It doesn't matter if you are an ardent or casual listener to African music, there is a big chance that you have come across the terms “Afrobeat” and “Afrobeats”.
These two terms are frequently used for categorization of African music, thanks to radio, television, and the internet. There are numerous types of music in Africa, we have traditional African music which is the type of African music void of external or foreign influences and under this category we have sub categories which are particular to different African societies.
We have the contemporary African music like the highlife of West Africa, Fuji, Juju, Apala, Soukous, Makossa, Afrobeat and tonnes of other genres (mainly fusions of the above mentioned genres with foreign influences), being created everyday by emerging African musicians, thus making categorization a tedious and confusing task. For example, in Nigeria, it is not uncommon to hear a Fuji song fused with another musical genre like Jazz, Techno and R&B. This is most often heard in church music where the rhythm (percussions) would be playing the traditional rhythm of a tribe or ethnic group, the pianist would be playing some jazz chords, a horn section would fill in some very jazzy horn lines and the lead singer would be singing with vocal techniques common in genres like R&B, and it still sounds beautiful.
In other cases you would hear a secular hip hop musician rapping to a hardcore hip hop or rap instrumental with their local languages and tonal inflections. To properly understand this style of of music, check out Nigerian rappers Phyno and Terry Apala and also gospel music group known as the Midnight crew.
This brings me back to ”Afrobeat”, or “Afrobeats”. So how are they different?
Afrobeat
Afrobeat and Afrobeats are very different types of music and the term should not be used interchangeably. Afrobeat is the music genre developed by Nigerian musical icon Fela Kuti. This genre of music is a fusion of funk, highlife and jazz music.
To understand this, take a listen to the track called Get on the Good Foot (linked below) by James Brown, listen out especially for the drum groove, the role of the rhythm, lead and bass guitar and then listen out to the horn section. When you are done, carefully take a listen to Fela Kuti’s Suffering and Shmiling (linked below). Can you hear the similarities? That is funk/soul in Afrobeat. And also the influence of Jazz music in Afrobeat is evident in the Jazzy horn lines and improvisation, which is very prominent in Afrobeat music.
Get on the Good Foot
Suffering and Shmiling
Fela would take very long solos (mainly built from the harmonic minor, natural minor, pentatonic and blue scales) which would last for up to ten or fifteen minutes before finally singing very simple lyrics. Audience participation being an important feature in African performances is not looked down upon in Afrobeat as “call and response” is greatly used to ensure proper audience participation. In most cases, the lead singer calls out a line and the audience respond. Also listen out to how the piano comps in Afrobeat, which is somehow similar to how a jazz pianist would comp. Take a listen to Unknown Soldier, Swegbe and Pako.
Unknown Soldier
The lyrical style is also similar to that of highlife music which utilises simple everyday language and mostly Nigerian pidgin english. An excerpt from the song African Woman by Fela proves this: “If you call am woman, African woman she no go gree, she go say I be lady”.
That line and the accompanying melody can fit into an highlife song perfectly. The chordal movement and harmony in Afrobeat is very simple as the chords mostly moves from the submediant to the dominant and it is mostly played in 4/4 time. With this chord progression (vi-v) you can do a medley of more than a hundred Afrobeat tunes because almost every Afrobeat tune fits with this chord progression. They are a handful of information about Afrobeat on the internet but I would recommend you should take a listen to some of Fela Kuti’s recordings before starting to surf the web for more information about Afrobeat. I would recommend you start with Gentleman, Lady and Teacher don't teach me nonsense.
Afrobeats
Now Afrobeats… with the S. This is the general classification for contemporary African music which are mainly fusions of the original African music genres like Highlife, Hiplife, Makossa and others. This types of music are heterogeneous in nature in the sense that they are made up of elements from many different kinds of music and thus would be wrong to classify them under any of this genre it borrows from.
To understand what I mean, I would recommend you listen to some tunes from musicians like Wizkid, Oritse Femi, Yemi Alade, Simi, Phyno, Terry Apala, Tecno, Dbanj, Uhuru, Sauti Sol, Vanessa Mdee, and others. They can all be found by a simple youtube search of those names.
Songs I would recommend: Joromi (linked below) by Simi ( this is a fusion of Highlife and Afrobeat). Rara by Tecno. Double your hustle by Orezi. Lastly Fada Fada by Phyno.
Joromi, by Simi
Conclusion
I hope this brief essay makes sense and is useful in understanding the two distinct categorizations of African music: Afrobeat and Afrobeats. Next time someone uses both interchangeably, you will be in a position to bring them back to line.