Every time she wins an Afrobeats award, the internet has something to say. The internet is wrong.
Tyla Laura Seethal was born on 30 January 2002 in Edenvale, on the East Rand of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is mixed heritage, with Indian, Indo-Mauritian, Zulu and Irish roots, the kind of background that makes arguments about cultural purity feel even more absurd than they already are. She grew up watching Michael Jackson and Rihanna, begged her parents to let her pursue music instead of mining engineering, and spent her 2020 pandemic gap year building a sound on social media that nobody else quite had a name for yet.
Her debut single, Getting Late, released in 2019 alongside South African producer Kooldrink, announced a new voice in the local scene and earned her a deal with Epic Records in 2021. What followed was a careful, considered build. Been Thinking earned her first Billboard chart placements. Girl Next Door, featuring Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, showed she could move between African music worlds effortlessly. Then, in July 2023, Tyla released Water, and the conversation changed entirely.
Water became a global phenomenon, powered by a viral TikTok dance challenge built around the bacardi, a contemporary South African dance style. It entered the top ten in multiple countries, made Tyla the first South African solo artist to enter the US Billboard Hot 100 in 55 years, and spawned a dance challenge that crossed every language barrier the music industry usually hides behind. Her self-titled debut album followed in 2024, a confident, cohesive body of work that blended pop, amapiano, R&B and afrobeats into something that felt entirely her own. She performed it at Coachella 2025, arriving on stage in a Britney Spears-era silhouette, backed by South African dancers, delivering a set she described as a milestone she had always wanted to hit. At the 2024 BET Awards, she performed Jump alongside Gunna and Skillibeng, complete with dancers in tiger print bodysuits and a life-sized elephant statue on stage. She dedicated her Best New Artist award to Africa. “Africa to the world,” she said, and meant it.
Tyla and the internet
The awards came in waves. Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance for Water in 2024, the inaugural winner of the category, making her the youngest African artist to win a Grammy. MTV VMA for Best Afrobeats in 2024 for Water, and again in 2025 for Push 2 Start. MTV EMA for Best Afrobeats Artist in 2024, alongside Best African Act and Best R&B, the same night. Billboard Music Award for Top Afrobeats Artist and Top Afrobeats Song in 2024. American Music Award for Favourite Afrobeats Artist in 2025 and Best Afrobeats Artist again in 2026, back-to-back. In 2025, she became the first South African artist to win World Artist of the Year at the iHeartRadio Music Awards, beating Burna Boy and Tems in the process.
And every single time, without fail, the internet had notes.
“Tyla is NOT an Afrobeats artist!!!!” wrote @MzJojoB.
“Tyla also doesn’t actually do Afrobeats,” said @kabrieltwt.
@gllowxpositvity claims she makes pop music that borrows from amapiano, afrobeats, R&B, and dancehall.
The comments recycle themselves every awards season with the reliability of a bad habit. Nomination drops. Tyla wins. Someone types the same sentence in a new font.
What is interesting, and telling, is how Tyla herself has navigated this. She has not been dishonest about her influences. In a 2023 Billboard interview, she explained how she gravitated toward amapiano after experimenting with it in 2019, how singing on top of the genre felt right, and how her sound developed over years of mixing the genres she grew up loving, R&B, pop, amapiano and afrobeats, into something people eventually started calling “popiano.” She coined the term herself. She owns it. Nobody is arguing that.
Tyla speaking to Vogue
“I represent African music. I really push Afrobeats & Amapiano because it’s something that’s not fully recognised globally”pic.twitter.com/SYhYugPyBv
— NOTJUSTOK (@NOTJUSTOK) March 1, 2025
But she has also been clear, in her own words, about what she believes she represents and what she is building toward. Speaking to Vogue, she said: “I represent African music. I really push Afrobeats and Amapiano because it’s something that’s not fully recognised globally.” She was not distancing herself from Afrobeats. She was advocating for it.
She went further, speaking specifically about the tension around Afrobeats as the sole African category at major awards. She said, “Afrobeats is the reason we are even getting recognised. It’s a genre that broke down many doors. I was just feeling a certain way about it because it is the only African category, and it takes away from both Afrobeats and Amapiano.” Read that again slowly. She is not saying she is not Afrobeats. She is saying the umbrella is too small for everything it is being asked to cover, and that both genres deserve their own recognition. That is not the complaint of an outsider. That is the argument of someone who understands the ecosystem and wants it treated with more care.
How is Tyla an Afrobeats artist?
Which brings us to the actual definition. Afrobeats, spelt without the apostrophe and the S that distinguishes it from Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, is not a rigid sonic formula. It is a broad, evolving genre rooted in West African popular music, built on the foundation of highlife, hip hop, R&B and dancehall, fused with African rhythms and exported to the world through artists like Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy. The keyword is popular. Afrobeats is African popular music. It has never demanded a single sound. Wizkid’s Essence sounds nothing like Burna Boy’s Last Last. Davido’s Fall sounds nothing like Rema’s Calm Down. What they share is DNA, an African sensibility in the production, the rhythm, the cultural reference points, and the intention.
Tyla is African. She makes pop music rooted in African sounds. Water carries West African rhythmic influence woven into its production. She has collaborated with Ayra Starr. She has championed the genre on global stages from the Grammys to Coachella. She has won Afrobeats awards at every major ceremony on earth, not once but repeatedly. The argument that she is not Afrobeats relies on a definition of Afrobeats so narrow it would exclude half the artists currently operating under the label.
The fans who drag Tyla every awards season are not wrong to care about genre integrity. That impulse is healthy. But they are applying a litmus test that the genre itself has never consistently enforced, and they are applying it selectively to a South African woman while the broader Afrobeats tent continues to expand in every other direction without complaint.
Tyla is an Afrobeats artist. She has the awards, the collaborations, the cultural footprint and her own words to prove it. The question was never really whether she qualifies. The question is why, every single time she wins, we still have to have this conversation.
The post Tyla is an Afrobeats artist and here’s why appeared first on NotjustOk.
Every time she wins an Afrobeats award, the internet has something to say. The internet is wrong. Tyla Laura Seethal was born on 30 January 2002 in Edenvale, on the East Rand of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is mixed heritage, with Indian, Indo-Mauritian, Zulu and Irish roots, the kind of background that makes arguments about
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