This article isn’t really, or should I say doesn’t really try to dig too deep into the issue. I just want to sample your opinions on the matter and have us all collectively reflect.
I think bottling music under a certain genre makes sense from a marketing point of view. It is good to open a website and read that a person is so-and-so type of musician. Also, for people who do award shows and what-not, it really helps them to be able to classify people they want to recompense. And for the artists, it helps them to give an identity to their craft or at the very least choose the lane they want to be in.
Music evolves and there are often fusions now and then between different artists from different genres. Sometimes it is a one-time thing, sometimes it fuses and forms an entirely new genre of music. Sometimes this new genre goes mainstream, often it goes underground and becomes a sub-culture with dedicated followers.
There is an underground musical movement from the fusion of rap with jazz and the fusion of rap music and soul music. A lot of what is called RnB today, for me, is not. Most of what the likes Tory Lanez does is more of a fusion between Trap rap and RnB. For me, it is something else. Not RnB.
But then again, maybe that is what RnB has evolved to become.
Nomenclature for music is quite an issue, and I understand how artists can sometimes not want to be defined by a single category because they sometimes do their music on a spectrum of categories. The Grammys have a category for Africa: World Music. Africa alone is 54 countries and 50 times that number of cultures, each with its own sound and music. You see where the problem lies?
Which brings us to Vernyuy Tina.
Vernyuy Tina calls her very unique style ‘Afro-Njang’ which for me is problematic because the “Afro” means originating from Africa. Afropop basically defines a mixture of music of African origin and pop music. And the "pop" music here is the sounds of pop and RnB. The Afro tag works when there is that metissage between a foreign and an African sound. Njang music is already and Afro music, since it is Cameroonian, and Cameroon is African.
If we cross our borders, Asa and Simi are classified as Afrobeats musicians, but you realise that their music is very different from mainstream Afrobeats from the likes of JoeBoy, Rema, or Davido.
Even the Alte music from the likes of Odunsi and Wurld is grouped under Afrobeat by some westerners, but it is more of pop, electro, and some dark elements of hip hop.
Vernyuy Tina is very, very unique in what she does. It’s not just the musicality, it’s also her pronunciations, her style, the spirituality and ethos she layers on the music, and even the content. What she is doing now can actually create a really, really unique genre that many young artists can follow into.
I don’t think calling her style Afro-anything is the right way to go. What Jovi does, before anything else, is rap music. But he calls it Mboko. There is nothing remotely hip-hop about the name alone.
What she is doing now can actually create a really, really unique genre that many young artists can follow into.
What do you guys think?
- Wandji Wilfred