A Grammys triple play
Heightened visibility of women falls in line with cultural shifts
Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar’s work for the blockbuster movie “Black Panther” received eight nominations from the Recording Academy, including recognition in the top three categories of record, album and song of the year.
A cursory glance at a list of artists with multiple nominations for the 2019 Grammy Awards looks promising in the wake of last year’s #GrammysSoMale complaints that erupted after male performers overwhelmingly dominated the statuettes handed out, especially those distributed during the national telecast of the annual ceremony.
This year, among 11 people with five or more nominations, six are men, five are women.
Friday’s Grammy nominations reflected the effort to create a more diverse group of top-of-the-slate nominees, finding room for academy recognition for hip-hop artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Cardi B and Post Malone, the indie folk-pop of Brandi Carlile, the progressive country of Kacey Musgraves, the youthful mainstream pop of Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey and the classic-rock underpinnings of Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s music from “A Star Is Born.”
“We’ve had a few objectives here,” Recording Academy President and CEO Neil Portnow said. One is “to be reflective of the year in music. … Another objective clearly is the commitment that we’ve made — that I’ve made — to looking at and finding tangible ways of ensuring that we are diverse and inclusive across the organization, and that we take this very important issue very seriously.
“We also want to assume a leadership role from an industry standpoint,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done across the industry. From that perspective, from having broader opportunities for more and wonderful artists
to be recognized as nominees, this intuitively feels like a good way to go.”
Nods for album of the year are particularly wideranging. The Lamar-led soundtrack to “Black Panther,” which features contributions from a plethora of major artists, is joined by Carlile’s “By the Way, I Forgive You,” Drake’s “Scorpion,” Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy,” H.E.R.’s “H.E.R.,” Post Malone’s “Beerbongs & Bentleys,” Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer” and Musgraves’ “Golden Hour.”
For Carlile, the heightened visibility of female nominees in the top categories this year reflects a broader shift in culture.
“I see more women being recognized in many industries and in all kinds of places [like] we saw with the midterm elections,” she said. “God help us it’s not [just] a trend.”
After 15 years of steady stewardship of the organization with little in the way of controversy under his watch, Portnow ignited a firestorm of criticism on the heels of a comment after January’s Grammys that it was time for women to “step up” if they wished to be better represented in the annual gala.
His quick mea culpa did little to quell the outrage among many who argued vociferously that if it was time for anything, it was time for Portnow to step down. Several weeks later he announced that that was precisely what he would do — after his current contract expires in July.
“It wasn’t the most fun year in my life last year,” Portnow said Thursday in his first extended interview with The Times since the controversy arose. “But these kinds of events can be beneficial if you take them as teaching moments.
“I’ve learned a lot,” he said. “It has strengthened my commitment to doing the right things, to having created the task force we did, and being committed and committing the academy, along with our board, to seriously working on this issue.”
He was referring to the announcement in May of an 18-member task force under the direction of Tina Tchen, who was chief of staff to former First Lady Michelle Obama. The group was charged with investigating biases at work in the music industry — whether conscious or unconscious — that created the situation spotlighted in a 2017 USC Annenberg study that found 93% of Grammy Awards in the top categories over the previous five years went to male recipients.
The task force’s initial recommendations resulted in this year’s expansion of the four general Grammy Award categories — record, album, song and new artist — to make room for eight nominees in each, up from the historical five nominations apiece.
“I think what we see is an accurate pulse,” Portnow said. “What I see [in the nominations] reflects the stories in music this year, but also, as we don’t view this through the lens of charts and sales or marketing or streaming or even social media attention generated, we see it through the lens of excellence and peer review, and I’m very proud of what we have in front of us in all these 84 categories.”
Any criticisms didn’t diminish the Grammys in the eyes of an artist such as Musgraves, “whose Golden Hour,” a tender and dreamy meditation on new romance, was one of the most celebrated albums of the year.
In New York this week to be honored as part of Billboard’s Women in Music event, she stressed that a Grammy nod is something special, given that the Recording Academy considers “every kind of music that came out in a year,” as Musgraves put it. “And this year I feel like there were a lot of strong voices from all over the place.”
Recording Academy voters were especially impressed this year with the sound of Wakanda, the fictional African country from the film “Black Panther.” The music that Compton rapper Lamar assembled to accompany the Marvel Studios blockbuster received a field-leading eight nominations for its album and singles, including the hat trick of recognition in the top three categories of record, album and song of the year.
This is the second time in Lamar’s career that he has led the Grammy nominees. Lamar went into the 2016 ceremony with 11 nominations tied to his “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and last year his “Damn” competed for album of the year, ultimately losing to Bruno Mars.
This year his hip-hop peer Drake scored seven nods, and a pair of artists have six — Washington state-bred singer-songwriter Carlile and producer Boi-1Da.
Nominees for record of the year, an award saluting musical performance and record production, are “I Like It” from Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin; Childish Gambino’s politically charged “This Is America”; Drake’s “God’s Plan”; Lady Gaga and Cooper’s “Shallow”; Lamar and SZA’s duet “All the Stars”; Zedd, Morris and Grey’s “The Middle”; and Carlile’s “The Joke,” which received a high-profile boost when former President Obama included it on a playlist of his favorite recent songs.
Six of those eight also collected nominations for song of the year, a songwriter’s award. In addition to “All the Stars,” “God’s Plan,” “The Joke,” “The Middle,” “Shallow” and “This Is America,” the other two nominated songs are Ella Mai’s hit “Boo’d Up” and Shawn Mendes’ single “In My Blood.”
Contenders for best new artist are sibling R&B duo Chloe X Halle, rising country star Luke Combs, Michigan hard-rock band Greta Van Fleet, R&B singer-songwriter H.E.R., indie countryfolk singer-songwriter Margo Price, pop musician-producer Bebe Rexha, and English singer-songwriters Dua Lipa and Jorja Smith.
But while the major categories appear particularly diverse, looking further down the list, the situation quickly becomes a case of “same as it ever was.”
Extending the analysis through those with three or more nominations, the imbalance is striking: Of 42 names, 32 are men — just 10 are women. To a big extent, that reflects the maleskewed world of producers and engineers being recognized for their work in the most nominated recordings.
Portnow acknowledges the disparity but cautions against reading too much into those numbers — for now. “The responsibility of our voters is first and foremost to make that judgment about the music,” he said. “Now, as far as the practical piece of that, what’s also important is that there be no barriers and there be no bias in terms of the process that leads to the creative choices that our voters can make.”
A start: Veteran singersongwriter-producer Linda Perry is also among the nominees for non-classical producer of the year, an exceptionally rare occurrence. The last time a solo female was nominated in that category was Lauryn Hill for the 41st Grammy Awards, which aired in 1999, and a woman has never won. In the classical producer category, however, the award has gone to a female seven times.
“I usually don’t like to single nominees out, but it’s nice to see a woman, Linda Perry, nominated for producer of the year,” Portnow said. “She’s been a great friend and supporter of the academy, but in the bigger picture, the phrase is, ‘You need to see it to be it.’
The Grammy Awards will be announced Feb. 10 in a nationally televised ceremony at Staples Center in L.A.