There is an old saying taken as fact among many people of color in this nation. President Obama reminded Morehouse College’s 2013 graduating class about it. Books about former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have used it as a way to explain her success. It was even said on Scandal. The saying usually goes something like this: African Americans have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much as whites do.
I was reminded of this when reflecting on Taylor Swift’s victory over Kendrick Lamar (and The Weeknd) during the Grammy Awards this past Monday. Award show victories don’t necessarily mean anything in the long run—they’re lines on a musician’s resume, a decadent relic of the good old times, but not a career-defining one in the way they perhaps once were. With the exception of the occasional Esperanza Spalding, the golden gramophone is just an outdated confirmation in the form of a trophy bearing an outdated musical technology.
In fact, an industrial analysis from Billboard in 2015 showed that performing at the awards was the true marker of increased earnings potential rather than a win itself. And thus, in recent years, performances have replaced the pageantry of the awards themselves: This year’s three-and-a-half hour broadcast (that’s two hundred and ten minutes!) featured twenty performances and eight award presentations. Even the awards show doesn’t really care about handing out awards any more. So why did I?
But the defeat of To Pimp a Butterfly bothered me as the credits ran over Pit Bull’s strange performance. It still bothered me the next morning. It still bothers me now. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) hangs its hat on the Grammy as the industry’s “most prestigious award,” given “to honor excellence.” These are of course abstract terms, but the general consensus among critics is that To Pimp A Butterfly (a 96 on Metacritic, a widely accepted reviews aggregator) was superior to Swift’s 1989 (a 76). Lamar’s album, in fact, is the fourth highest-reviewed album in the site’s (admittedly somewhat incomplete) index. Have we entered a new era of “raptimism?” Or was there something about Kendrick Lamar’s work that tapped into the zeitgeist? And wouldn’t his unique blend of popular attention and critical acclaim make him a shoe-in?
Remember the award in question here—NARAS is said to be honoring the Album of the Year. As I said Tuesday, no record seemed to sum up 2015—a year of reawakening radical black political consciousness punctuated by the gunshots of those who purport to serve and protect—more than To Pimp a Butterfly. It topped the year-end lists at 28 different major mainstream publications, including The A.V. Club, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. The latter declared, “Thanks to D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, 2015 will be remembered as the year radical Black politics and for-real Black music resurged in tandem to converge on the nation’s pop mainstream.”
Lamar was nominated for eleven awards; seven were drawn from To Pimp a Butterfly and four featured him secondarily as a feature or contributor. He wound up taking home five awards: Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song, Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, Best Rap Performance, and for Best Music Video (ironically as a featured artist in Taylor Swift’s bloated homage to #squad, “Bad Blood”). Virtually all of the talk in the mainstream press the day after the ceremony suggested that Kendrick was one of the night’s big winners. See here, here, here, and here. There are more; trust me. We are expected to take it for granted that Lamar had had a good night.
Perhaps he did. But I instead want to make the case here that Lamar’s excellence was undercut by a system that was not built to recognize it. Reviewed on its own merits, Lamar’s work was seen as exceptional, but when it went up against a white artist, Swift, his work was no longer superlative. Now it was somehow inferior. He had the Best Rap Album; she had the Best Album. He had the best Rap Song and the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration; Ed Sheeran had the Song of the Year. Even Lamar’s win as a guest on Swift’s “Bad Blood” video beat out his own video for “Alright.”
I want to argue that from this treatment, we can grasp hold of a more pervasive logic: That NARAS’s record suggests that recognizing artists of color as among the best albums of the year is a suitable degree of validation. Just making the final cut is a tribute to their success. And the media coverage implies that artists in minority-identified genres should be satisfied with their niche accomplishments. Their place in the pecking order has been set.
Despite the fact that hip-hop is arguably the most popular music of our time, when it comes time for the “real awards,” non-white artists are almost never recognized. In the last ten years, there have been seventeen nonwhite artists nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. They are as follows: Mariah Carey and Kanye West in 2006; Gnarls Barkley in 2007; Herbie Hancock and Kanye West in 2008; Ne-Yo and Lil Wayne in 2009; Beyoncé Knowles and The Black Eyed Peas in 2010; Bruno Mars and Rihanna in 2012; Frank Ocean in 2013; Kendrick Lamar in 2014; Beyoncé Knowles and Pharrell Williams in 2015; and The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar in 2016. Of those seventeen, the only winner was Herbie Hancock in 2008. His album was a collection of covers of songs by the white folk artist Joni Mitchell.
In 2006, Carey won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song, and Best Contemporary R&B Album, losing Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal. That’s three wins in the racially marked categories and four losses in the non-marked ones. West lost Record of the Year and Album of the Year, winning Best Rap Solo Performance, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap Album. Again, a shutout in the mainstream. In 2013, Frank Ocean won Best Urban Contemporary Album and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, losing Best Short Form Music Video, Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and the important Best New Artist category. While there are 47 more years to study, this sure seems like a pattern.
Many well-meaning people often have a hard time understanding what systemic racism looks like. This is what systemic racism looks like. When renowned creations by racialized artists are only honored in the categories coded black and systematically passed over time and time again for “mainstream” recognition, this belies an in-built bias that precludes nonwhite excellence from being considered on the same terms as white excellence. Lamar’s excellence was only questioned when it came face-to-face with the white mainstream. When you look at the academy’s record, it shouldn’t have been surprising that Taylor Swift won out over Kendrick Lamar. That is a hegemonic racial caste system playing out in the way that it is designed to play out.
Again, “which artist wins a Grammy” is not a high stakes argument, and one could easily argue that despite all this, Kendrick Lamar’s incredible performance on Monday was the actual highlight of the evening, as he boldly stood in chains while the glittering audience bedecked in the trappings of vulgar wealth applauded. But until the establishment is either ready to appropriately appraise his excellence or confront its own race problem head-on, Lamar’s words fall flat on the ears that need to hear it most.
In closing, let me just say that I don’t believe I’m alone in this fight. You can think what you will about Kanye West, but his outbursts after Beck’s victory in 2015 and, of course, Taylor Swift’s in 2009, were leveled at a system that he sees—rightly, I would argue—as a race-based system of differential acclaim. This year’s result showed that even superlative excellence from African American artists sometimes still isn’t enough. And though he wasn’t present Monday, I’m going to go ahead and assume Kanye West was stewing somewhere after another music industry injustice. Kanye might be the only person left on earth who cares about the results of awards shows. Maybe more of us should.
John Vilanova is MusiQology’s Managing Editor and a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication. You can find him on Twitter @johnvilanova.
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