At the 2024 GRAMMYs, African music will be elevated via the newly announced Best African Music Performance GRAMMY category. GRAMMY.com sat down with industry leaders from the African music community to discuss the impact of this major development.
In 2022, the Recording Academy CEO visited a number of African countries, where he met with leaders in the local music communities and intently listened to what each had to say.
“Mind-bending. Game-changing. Eye-opening,” Mason jr. said of his trips to Africa. “There’s so much music, so much creativity over there. Africa is the birthplace of, well, everything, but definitely music.”
Accordingly, the universe of sounds coming out of the African continent can’t be boiled down to just those having an international impact today, like Afrobeats or Amapiano. No, every corner of Africa is a fount of brilliant musical offerings. So it’s incumbent on the Recording Academy, the world’s leading community of music professionals, to reflect the momentum happening across Africa.
With this as the engine, the Recording Academy has revealed a thrilling new GRAMMY category in time for the 2024 GRAMMYs: Best African Music Performance.
Announced in tandem with two other exciting, new GRAMMY categories, including Best Alternative Jazz Album and Best Pop Dance Recording, the category elevates all flavours of African music — from Afrobeats to kizomba to Ghanaian drill to South African hip-hop — without regard to borders. Musical excellence from anywhere and everywhere in Africa will be carefully considered in this progressive category.
While this development is a forward-thinking expansion for the Recording Academy, the GRAMMYs, and the international music industry as a whole, the new Best African Music Performance category is the “first step toward a much bigger, more fruitful journey ahead,” Mason jr. tells GRAMMY.com. “And we’re not done as an Academy: We’re making sure that we represent music from that region fairly and accurately.”
Source: www.grammy.com