When Tyla won the 2026 Grammy for Best African Music Performance with “PUSH 2 START,” the reaction was immediate and familiar. Too “western,” too “pop,” too “unAfrican.” This backlash reveals less about the South African star and more about the enduring problem of how music from Africa is imagined, marketed, and disciplined on the world stage.
African creativity is still expected to sound ancestral, percussive, earthy, and visibly rooted in tradition to be legible as African at all.
The Colonial Appetite for “Authenticity”
At the heart of this problem is a colonial logic of authenticity. From time, Africa has been studied, archived, and categorized as a site of “culture” rather than modernity. African music was framed as ritual, folklore, and tradition, valuable only insofar as it represented a frozen past.
The logic still haunts global institutions like the Grammys, and even Africans themselves. African artists are welcomed, but only if they perform Africanness in ways that align with Western expectations: heavy percussion, call-and-response, indigenous languages, and visible markers of “heritage.” When African artists sound like global pop, R&B, electronic, or alternative music, they are seen as derivative instead of innovative.
Meanwhile, Western pop is celebrated because it is hybrid. A Western artist can move between house, country, trap, Afro-diasporic rhythms, and ballroom culture and be hailed as experimental. But when African artists blend amapiano with pop or R&B with electronic textures, they are accused of sounding too Western.
Hybridity is freedom for the West. For Africa, it’s regarded with suspicion.
Tyla Is Not the Exception — She Is the Rule
Tyla is not an outlier. She represents a long lineage of African artists who refuse the idea that African music must sound like a museum exhibit. Amapiano itself is a futuristic, urban, electronic genre born in South African townships, built from deep house, jazz, kwaito, and long drum experimentation. Tyla didn’t dilute African music — she, like other experimental artists from the continent, extended it.
The same is true for artists like Amaarae, whose genre-fluid, hyperpop-inflected sound confounds easy labels. Rema, who merges Afrobeats with emo, trap, and alt-pop aesthetics. Burna Boy, who has authoritatively labelled his sound “Afro-fusion,” a transatlantic blend of dancehall, reggae, Afrobeat(s), hip-hop, and R&B. And Tems, whose vocals float between soul and alternative R&B.
None of these artists is abandoning Africa. They are proving what our music has always been: global, experimental, and historically entangled with the world.
What the Grammys Actually Want
Since its inception in 1959, the Grammys do not simply “recognize” music; they manage it politically through categories. The architecture of the awards has always functioned as an ideological sorting system, one that collapses difference when it needs to contain Black creativity and separates it when it needs to preserve whiteness at the center.
Historically, Black artists were excluded outright from major categories, then later admitted only through segregated genre boxes like R&B, Soul, or Urban Contemporary. These categories operate less as neutral descriptors than as racial technologies, deciding what kind of innovation is allowed to be seen as universal, and what must remain “cultural,” “ethnic,” or “niche.
Beyoncé’s Renaissance is a prime example: a sonically radical, politically layered dance record rooted in Black queer histories was relegated to dance and R&B categories, while Album of the Year — the Grammys’ most symbolic site of artistic universality — continued to reward safer, whiter pop projects. This is how the institution performs inclusion without surrendering power: by expanding the margins while protecting the center.
Created in 2024, new categories like “Best African Music Performance” don’t dismantle this logic; they emphasize it. Admitting more Black and global South artists, but only inside tightly managed lanes that mark their work as regional, ancestral, or stylistic rather than fully contemporary, experimental, and globally generative.
Essentialism isn’t just typecasting African artists with a generic sound; it also works structurally, by quietly barring them from categories they should logically inhabit. Tyla’s upcoming album, A-Pop, has already been described as explicitly pop-oriented, which should position her in the same competitive field as artists like Sabrina Carpenter or Zara Larsson.
Yet the industry reflex is to keep African artists sequestered in special categories, as though their work must always represent a region before it can represent a genre. In this way, essentialism doesn’t just misname African music — it limits its future.
The Question We Keep Avoiding: What is African Music?
The real question is not whether Tyla is African enough. It’s whether the category itself makes sense. African music has never been static. Long before colonialism, African music traditions were already hybrid, shaped by trade routes, migrations, religious exchange, and regional dialogue.
Colonialism intensified this, forcing African music into conversations with Christianity, Western instruments, and capitalist markets. So African music has been adaptive, inventive, and diasporic. In other words, it has always absorbed and transformed external sounds.
To demand sonic “Africanness” today is to ignore history and pretend that Africa exists outside of time. African music isn’t defined by how ancestral it sounds. It’s defined by who makes it, where it emerges from, and how it speaks to African realities — past, present, and future.
Tyla’s music reflects a young, urban, post-apartheid South African plugged into global digital culture. This is an African reality, too.
Symbolic Inclusion Isn’t Liberation
The Grammys’ embrace of African music is often framed as progress. And in some ways, it is. Visibility matters. But symbolic inclusion without in-depth transformation is hollow. African artists are allowed into the room, but only if they behave predictably, only if they carry the burden of representing a continent in ways that are legible to Western audiences. They must ‘sound’ African enough to justify their presence.
True recognition would mean allowing African artists to exist without constantly explaining their Africanness, without being asked to perform tradition every time they step into modernity.
All things considered, Tyla’s win —a second time since winning the inaugural launch of the category for “Water”—is caught within an institutional contradiction. She can escape colonial trappings and be experimental, but only within geographic categories. The problem, then, isn’t African music changing or evolving. The problem is that the world still doesn’t know how to let it.
