The usual suspects
Recording Academy chooses to stay the course for 2021 Grammys
Time to read some Grammy tea leaves, and ... yep, it looks like the 63rd Grammy Awards on Jan. 31 will be as unimaginative and borderline-meaningless as the Grammys have been for more than a decade now.
It's getting hard to stay angry at something so reliably boring, but let's try. The Recording Academy nominated Beyoncé nine times on Tuesday for the least interesting music of her career, including nods for record and song of the year, while Taylor Swift's half-interesting “indie” album was nominated for the biggest prizes in the pop categories, as well as for song and album of the year.
From the looks of the other top-tier nominees, it's clear that the 11,000-plus-person Grammy electorate continues to equate musical excellence with household name recognition, and/or the record industry's blessing while only ever pretending to care about what the rest of us are listening to, especially those of us who are listening to rap music.
And if you like rap, the dominant idiom of popular song in this century, these Grammys are still not for you. The academy says it doesn't measure excellence in album sales, but why does that only seem to apply to the rappers? At least five rap stars with No. 1 albums released during the eligibility period — Gunna, Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd, Youngboy Never Broke Again and the late Juice WRLD — weren't nominated for a single Grammy this year.
And while more than half of the albums that reached No. 1 during this Grammy eligibility window have been rap music, the only artist in the bunch up for album of the year at the 63rd Grammys is the white rapper Post Malone. (An ugly Grammy factoid that grows uglier each year: no Black artists have won album of the year since 2008.)
Squint elsewhere on the slate for a silver lining and you'll find one over in the country music categories, where four nominees for best country album are women — Ingrid Andress, Brandy Clark, Miranda Lambert, Ashley Mcbryde — and the fifth is the coed quartet Little Big Town. Here, the Recording Academy seems to be tsk-tsk-ing country radio for its long-lopsided gender imbalance, but as we've seen before these gestures don't go very far in Nashville, Tenn. Kacey Musgraves, the great country singer who won album of the year at the Grammys in 2019, brought heaps of prestige back to Music City, but she didn't gain much traction on country airwaves.
This was supposed to be a year of reinvention for the Grammys. Former academy president Deborah Dugan was ousted from her seat mere days before last year's telecast after surfacing allegations of sexual misconduct and vote-rigging at the organization's highest levels. And, while those cases are still pending, interim Recording Academy president Harvey Mason Jr. recently told USA Today that diversifying the Recording Academy's membership has been a “huge priority for us.”
The blandness permeating this year's slate of top nominees suggests that efforts are going slower than expected. Swift seems poised to win the third album of the year award of her starry career while the Grammys continue to drift off into oblivion.