In less than a year, Nigerian superstar Burna Boy parlayed a quip at Coachella into a critically-acclaimed, record-breaking Grammy-nominated album, African Giant.

Burna Boy, née Damini Ogulu, has experienced an ascension that has been less meteoric and more piecemeal — marked by defining deterrents and gradual wins. His Best World Music Album Grammy nomination comes at no surprise to the fans and onlookers who have been following the 28-year-old afro-fusion artist’s rise over the better half of a decade. This development in the Afropop protagonist’s career represents the climax in a coming-of-age success story of one of Africa’s most successful artists of today.

As afrobeats/afropop surges into the sphere of American pop music, a slew of issues arise. In this crucial moment, what has remerged is the battle for visibility, validation, and respect.

Burna Boy’s Grammy nomination and loss mark a monumental moment in Afropop history while simultaneously revealing the award show’s flawed system — underscoring the longtime issues with the category and term “world music” and the implications of the Recording Academy’s role in upholding the confusing, controversial classification.

Burna Boy was expected to take home the award given his track record this past year but lost to the legendary Beninese singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo, whom the Grammys has nominated and awarded a handful of times. During her acceptance speech at this year’s awards, Kidjo dedicated her award to Burna saying, “The new generation of artists coming from Africa are gonna take you by storm… Burna Boy is among those young artists that come from Africa that is changing the way our continent is perceived.” Her words affirmed that the Grammys can’t eclipse just how paramount of a role African artists are playing in the reinvention of popular music and the recalibration of how and what the world hears.

This was barely a loss for Burna, who has sampled Kidjo’s music and was graced with a feature from her on his nominated album. Though Kidjo and Burna are from different countries, different generations, and make different styles of music, they are both important African artists whose work should be honored respectively and respectfully. And if the Recording Academy recognized diversity outside of race or gender — where they’re still failing — and allowed for the nuances of style, genre, and regions as well, maybe both artists could have received proper recognition for their contributions to music this past year.

The Grammys are not thoroughly engaging in the current scope of music from around the world. ‪There isn’t one singular global sound, so the world music category can’t possibly encapsulate what’s happening in the world. But where did it even come from?

The Recording Academy instituted the World Music category in 1992. Ironically — but in some ways, on-brand for the Grammys and its flawed voting process — the first World Music award was given to an American artist. Mickey Hart, a member of the rock band Grateful Dead won the award for his 1991 album, Planet Drum — a project featuring percussionists from around the world. But the first African artist to win the Best World Music Album Grammy was Malian legend Ali Farka Touré for his 1994 album Talking Timbuktu, a collaboration project with American musician Ry Cooder, who had won a Grammy in the World Music category a year prior. More African acts including South Africa’s famed choral group Soweto Gospel Choir, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Angélique Kidjo would go on to win.

American ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown coined the term in the early 1960s, but it was later popularized in the 1980s as a marketing category in the media and the music industry intending to encompass different styles of music from outside of the Western world. It is by and large a determination of any type of genre or sound that Westerners consider ethnic, indigenous, folk, or simply non-American music. And then there’s the advent of digital music production, which threatened the original definition of world music that sought to instill an authenticity identifier and distinction between indigenous music traditions and modernized, digitized pop music.

The term highlights the Western obsession with “authenticity” anchored by residual effects of cultural colonialism without challenging who is placed in the position of power to police what is being classified and othered ex-cathedra by a notoriously rigid pool of Academy voters. A sexual harassment and gender discrimination complaint filed this month by former Recording Academy president and CEO Deborah Dugan revealed a recent task force on the board to be 68% male and 69% white, supporting speculation and criticisms about outdated rules and out of touch voters contributing to voting irregularities and discrimination. The provincial parameters of the term world music introduced non-Western music to Western audiences as “exotic” imports. Under this framework, America functions as the nucleus of music while the rest of the world’s vast and varied genres exit on the periphery. The result is what can be seen at this year’s Grammys, in which Burna Boy — whose amalgam of Afrobeat, dancehall, hip-hop, pop, R&B, and reggae forms what he refers to as afro-fusion — is lumped into the same category alongside Altın Gün, a Turkish Psychedelic Folk band. ‪