With the dust settled and the hot takes cooled, we wanted to reflect on the surprising results of the 2019 GRAMMY Awards, which upset some longstanding patterns and pathways and doubled down on others. From the moment surprise guest Michelle Obama took the stage with hostess Alicia Keys, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Lady Gaga, the show emphasized the long-overlooked voices and centrality of women in a music industry that has a serious, significant problem with gender inequality, where according to the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, men made up more than 75% of the Billboard Hot 100 between 2012 and 2017.
Songwriting and other engineering numbers were similarly (and in some cases more) concerning, which suggests a key similarity to our ongoing project of discussing race as it relates to the awards: Without women working in studios and receiving the requisite six production credits on releases necessary to join the Recording Academy’s 14,000-strong voting body, the votes will be as unrepresentative as an industry in which men’s opportunities, bonafides, and voices are often normalized. Neil Portnow outrageously suggested women’s lack of trophies in 2018 (only one woman received a trophy during the telecast) was actually the fault of women artists for not “step[ping] up.”
As the 2019 Awards began to broadcast, I made a quick prediction: Specifically that the GRAMMYs would be faced with a non-choice that is often rendered as one: What mattered more—gender or race? I fully expected the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper showbiz epic “Shallow,” from their film A Star is Born to sweep Song and Record of the Year, with one of two white female artists Kacey Musgraves or Brandi Carlile to win Album of the Year, continuing the categories’ 9, 14, and 11 year streaks, respectively. “There would be nothing more predictable of such a legacy organization for it to not be capable of thinking intersectionally,” I wrote at the time.
A funny thing happened on the way to the podium, though: Gaga and Cooper left trophy-less among the General Field (though Gaga won two trophies in a pop field that featured only one black-led nomination across its four categories, a concern). Instead, Childish Gambino’s surrealist “This is America” became the first song featuring rapping to take Song and Record of the Year.
While much of our work here has focused on Album of the Year, as it’s the final award of the GRAMMYs telecasts (usually airing long after the awards’ posted end time), Song and Record of the Year have produced the same problematic patterns of white winners and black nominees who fell “just short.” To wit, only three black artists (Alicia Keys, Luther Vandross, and Beyoncé Knowles) have won Song of the Year since 1996. In that same time period, only one black artist, Ray Charles in 2005, has won Record of the Year. So Gambino’s wins are unequivocally a big deal.
Read Dr. Guy’s breakdown of “This is America” in TIME magazine.
It’s as well worth noting specifically that Gambino’s victory engages with a divide drawn in the Academy within black music: Before Sunday night, only two General Field winners, Lauryn Hill in 1999 and Outkast in 2004, featured artists rapping. Long-held debates about the artistry and musicality of black music often place the sing-talk hybrid of rap within their crosshairs, where ostensibly the rejection of mainstream hip-hop (Kendrick Lamar now has nine nominations in General Field categories and ZERO wins) rested upon these concerns. Gambino’s haul doubles the number of General Field rap trophies overnight. This is a big deal—a potentially major shift.
How did he do it, then? I’d argue Gambino’s win follows a path I proposed for his failed Album of the Year candidacy last year, when his excellent album Awaken, My Love! was among those nominees steamrolled by Bruno Mars. His candidacy rested upon being interpellated as “not just” a rapper, appealing to the base constituencies of fans rather than the musical experts. Instead, he was an artist who had created a provocational art piece rather than a single built for radio or the club, a song most clearly remembered in its video form, which contributed to its effectiveness, even if that video ostensibly was not what was being judged. As I outlined in The Atlantic, though, this is actually a phenomenon of late where black artists who cross over into the General Field usually might be summed up with one of a set of words: “auteur,” “genius,” “individual,” or the like. Gambino’s big night happened because the GRAMMY voters were convinced he was an artist—that he’d ascended to a higher plane of creativity.
Given all these narratives, it would make sense that Kendrick Lamar’s high-concept Black Panther soundtrack might have a shot at breaking his losing streak. Recall, the Pulitzers recognized the “vernacular” quality of DAMN., a word that ultimately feels somewhat backhanded in a conversation around artistry: It might not be unfair to suggest that the very thing that the Pulitzers praised was the quality that kept him off the GRAMMYs stage this past January and two and four years prior. Lamar and his collaborators would have a chance to take home the Album of the Year for the Black Panther soundtrack, in large part due to the Academy’s recognition of this as a more artistically minded, conceptual project than his previous albums, all of which lost out. Alas, though, the streak continues.
Album of the Year instead went to Kacey Musgraves, a white singer of a new era of country music which eschews tried-and-true man-and-truck narratives that have dominated radio and embracing LGBT support and criticism of life under the current Presidential administration. More work in the long term needs to be done about the recent phenomenon of overrepresentation of country on the telecast, throwing a bone to the ostensibly white viewers still inspired by the music. (When other than GRAMMYs weekend do we hear from Little Big Town?) But in the short term, this means Album of the Year has not gone to a black artist since 2008, which should prompt a deeper exploration into the idea of the album itself. What is it about black albums that seems to lack the coherence necessary to earn this award?
One of the most talked-about moments of the show was when host Alicia Keys sat betwixt two dueling pianos, one white and one black, and performed a medley of songs she allegedly wished she had written. Keys is one of the few black artists who’s made good, crossing into Song of the Year in 2002 for “Fallin’,” one of her pop epics. (Her other fourteen awards all come in segregated black categories). Much of her personal narrative—like GRAMMY favorite Stevie Wonder’s—rests upon her status as a child musician. With this virtuosic performance, Keys also connected herself to another child prodigy—Hazel Scott—who famously played two pianos at once in 1943’s The Heat’s On. Comparing the two performances furthers Keys’s claims to a certain level of artistry that is necessary for Academy acceptance.
Frequent GRAMMYs critic Drake made a surprise appearance to accept Best Rap Song for “God’s Plan,” electing to use the little time he had before his mic was cut to remind viewers that, “We play an opinion-based sport, not a factual-based sport,” where “This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand what a mixed-race kid from Canada has to say, or a fly Spanish girl from New York.” This reminder was important because the GRAMMYs suggest often that expertise is a means to objectivize their musical listening, taking something subjective and making it as close to opinionless as possible. That rhetoric is ultimately a disappointingly race-blind one—a literal blindfold test, Portnow once called it—and for artists to be calling it out might represent an opportunity for interventions and clearer criteria.
But for all the important gains for black music this year, two tribute performances reminded us that this is one step of many needed in the right direction. The first, a Motown tribute led by Jennifer Lopez, featured a number of songs from the label, which was once the largest black-owned business in America, that lost out on GRAMMY Awards. Launched in the early Sixties, Motown had 35 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s and dozens of other hits between their origins in 1961 and Stevie Wonder’s triumph in Album of the Year in 1974, with only four R&B Grammy wins (for the Temptations’ forays into psychedelic soul with “Cloud Nine” in 1969 and “Papa was a Rolling Stone” in 1973, the latter earning three) to show for its pop culture dominance.
Further, a powerful tribute to the dearly departed diva Aretha Franklin was stirring, but elided an unfortunate truth about Franklin and the GRAMMYs: She never won an award in which she competed against white artists. Among her 18 wins, only two were in non-segregated categories, and neither was a competitive award (Grammy Legend and Lifetime Achievement). Her work earned nomination in categories against white artists only four times. She lost all four. She was never nominated in the General Field.
These were stark reminders for us that no one year will ever fix a longstanding and systemic set of circumstances surrounding the critical and industrial appreciation of black music in all its forms. But as a wise artist once said, “This is America.”
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