Diversity blind spot shows few signs of clearing up
Faces of popular music being shut out of major Grammy categories
Tyler, the Creator wasn’t going to be ignored.
Amid the slow-moving, nationally televised spectacle last weekend that was the Grammy Awards, the California rapper donned a blond wig and shades, commanded an army of clone-like dancers and roared amid a simulated inferno.
It was a riveting moment of theater, but Tyler wasn’t through. After winning the best rap album Grammy for his 2019 release, “Igor,” he was still fired up backstage.
“It sucks that whenever we — and I mean guys that look like me — do anything that’s genrebending or that’s anything, they always put it in a rap or urban category,” he said. “I don’t like that ‘urban’ word — it’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me. … Half of me feels like the rap nomination was just a backhanded compliment, like my little cousin wants to play the game. Let’s give him the unplugged controller so he can shut up and feel good about it.”
The suggestion that the Grammys are stacked against non-white, non-mainstream performers is not a new one. But things behind the scenes have been boiling over in recent weeks with fresh accusations made by the Recording Academy’s recently ousted chief executive, Deborah Dugan, that the Grammys have been rigged by a “boys club,” where votes are manipulated in “secret committees.”
Rigged or not, the Grammys
still look like a lost cause when it comes to evaluating the most vital contemporary music. Hip-hop in particular continues to be treated as the equivalent of a fad or a gimmick that will soon blow over, rather than an art form that has been evolving and redefining popular music for more than 40 years.
Hip-hop/R&B artists represent more than 30% of all streaming activity in music, more than double that of the next-closest genres (rock and pop at 14% each). Yet it wasn’t until 2014 that the Grammys allowed songs that use samples — a cornerstone of hip-hop composition — to even compete in songwriting categories, including song of the year.
Little wonder that only two hip-hop artists (OutKast in 2004 and Lauryn Hill in 1999) have ever won album of the year, and that the rap innovators of recent decades have been shut out in the four major non-genre-specific categories (album, song and record of the year as well as best new artist).
Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Drake and Jay-Z have been nominated for more than 200 Grammys and have won 58, none in the Big Four. Despite 70 nominations and 24 awards, Beyonce has won only one in a major category (“Put a Ring on It” in 2010 for song of the year).
No one outside the Recording Academy would think of these as artists who appeal only to listeners of a particular genre. They are the face of popular music.
On Sunday, Lizzo was the latest self-described “no-genre hiphop” artist hemmed in by category as she won three Grammys in the urban contemporary, pop and R&B fields but was shut out in all of the Big Four categories in which she was nominated.
Billie Eilish, the 18-year-old artist who swept the Big Four, is certainly a worthy choice as a pop innovator. But to deny Lizzo even just one or two of the major awards is to ignore the artist who crossed lines of genre, gender and generation unlike any other in 2019. If any song ascended to anthem status last year, it was Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” though it lost both record and song of the year to Eilish’s “Bad Guy.”
Ric Wilson, a genre-blurring Chicago artist, spoke for many when he tweeted Sunday during the awards show: “Truth Hurts was one of the biggest breakout songs that I’ve ever seen” and added that “from hood dudes to soccer moms that was the Record of The Year.”
For the Recording Academy to miss recognizing such a cultural landmark when passing out its biggest honors affirms that it’s still broken, despite the academy’s claims that it is trying to address its diversity blind spot. The 21,000-member academy claims it is focusing on recruiting more women, racial minorities and younger voters in recent years, with 590 new voting members last year and 200 in 2018.
The academy’s interim chief executive, Harvey Mason Jr., recently announced a series of initiatives by a diversity task force to hire a “diversity and inclusion officer,” initiate an independent review of the academy’s diversity and inclusion efforts, and create a fund for “women in music” organizations.
To acknowledge the problem, let alone address it, is long overdue, but it may not be enough. Viewership for the Grammy Awards show Sunday hit a 12-year low, down 5% from 2019 to 18.7 million.
As hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs said at a preGrammy gala last weekend, “Black music has never, never been respected by the Grammys to the point that it should be. So right now, in this current situation, it’s not a revelation. This thing’s been going on, and it’s not just going on in music. It’s going on in film, it’s going on in sports, it’s going on around the world.”
And if it keeps going on at the Grammys, a key voting bloc — the fans — may tune out for good.
No one outside the Recording Academy would think of these as artists who appeal only to listeners of a particular genre. They are the face of popular music.