The Grammy Issue

For decades now, the Grammys have been severely flawed, often favoring projects with commercial success

and name recognition over more deserving music. The prestigious award show has even been accused of favoring white artists over artists of color. The more notorious of these deliberate blunders of the 2010s being Taylor Swift's 1989 winning album of the year over Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed Black power album To Pimp a Butterfly in 2016, Adele’s 25 winning album of the year of Beyonce’s monumental album Lemonade, and the genre bending Frank Ocean being snubbed for best new artist in favor of the one-hit-wonder band Fun. The latest of these mistakes came this year in the rap album of the year category. This year has been one of the best years in hip-hop in the last decade, and when the Grammys released their nominations they snubbed several great projects in favor of lackluster albums from bigger artists, in particular God Did by DJ Khalid, and Come Home the Kids Miss You by Jack Harlow. These albums were favored over critically acclaimed and important albums like The Forever Story by JID, and Melt My Eyez See Your Future by Denzel Curry. To put this in perspective, Come Home the Kids Miss You by Jack Harlow received negative reviews by many music reviewing publications, including a 2.9/10 by Pitchfork, 6/10 by Rolling Stone, and a 3/10 by music critic Anthony Fantano. Compare these reviews to that of The Forever Story, an album about Black culture, and the Black experience experience. The Forever Story by JID garnered a 7.3/10 from Pitchfork, 9/10 from Allmusic, and a 9/10 from Anthony Fantano. These obvious mistakes by the Grammys are unfair to deserving artists, and disconnects the Grammys from their audience. This disconnect is trending towards a fall from grace for the award show, as fewer and fewer people will care about the show.

Many, including myself, propose speeding up that process. The only way to fix this issue is to weaken the stranglehold that the Grammys has on the music industry. The way to do that is to simply ignore them. Don’t watch the show, don’t tweet about the Grammys, and don’t use it as evidence to support your music narratives. Reducing the popularity of the Grammys and garnering mass anti-Grammy support will, in turn, start a trend of labels and artists not sending their stuff in for consideration. This will force the Grammys to change, or they will become obsolete. The Grammys have to change their selection committee, as the committee is dominated by pop music specialists and by white males; this was a problem the Grammys tried to fix before, but ultimately the committee is still lopsided. I would like to see the Grammys switch to a system akin to the way the Baseball Hall of Fame does it. The way the Baseball Hall of Fame does it is they give votes to a select number of independent journalists, which in my eyes is far better than the Grammys’ current system of giving unnamed music industry members votes. The bottom line is that the Grammys are severely flawed and it's up to us to fix the problem.