Son of the Legendary Fela Kuti, Seun Kuti says Afrobeats shouldn’t be seen as a strict genre but as a label identifying sounds coming out of Africa.

On The Beat 99 fm radio show he said:

“Clearly still not doing justice to the music. I think Afrobeat is more of a title than it’s a genre. More of a title than it’s a genre,”

He argued that the adaptibility of Nigerian artists shows why the tag is more of an umbrella term than a rigid sound.

“You can see amapiano. Yes, you can see the new Afrobeat. It’s the new title of that. So Afrobeat is just a generalization, just a title to identify something from a particular place. I don’t think it’s a genre. It’s not a genre,”

Seun continued:

“Even the gatekeepers, the big names don’t deal with it like a genre. Their artists are eclectic in the way that they could do a dancehall track today, do a blues track tomorrow, do a Nigerian pop song and jump on amapiano,” he said.

He concluded that the flexibility of African musicians proves Afrobeat is better understood as a unifying label rather than a musical category.