By: Nana Ama Gyapong
The Grammy Awards or Grammys, are awards presented by the Recording Academy of the United States to recognize “outstanding” achievements in the music industry. Recently, the recording academy introduced a new category for music from Africa and this comes at the back of rumors that the scheme was deemed to create a category for Afrobeats to represent music from Africa.
This came as good news to Africa because, for the first time, our voices had been heard but a Digital Music Expert, Jonilar has expressed his opinion stating that Africa must be represented as a whole and not just in a single category.
He made this assertion during a discussion on Ghana’s global prospects on the music front, Grammy Awards categorization, and other matters on Ebitz on LifeStyleTv.
“For the first time, we have something African in there that is our own category but I am actually not happy for a simple reason which is because we’ve been fighting to gain an equal or total representation of African music at the awards, which means that if you have Taylor Swift in there, you should see Sarkodie and Burna Boy there as well. But with the current definition, they are giving us, it means that if we should have a situation where an African artist gets more of their songs streamed as compared to the Americans, Africans will be limited to that category although they qualify to be in other categories” Jonilar said.
He continued by saying, “The representation has been boxed in a certain way because people like Angélique Kidjo (singer-songwriter, actress, and activist noted for her diverse musical influences and creative music videos) have been in existence for years and can rock shoulders with Beyonce”.
“If you want to give African representation, put your potential nominees in the same category as the Americans so that we can be well represented but not because we are requesting for a category as a continent hence the creation of it which will end up being an internal battle for African artists to get nominated for Grammy awards”, Jonilar concluded.
After Rocky Dawuni, Fuse ODG and Killbeat were nominated by the Grammy Academy years ago, and with this new category, let’s see if Ghana will be lucky this time around and take home an award.
