Grammys finally admit hip hop is here to stay
Genre rules top categories, including Best Record, Album and Song of the Year
The ceremony for the 60th Grammy Awards is still two weeks away, but already music’s biggest TV night has made history.
For the first time, hip-hop artists dominate in the academy’s top categories, including Record, Album and Song of the Year.
But that sound you’re hearing isn’t Champagne corks popping in celebration. It’s exasperated sighs that the Recording Academy only just discovered what the rest of the entertainment industry noticed back in the flip-phone era: hip hop, once an outlier, is now the status quo.
From Broadway’s Hamilton to Hollywood’s Straight Outta Compton to television’s Atlanta, hip hop’s broad influence on American pop culture has defied countless predictions that a nervous white mainstream would never fully embrace a trend born out of the urban, Black experience.
Consider hip hop’s television takeover. Today, rappers are not only backing films about the Black experience, they are creating, producing and starring in top-rated cable and network series and breaking out of music categories at film and TV award shows.
Atlanta creator and star Donald Glover — who under his stage name, Childish Gambino, is up for five Grammys — made history when he won a directing Emmy in September for his breakthrough FX comedy, a cable ratings success, about the everyday trials and tribulations of an aspiring hip-hop entrepreneur. No other Black director had ever won an Emmy in the comedy category and Glover was the first director since Alan Alda in1977 to win for a comedy in which he also starred.
“I wanted to show white people you don’t know everything about Black culture,” he told the awards ceremony audience, some of whom had already watched him win two top Golden Globes for the show.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who shat- tered records and expectations when his hip-hop musical Hamilton swept the 2016 Tonys, is now executiveproducing a forthcoming Showtime series, The Kingkiller Chronicle, based on characters from the fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.
And hitting Showtime this month was the already critically acclaimed The Chi from Master of None’s Lena Waithe, the first Black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing, and hip-hop star Common, the first rapper to win an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe.
It was one of many in a string of “crossover surprises”: Fox’s hip-hop-themed drama Empire became a surprise success with white audiences; soccer moms were surprised they couldn’t stop humming Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” in favour of something — anything — else; and a biopic about once-feared gangsta rap pioneers N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton, became a surprise hit at the box office.
The surprise, however, is that anyone was surprised.
“Hip hop is the soundtrack of at least one, probably two generations now,” says Common (a.k.a. Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr.), who is an executive producer on the Waithe-run series about everyday life on the South Side of Chicago. “People used to be afraid of it or consider it the music of gangsters or thugs, or whatever. But now, it’s part of everything . . . and everyone under the age of 40.”
Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill and Eminem are to a generation what the Beatles and Rolling Stones were to boomers: the artists of their youth.
Says Common, “rappers are storytellers and that is a timeless tradition no matter who is watching or listening.” And clearly, this year, the Grammys finally are.