The Grammys Are Constructed on a Delusion

On the finish of final evening’s Grammys ceremony, a chill and inoffensive famous person stated one thing that despatched many music listeners right into a rage: “This doesn’t occur to folks like me fairly often.” These have been Harry Types’s phrases after profitable Album of the 12 months; presumably he wished to tug an inspirational narrative from the truth that little ol’ he, a former reality-TV contestant from a small city, had earned probably the most prestigious award in well-liked music. But folks like him—white, well-connected singers of tasteful pop and rock—are precisely who win Album of the 12 months Grammys. The type of people that don’t win embody rappers (a hip-hop artist final took Album of the 12 months 19 years in the past) and Black girls (you’d have to return to 1999 for that).

Types’s Harry’s Home is well-made fluff, and its victory over extra daring, presently influential artists—together with Beyoncé, Unhealthy Bunny, Lizzo, and Kendrick Lamar—triggered uproar on-line. Justice can be for that backlash to not overshadow a few of the milestones of this 12 months’s ceremony: Beyoncé breaking the report for probably the most Grammy wins in a lifetime; an excellent medley celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop; a victory lap for the queer hitmakers Sam Smith and Kim Petras. Sturdy performances by Lizzo, Brandi Carlile, Steve Lacy, and Stevie Surprise (!), in addition to the transferring In Memoriam partly impressed by the rapper Takeoff, deserve a watch. However one thing about Types’s win makes the incoherence underlying the Grammys so obvious as to be maddening, virtually insupportable.

“Effectively, shit,” Types stated initially of his acceptance speech. “I’ve been so, so impressed by each artist on this class with me … I believe on nights like tonight, it’s clearly so vital for us to keep in mind that there isn’t any such factor as greatest in music.” The meek tone delivered to thoughts an ungainly Grammys custom of white winners performing embarrassed to have been elevated over Black friends (see Billie Eilish dedicating an award to Megan Thee Stallion in 2021, Adele doing the identical to Beyoncé in 2017, and Macklemore apologizing to Lamar in 2014). And in arguing there isn’t any greatest in music, he highlighted the delusion that the ceremony, to that time, had been reveling in.

That delusion? The concept that the Grammys are something apart from a distorted recognition contest. One of many evening’s wilder artifacts was a section stuffed with faux information tales: a couple of protest turning right into a live performance, inflicting police to put down their weapons; about music being prescribed as a medication to deal with illness; a couple of track swaying governments worldwide to help girls’s rights. The purpose, stated Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. in the course of the video, was as an instance the hypothetical energy of music. Setting apart that the fabrications appeared to diss the artwork kind—insinuating that no matter music’s really conducting proper now isn’t all that spectacular—the section insisted that the Grammys don’t simply reward the pleasing association of vibrations within the air. In addition they encourage human progress and connection.

Within the spirit of that notion, the ceremony overvalued the Album of the 12 months race with pretaped segments wherein followers of the nominees sat round a desk and argued about why their faves deserved to win. With the keenness of entrepreneurs pitching start-ups, the panelists touted the social and private significance of every album: Lizzo was praised for her physique positivity, and Lamar for his charity towards a fan in want. But the notably various roundtable additionally illustrated that the battle for a prize like Album of the 12 months is sure up with listener demographics and cohorts of style. Types’s champion was a 78-year-old Canadian lady who’d flown, along with her granddaughter, to see him carry out—an ideal instance of how Types’s avowedly nostalgic pop has succeeded by bringing Gen Z and the Child Boomers collectively.

The fan-panelists didn’t discuss very a lot concerning the music itself; little time was spent on how somebody determines that one track is superior to a different. However Grammys historical past makes clear that the voters within the normal classes do pattern towards particular sounds. Genteel-seeming music, made largely with analog devices, hewing intently to basic songwriting templates, tends to win. Music that’s clearly primarily based in digital recording and manufacturing, that experiments and provokes, often doesn’t. In different phrases, Beyoncé’s Renaissance, an modern style mishmash celebrating Black, queer historical past, perhaps by no means actually stood an opportunity, although it plainly has extra of a social conscience than the mumbled nothingness of Harry’s Home. The race and ethnicity of the performers form the chances, too—partly due to traditionalist aesthetic concepts that simply so occur to write down off principally all of hip-hop.

Maybe a problem to these concepts continues to be brewing, or maybe they’ll by no means be dethroned. After the departure of the longtime Grammys president Neil Portnow in 2019, the Recording Academy has expanded its voting base in an effort towards constructing variety. The record-breaking thirty second Grammy win for Beyoncé final evening exhibits that artists like her do have important constituencies on the Academy (although the outcomes virtually all the time present up in genre-specific, moderately than normal, classes). And Types looks as if a pleasant man who’s made some good music. The issue lies in performing like this awards present is saving the world, moderately than mirroring its issues again to it.