Comedian Michael Blackson is confident that the influence of Afrobeats music in the U.S. has grown significantly and the genre will soon rival, if not surpass Hip Hop’s dominance in the country.
A TMZ reporter caught up with Ghanian born comic at the Kids in Africa Afrikicks event, organized by Oni Productions days after Afrobeats sensation Rema won the MTV VMA award for his chart-topping hit “Calm Down,” featuring Selena Gomez.
Blackson was asked if more labels “were gonna start prioritizing Afrobeats and latin music.” To which he answered, “Definitely, what I like and why the world loves Afrobeats so much is because its fun, its loving, its slowly going to take over like Hip Hop.”
“Its fun, good time, it’s enjoyment, it’s love, sometimes you don’t understand what they are saying but it be so nice you have no choice but to groove to it,” the African King Of Comedy continued.
This year the VMAs added a “Best Afrobeats” song category, and Rema’s music video has been a massive success, amassing over a billion views in just one year between the original and the remix with Selena.
Blackson also pointed to Hip Hop figures like Canadian singer Drake whose Afrobeats song “One Dance” featuring Whizkid is his most streamed song on Spotify and Chris Brown, who also collaborated with Wizkid and Davido several years ago, as evidence of the genre’s global appeal.
In March fellow Ghanian star Stonebwoy told The Breakfast Club he would love if Afrobeats took over the U.S. “I would love it because it’s still black…if Afrobeats does get the forefront like it’s getting interestingly it has all the other genres embedded inside of it. When you break down any typical Afrobeats song you can put every other music of black origin on there. If you strip any Afrobeats song as a producer you can find dancehall in there, that’s how come everybody is gravitating to it, I believe so because everybody can find themselves in there knowingly or unknowingly. It has several branches and big tree.”
