Stevie Wonder said it best: “Thank you, but stop.” He was trying only to curtail the standing ovation that greeted him at last night’s Grammys so he and his fellow uncannily undiminished senior citizen Smokey Robinson could get on with the music. But he could have been addressing the whole institution.
Thank you, Recording Academy, for a broadcast that carried on the recent trend of avoiding the overdone production numbers and ungainly musical mismatches of the the pre-pandemic era in favor of simply first-rate performances—like Wonder and Robinson’s stage-flattening Motown tribute, Steve Lacy’s supercool rendition of “Bad Habit,” or the Questlove-curated, astoundingly all-star celebration of hip-hop at 50 that made for a jaw-dropping centerpiece, and arguably a bit of an apology from the Grammys for giving that genre short shrift for most of that half-century. As a viewer this year, all I wanted was to be at Lizzo and Adele’s table, where they were having a nonstop blast just dancing and singing along, awards be damned (though they also each got a chance to deliver an acceptance speech).
But stop, Grammys, because when it comes to the ostensible reason for the show, those little gramophone-shaped prizes you hand out, you still can’t get it right.
Not that there is an actual right answer about any given year’s best songs or albums. As Harry Styles put it when sheepishly accepting his album of the year award for Harry’s House, “There is no such thing as best in music,” and artists creating music in a recording studio are not like sports teams giving their all to win a championship. Every music writer is aware that whenever we put out a year-end list, some fan will start yelling online that the whole thing is invalid if their favorite artist isn’t ranked No. 1. So that’s not what I’m trying to do here.
But this particular year, Beyoncé not winning the Grammys’ most prestigious award did feel pretty close to discrediting the entire enterprise. Everyone knew it in advance, as spelled out in headlines such as “The Beyoncé Paradox,” “It’s Beyoncé’s Time to Shine at the Grammys … Right?,” and, most aggressively, in the Los Angeles Times, “Grammys, You Have One Job on Sunday: Give Beyoncé Album of the Year.”
It’s because this is the third consecutive studio album for which Beyoncé Knowles has been nominated and then passed over for a white artist, despite all three records’ status as music-industry milestones. Last time this happened, in 2017, Adele’s acceptance speech was just an abject apology for 25’s beating Lemonade, which didn’t much help. It’s because, although Beyoncé last night officially became the most awarded individual in the history of the Grammys, only 1 of those 32 prizes has come in the Recording Academy’s top, cross-genre categories—“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” as song of the year in 2010. And it’s because Renaissance is not only, in my opinion, Beyoncé’s best album, it’s one presented precisely on terms that the Grammys ought to understand. It might not have her very best songs, but it is an album as an album, an extended conceptual statement encompassing decades of music history in dialogue with the present.
However, the music history at question here is that of house and other electronic dance music—a form that, as Beyoncé graciously acknowledged while accepting her Grammy in that subcategory, was invented by queer people of color, and one that a substantially luddite-leaning, traditionalist Grammy voting bloc has never respected.
If this were just the Grammys’ not clicking with Beyoncé, that would be one thing. But no Black woman has won the album prize in the 21st century. The last one who did was Lauryn Hill in 1999; the only other two Black female winners in the award’s 65-year history were Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston, both also in the 1990s. And of the Black men who’ve won in the past 23 years, arguably only Outkast in 2004 were truly in conversation with the central currents of popular music at the time. The others, excellent as they are—Herbie Hancock, Ray Charles, and last year’s winner, Jon Batiste—belonged to more-specialized legacy niches. They didn’t have the same symbolic meaning to the public at large.
The Grammys leadership is well aware of its reputation, and they’ve been struggling painfully to change, particularly by expanding their voting membership beyond a preponderance of old white studio and label guys. With a field of 10 nominees in a category, pluralities are going to break various ways; some voting blocs are going to split or cancel one another out. The outcome doesn’t reflect anyone’s personal malice, but complex processes that always seem to mysteriously wind up the same way is the definition of structural racism. Whether you accept that or not, it’s damn sure how it’s going to read to a lot of artists and the public. And that’s going to have consequences for the Grammys as an institution, in terms of viewership and artist participation. Many hip-hop and R&B stars, including Drake, the Weeknd, and Frank Ocean, have already been boycotting the Grammys. It wasn’t a coincidence that Beyoncé herself didn’t agree to perform at this year’s event, or even go out of her way to show up on time.
There were outcomes that would have been more defensible. Bad Bunny’s album Un Verano Sin Ti is arguably more globally significant than Renaissance, certifying that the world’s biggest star right now is making Spanish-language, Latin music. His opening number at the Grammys, which endearingly rearranged his usually beat-centric music as traditional merengue, no doubt won him thousands more fans in a few minutes. And if Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers had won, it would have been in a great Grammy tradition of awarding the right person for the wrong album, as some compensation for past slights. In his acceptance speech for best rap album, Lamar characteristically found a complex way to spin the mixed reception of Mr. Morale, saying of its ambivalent, somewhat self-absorbed treatment of difficult subject matter, “I finally found imperfection on this album.” True on a couple of levels, King K.
But no, the award went instead to Harry Styles, for an inconsistent album with some excellent songs. I would have endorsed “As It Was” for record of the year, which Lizzo won for “About Damn Time.” (She spent her speech paying tribute to Beyoncé as well as Prince.) But when host Trevor Noah came to the microphone to announce the album of the year and peeked inside the envelope, he quickly changed his mind and asked the diminutive Styles-superfan granny from this year’s weird fan-roundtable group to read it out, doing the dirty work for him. Frankly, I suspect that this was the point of that belabored exercise all along. This heartland focus group (which came off like the New York Times interviewing voters at a Midwestern diner), featuring one advocate for each album nominee, was meant to take the heat off the Grammys if something like this happened: “See? Nice people can disagree! Even if it turns out to be ABBA, that one guy whose house burned down loves them!”
Styles, for his part, seemed like a fabulously dressed doe in the headlights. He’d already been thrown off in his own performance by the night’s perpetual sound issues, and now here he was, serving as a human sacrifice to expunge the Recording Academy’s sins. (And we’d thought the Satanic portion of the proceedings was done after Sam Smith and Kim Petras finished performing “Unholy” bathed in demonic red light!) Styles handled the situation as well as could be expected, until the last moment, when, in handing off the microphone to his collaborator, Kid Harpoon, he blurted out, “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often.”
Now, I think I understand what Styles meant by this: He was speaking from a British, class-conscious context. He’s a kid who came from a lower-middle-class family of divorce, went to a comprehensive school, and worked part time as a baker in high school before winning an audition to join a boy band. In his mind, he was saying, “Wow: I’ve sure come a long way from where I started, so I’m grateful.” But under the circumstances, it came out wrong, and to American ears it came out exactly topsy-turvy: People like Styles—white, Anglophone, seemingly straight male stars (even if they enjoy wearing dresses, or Gritty-gone-glitter silver onesies)—often seem like the only people this happens to.
In other words, I really think Styles just misspoke and will be misunderstood. He doesn’t deserve the grief he’s going to get over it, this week and possibly for the rest of his life. Then again, there’s a lot of grief to go around.
So instead of reviewing all the other joyful or moving musical moments from last night—the heartbreaking tribute to the late Takeoff by Quavo and gospel group Maverick City Music in the memorial segment, for instance—I’m going to take Stevie’s cue and say thank you, but stop. It would be a bit too much of a case of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Except for one final point: The Grammys’ new Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change was awkwardly introduced, with the sudden appearance of Jill Biden and confusing talk about the number of “submissions,” which led me to think that this was going to be some kind of amateur talent competition. But instead, the prize went to a piece of music that, as I wrote in my end-of-year retrospective, is objectively the most important song of 2022—Shervin Hajipour’s Iranian protest anthem “Baraye.” I do believe that the issues of cultural representation and other dynamics I’ve been discussing so far here are significant. But this tweet, from Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, puts them in a bit of perspective.
So, let’s go ahead and get righteous on behalf of Beyoncé and, more cogently, over what the Grammys’ repeated flubs are a symptom of in American culture. Still, unlike Shervin Hajipour, for instance, Beyoncé hasn’t been imprisoned for any of her songs, last I checked. She still has her millions. There are, to say the least, greater injustices.
