
Afrobeats (not Afrobeat) has become a globally-accepted term used to describe songs from Africa.
In the meantime, some people on social media think Stonebwoy and Sarkodie could have done better with their answers to the question.
–
By: Kwame Dadzie | Ghana Weekend
