THE STARKING

“I remember back in the early 2000s, when I was trying to market and get Afrobeats in America signed, they thought it was Reggae music,” he says.

“It was one of the things that was so frustrating, trying to get them to understand the African population was so big, and this music will be the future.

“Unfortunately, I got a lot of pushback.”

It would be another 10 years before Afrobeats fully broke through, with huge artists like Drake and Beyonce collaborating with some of its biggest stars.

And when Wizkid took home a Grammy Award in 2021, Akon says it was “one of those ‘I told you’ so moments”.

He puts the rise of Afrobeats down to the younger generation “being more inquisitive about the new music surrounding them”.

“And I think social media had a huge role to play in expanding the sound of different genres, because we didn’t really have any platforms,” he says.

European success of acts like Davido “changed the dynamics” for Afrobeats artists, Akon says, and gave them a better idea of how to crack the US.

He says that huge support from fellow Africans helped to “put the word out”, leading social media platforms “grabbing all of those posts” and “exposing Afrobeats” in a certain light.

Akon says: “Everybody’s really doing their part, to try to get the world to see what that was. And then once they saw it became very infectious, you know?

“That’s what changed everything.”

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And he thinks the future of the genre is bright.

“Afrobeats is going to be around a long time, because it’s been around a long time [already],” he says.

“The role that I really played was just kind of helping to expose it, putting it out there, and using every opportunity that I had, and every relationship that I had, every resource that I had, to introduced it and hope that people will gravitate.”

And Akon believes that it will drive curiosity about his home continent, and new artists won’t have to distance themselves from their roots like he did.

“It’s shined the light globally, and will now open up the door for people to learn a lot about Africa, through the music of Afrobeats,” he says.