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LONDON. — Yesterday, Afrobeats megastar Burna Boy fired up Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
While he has played at the UK’s biggest festival before, this was his first time on the famous main stage, which has been Glastonbury’s focal point for decades.
Fellow Afrobeats star Ayra Starr also performed on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday, while Tems had a slot on the Other Stage.
From West Africa to the world stage, Afrobeats has risen rapidly to dominate playlists and radio.
On Spotify, the Afrobeats genre has grown by 1,200 percent since 2017.
But with its artists now performing at the very top of the UK’s biggest festival, it feels like another threshold has been crossed.
“It’s our time,” Starr told BBC News.
“It’s been a long time coming and we deserve this.”
So what is Afrobeats all about, and how has it taken off?
The genre has its roots in Nigeria and Ghana, and started rising rapidly in popularity in the 2010s, with early hits from artists like Fuse ODG and D’banj.
It is not to be confused with “Afrobeat” – minus the “s”.
That is a movement created in the 1960s and 1970s by the artist and activist Fela Kuti.
Kuti’s musical style is a fusion of traditional African rhythms with funk, jazz and highlife.
Coincidentally, Kuti himself played at Glastonbury in 1984, and this year, his son Femi Kuti played on the Pyramid Stage.
But Afrobeats, with an “s”, is a completely different sound. It is generally seen as a fusion of traditional West African musical styles with Western pop, rap and dancehall.
“Afrobeat spoke to a much older audience,” said DJ Edu, who hosts BBC 1Xtra’s AfroSounds show.
“Afrobeats has been driven a lot by social media,” he said, adding that young people, travelling to different parts of the world, also helped spread the sound.
There were challenges, of course. DJ Edu said that a lot of people who started out making Afrobeats were not clued up about the music industry.
“They were just kids making music from their bedrooms, not worrying about streaming or royalties. That was the big problem, there was no structure,” he said.
But as bigger artists started making headway, younger ones were able to learn from them and chart their own route in the industry, he added.
DJs in the UK started fusing pop music with Nigerian and Ghanaian beats, taking the sounds to new audiences.
Songs from the genre regularly started crossing into the mainstream, with its first big global success being the release of Oliver Twist by the artist D’banj in 2012.
The song made the top 10 on the official UK Singles Chart and was number two in the UK R&B Charts.
It is often described as the first time Afrobeats really took hold in the UK. — BBC.
Online Reporter