Ghanaian-American singer Ama Serwah Genfi, better known as Amaarae, has berated the Recording Academy, organizers of the Grammy Awards, for jam-packing all African music genres under one category at the award show.
The Grammys recently added a category for “Best African Music Performance,. The category is open to both modern and traditional African music, such as Afrobeats, Afropop, Amapiano, High Life, Fuji, etc., according to the award’s organizers.
However, in a recent interview with Metro TV, Amaarae referred to the Grammys’ decision to lump all African musical genres under a single category as “reductive.”
She said:
“The idea of an African category [at the Grammys] is great in practice, but I think it is reductive. There are way too many categories to just placed under an umbrella of African music.
“Take a song like ‘Sad Girlz’, ‘Calm Down,’ or ‘Calm Down’ or ‘Last Last’; these are all songs that didn’t just do well in Africa but did well globally and had humongous global impacts. So, to me, they are popular records.
“So, I feel like a record like [Rema’s] ‘Calm Down’ with the remix with Selena Gomez, that should be able to compete in pop categories [at the Grammys]. I feel like [Burna Boy’s] ‘Last Last’ should be able to compete in hip-hop, RnB or pop categories and not be relegated to just the African category because that’s reductive of the works that [African] artists have done to break boundaries.”
Cc: https://dailypost.ng/2023/06/23/singer-amaarae-faults-grammy-organisers-for-creating-african-category/
