Update: Tyla didn’t end up getting nominated for the 2025 ceremony.
When Tyla accepted the first-ever Grammy for Best African Music Performance eight months ago, she symbolized the progress, however lagging, that the Recording Academy had made in honoring global music. For once, it seemed, the organization was meeting the moment: recognizing “Water,†an amapiano-pop track from a South African singer that became an American smash. “Thank you to the Recording Academy for this category,†the visibly overwhelmed singer said in her acceptance speech. “It’s so important.â€
The Grammys were widely, and correctly, praised for introducing Best African Music Performance. But just months after Tyla celebrated her win, she’s become a reminder of how far the Academy still has to go with non-western music. While “Water†was exactly the kind of song the new category was made for, the album it appears on is now struggling to find a place at the 2025 awards. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a screening committee of R&B experts has moved Tyla from the Best R&B Album category, where her team initially submitted, to Best Pop Vocal Album.
Tyla’s music has little in common with the albums she’ll now be competing against for a nomination, like the confessional pop of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department or the brooding alt-pop of Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. But Tyla didn’t quite fit in R&B, either. Her songs are built around percussive amapiano beats, refashioned from ten-minute dance tracks into digestible hits. While she draws on R&B to get there, she also works in house, hip-hop, and dancehall.
So what are the Grammys supposed to do with an album like that? Tyla’s team could have submitted in Best Progressive R&B Album, which tends to be more open to genre fusion, rather than Best R&B Album, which tends to focus on classic R&B signifiers. (Victoria Monét’s Motown-indebted Jaguar II won this year’s R&B trophy, while SZA’s adventurous SOS clinched in Progressive.) Yet that solution still wouldn’t have recognized Tyla’s South African influence. There’s also Best Global Music Album, but that would be an awkward fit too — it’s a category that once focused on Indigenous music traditions but has since become a catchall for everything from Afrobeats to Indian jazz.
It seems obvious that the Grammys need a Best African Music Album category, even if it comes with its own issues (any “African Music†grouping lumps together disparate styles, conflating an entire continent with a genre). Though the Academy has always been cautious in treading new ground — it didn’t award a Best Rap Album trophy until 1996, a full seven years after first introducing Best Rap Performance — it would show that they are serious about continuing their investment in global sounds. As important as it is for the Grammys to recruit more members who can properly evaluate non-western genres over hastily rolling out new categories, it’s also important for a professional music organization to keep up with industry trends. But that’s impossible when the Academy continues to be reactive, rather than proactive, about global music. The Best African Music Performance award already arrived too late to recognize hits like Wizkid and Tems’s “Essence†or Rema’s “Calm Down.â€
The issue extends beyond African music. More than six years after BTS earned their first American No. 1 album, there’s still not a dedicated Grammy category for K-pop; the Academy continues to award reggaeton albums under the name “Música Urbana,†even after ditching the loaded “urban†term in the R&B field; and as exciting as Peso Pluma’s win for Génesis in Best Música Mexicana Album was, there was no category for Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny’s culture-bridging hit “Un x100to.†It’s hard to predict what will break out musically, but the Academy’s track record gives little confidence that it’ll be ready to respond to the next global genre to cross over into the U.S., no matter where it comes from.