Tyla’s Grammy Triumph and the Cost of a Catch-All African Category

Tyla’s victory at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night was, on its face, another milestone in the fast-moving global ascent of African pop.

Her win for Push 2 Start in the Best African Music Performance category marked her second Grammy in as many years, an extraordinary achievement for a 24-year-old artist whose international breakthrough only began in earnest with Water.

The Recording Academy framed the moment as progress, proof that African music continues to command space on one of the world’s most influential cultural stages. Yet almost immediately, the celebration curdled into controversy, exposing a long-simmering fault line about genre, ownership, and who gets to define Africa’s most lucrative sound.

The unease was not about Tyla’s talent. Few dispute her polish, her pop instincts, or her global appeal. Push 2 Start is sleek, restrained, and built for international consumption, leaning into a rhythmic minimalism that draws more clearly from South African amapiano and contemporary R&B than from West African Afrobeats.

The issue, rather, is the category itself and what it continues to reward. For the second consecutive year, the Grammy for African music went to an artist who does not make Afrobeats in any strict or historical sense, while Nigerian artists who helped turn the genre into a global export once again walked away empty-handed.

Afrobeats, as understood in Lagos, Accra, and across much of West Africa, is not a catch-all term for African pop. It is a specific cultural movement with roots in Nigerian and Ghanaian music scenes, shaped by local rhythms, pidgin-laced lyricism, and a decades-long evolution that predates its Western validation.

Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and a younger generation, including Ayra Starr and Omah Lay, did not simply benefit from Afrobeats’ rise; they built it, often without institutional support, and pushed it into global consciousness through touring, diaspora networks, and grassroots fanbases. That history matters, especially when award bodies position themselves as arbiters of cultural recognition.

The Recording Academy attempted to sidestep these tensions by naming the category Best African Music Performance rather than Afrobeats. In theory, the distinction should allow for a broader and more inclusive understanding of the continent’s music.

In practice, however, the category has been marketed, discussed, and emotionally received as a proxy for recognition of Afrobeats. Many of the nominees come from the Afrobeats ecosystem. Media coverage frequently collapses the distinction. When the winner is announced, the conversation almost always centers on Afrobeats, regardless of the category’s official name. The result is confusion at best and cultural erasure at worst.

Tyla herself has been candid at various points about not being an Afrobeats artist. Her sound, she has said, reflects her South African background and her immersion in amapiano, pop, and R&B. That honesty has done little to shield her from backlash, largely because the criticism is less about her individual choices than about the structures that elevate her work in a space many Nigerians feel was created to acknowledge their genre’s global impact.

To some fans, it feels as though Afrobeats is being celebrated without being understood, its success harvested while its core identity is blurred beyond recognition.

The frustration in Nigeria is amplified by patterns that are hard to ignore. Over multiple international award cycles, Afrobeats artists dominate nominations, generate global streaming numbers, and fill arenas across Europe and North America, yet struggle to convert that visibility into wins.

When victories do come, they often go to artists whose music aligns more neatly with Western pop sensibilities. For critics, this suggests an institutional comfort with African music that sounds familiar enough to global ears, even if it sidelines the genre that forced open the door in the first place.

There is also a deeper question about how Africa itself is being flattened in the global imagination. By grouping dozens of countries, languages, and musical traditions into a single category, awards bodies risk reinforcing the idea that African music is a monolith.

The irony is that at a moment when African artists are asserting greater creative autonomy and international influence, the frameworks designed to honor them remain blunt and underdeveloped. Amapiano, Afrobeats, Afro-soul, and other regional movements are treated as interchangeable, even though their histories, audiences, and aesthetics are distinct.

None of this negates Tyla’s achievement. Winning a Grammy twice before the age of 25 is rare by any standard, and her success speaks to a generation of African artists navigating global pop on their own terms.

But her win has become a lightning rod because it sits at the intersection of artistic merit and institutional failure. The backlash is not simply about one song or one artist; it is about a growing sense that African music is being celebrated selectively, through lenses that prioritize accessibility over authenticity.

If the Grammys truly intend to honor African music, the solution is not to pit artists against one another across regions, but to invest in deeper categorization and cultural literacy. Afrobeats deserves recognition as a genre in its own right, with criteria informed by the communities that shaped it.

So does amapiano. So do the many other sounds emerging from the continent. Until that happens, moments like Tyla’s win will continue to feel less like triumphs and more like missed opportunities, applauded on stage while contested everywhere else.