Grammys not perfect, but did Houston proud
There are only a few reasons for skipping school that we can responsibly condone and Lizzo gave a pretty good one Sunday evening while accepting her Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
“In the fifth grade, I skipped school to see you perform,” she told Beyoncé during her speech for her win for “About Damn Time.”
“You changed my life,” she continued. “The way you made me feel, I was like, ‘I want to make people feel this way with my music.’ ”
It was one of the show’s most uplifting moments, reflective not just of Lizzo’s particular philosophy of unstoppable optimism and hustle but of the best that the music industry has to offer: two talents inspiring and supporting each other.
Though Beyoncé’s equally bouncy and vibrant album “Renaissance” did not take home Album of the Year, she still walked away with four more shiny gold gramophone statues to add to her collection. With 32 Grammy Awards to her name, she became the most-awarded artist in the show’s 65-year history.
It was a proud night for Houston.
“I’ve been the same since I’ve been driving slow on Bissonnet,” Lizzo sang during her performance.
Many other Houston artists also shined Sunday, from those nominated, including Tobe Nwigwe and even Rice University professor and historian Douglas Brinkley (again), to those who took home the hardware, including pianist Robert Glasper who beat out a very salty Chris Brown for Best R&B Album.
It was also a complicated night. Beyoncé’s loss for Album of the Year marks the fourth time that her work has been overlooked in that category and with what is arguably the strongest entry the Houston-born and -raised icon has had. It’s not a stretch to see it, as many do, as a snub. How can the most decorated musical artist never have won for best album?
“You clearly are the artist of our lives,” Lizzo said in her speech, echoing our sentiments precisely.
Bigger than one artist’s personal frustrations though, the loss seemed to reflect a long-running institutional failure on the part of the Grammys to properly recognize the contributions of “genre” artists to making and shaping so much of our musical culture. After it was introduced in 2013, for example, the show’s “Urban Contemporary” category was criticized for years by artists who argued it was a way to sideline Black musicians until it was only recently renamed.
And it’s not just the Grammys. When the enormously popular Bad Bunny took the stage to perform an opening medley from his album, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” the first Spanish-language album nominated for the best album of the year, the live captioning provided by CBS (fixed later for replays) simply read: SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH.
Award shows are tricky. Almost every year, there’s something they seem to get wrong and yet we excitedly look at the nominations each time, counting up the wins for the hometown team. The show has tried to make changes, such as adding to its “membership class” to create a more diverse groups of voters. This year’s program included a 50-year celebration of hip hop (which featured yet another Houston star, Scarface) but here too, the show’s own record has been spotty.
In her own acceptance speech, Beyoncé said she was simply trying to receive the moment as she thanked the queer community, whose imprint is all over her album, and her Uncle Jonny in particular, whom she once called the “most fabulous gay man.”
While she certainly earned Album of the Year in our book, the moment we were most happy to see was two (Houston) artists genuinely celebrating each other and basking in their immense achievements. Besides, as Beyoncé knows, the best revenge is your paper.
Moment between Lizzo and Beyoncé was uplifting for music industry.