Grammy CEO Visits Africa To Scope Afrobeats; J’can Producer Asks What About Dancehall

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr, after meeting with Afrobeats creators in Ghana, says the Grammys were considering adding an award category for Afrobeats and that he “had been meeting with players in the genre to explore the possibility.”

“We called in producers, songwriters, artists, executives and we had a virtual listening session where we heard from Afrobeats creators.  We just talked about, ‘What are the different subgenres? What are the needs? What are the desires?,” Mason Jr. reportedly said at a news conference on Sunday.

“My goal is to make sure that we represent all genres of music, including Afrobeats, at the Grammys. But it has to be done properly,” Mason added.

Amid the congratulatory messages following the announcement and the listening session which Mason described as “very important and very valuable and a step towards that path”, Dancehall producer Joey Lyric, of Lyrics Rhoom Entertainment, had expressed concern that Jamaicans have never been afforded the opportunity for such discussions or received a similar visit from the Grammy CEO.  

“Both the UK and the US have launched Afrobeats Singles Charts. Kudos to our African Brothers and Sisters. African Producers, Songwriters, artists etc were ALL contacted and allowed to sell their creative visions to their American counterparts. Has this ever been the case with Reggae/DANCEHALL????” he noted after viewing the post about the new developments on disc Jockey ZJ Sparks’ IG page.

“WHY aren’t they speaking to the likes of a Jeremy Harding, Specialist Dillon, Gussy Clarke, Donovan Germain, Mikey Bennett, Sharon Burke etc to hear the NEEDS & DESIRES of our Creators?” the Baay Woman Deh Yah producer asked.

In a video shared of Mason at a function held in his honour in Ghana, he had explained, among other things, that it could likely take a while for the addition of Afrobeats to be made, as throughout the year, the Recording Academy accepts proposals for new categories from its members, which are then reviewed by a committee and voted on by the Recording Academy Board of Trustees.

In March Cristy Barber, who sits on one of the Grammy committees, had, in addition to pointing out the unlikelihood that Dancehall will ever get its own category, had said that the focus right now ought to be spent on preventing the “Best Reggae Album” field which subsumes all Jamaican music, from being taken away.

Barber had said that the request for Dancehall and Reggae to be given separate categories has been made over and over for many years, but had seemingly fallen on deaf ears.    

She had said that in the 1990s when she “got involved with the Recording Academy” and in 2003 when she started a campaign to get more Jamaican musicians to register with the Academy, along with other persons, she had submitted petitions in to the academy to try to get another category.

She had also said that she does not envision Dancehall getting its own category, for the simple fact that the Los Angeles-based Recording Academy has a very small staff and “tends to take away fields, not put more fields in”.

As for the maintenance of the category, Barber, speaking at a forum on Jamaican music, had said that the number of entries had dwindled during 2021, with only 125 submissions, many of which were one-riddim albums.