GRAMMYS 2016: SAY NO TO DRAKE, JUST ONE TIME

I’m usually someone who tends to think things go in cycles. Hearing 20-somethings say, “Yeah, but it’s different now,” or 60-somethings say, “It’s not like it used to be,” always gets me a little on edge.

To be a little more specific: year after year people all argue about the Grammy nominations; who should have been nominated, who shouldn’t have, yada yada yada. Every year is always more important and more surprising than the last, so they say. Every year.

But this year truly is different…right?

To get even more specific: this year was the first year ever that a “diss track” has been nominated for a Grammy (Drake’s song Back To Back). Are you not familiar with what a “diss track” is? If not, good for you, you’re probably doing productive things. One possible reason you might not know the term is that you’re white and/or above the age of 45. It’s just Hip-Hop. Seriously though, to provide an actual explanation of the term and to stop generalizing: think of a “diss track” as a Hip-Hop version of any 3 minute segment on Fox News (sorry, apparently not done generalizing). In a diss track, every line in the song (“the track”, as they say) is curated and packed with supposedly poignant jabs at whomever the artist decides needs to be “dissed” at the time. The goal of the rapper is to point out any flaws in the other person’s character, music, hustle, etc. Is that a proper NPR explanation?

For Hip-Hop, diss tracks are simply part of the culture. They originated in the 70’s as two emcees showing off their wit and rhyming abilities, taking jabs at one another through well-crafted, yet improvised, poetic verse. It wasn’t done over the internet; It was face to face, man-to-man, and was the ultimate test of pride and character in every way. Nowadays, if you truly love Hip-Hop (and I really do), you’re always paying attention to these, no matter how petty the argument they stem from. It’s good rap and good fun. It’s a moment.

Now that we have the history down, let me explain the guts of my qualm: THESE SONGS SHOULD NOT BE IN THE GRAMMY POOL. In today’s day and age, they’re very rarely a noble display of pride and adequate self-esteem like they’re intended to be. Now, they’re simply floundering “couch protests” in the form of a 3-minute long MP3 file that gets quietly uploaded to the internet with the soft click of a button. They stem from little tiny letters thrown into the Twitter-sphere with no backbone needed. In short, what these songs stand for (strength, pride, and realized artistry) are not what they are, and thusly should not be rewarded with the highest honor in music.

If you want to counter me, you might say that the point of the Grammys is to celebrate the music of the year that most influenced their genres, and hopefully our culture as a whole. If this is your argument: fine, you win. Drake’s song did that and there are memes to support it (I laughed when I typed that).

But I’m still going to talk as loud as I can. Why? Because it’s quiet in this room and no one is interrupting me (Oh, how nice?!). The Grammys are basically an institution, if they aren’t actually. To quote Kanye (yes, I’m doing this), the Grammys are supposed to celebrate “MONUMENTAL FEATS OF MUSIC” (he was kind of yelling when he said that). They’ve been around far too long to be swayed by a shitty Twitter battle between Drake and another guy. Back To Back wasn’t monumental for anything other than meme culture, Drake’s ego, and the Kardashian followers (okay, I admittedly liked it too). But in the scope of the entire year, Drake’s few minutes on this issue were merely a whiney blip in a period that had plenty of great music to make people dance, cry, or feel inspired by. I’m not going to show my kids, or my grandkids, Back To Back. If I do, someone please take me out back. PRAY THE REAL LIVE FOREVER MAAAANNN…because I sure as hell am going to show them Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and Vince Staple’s Summertime ’06.

Now, to get a little more serious:

If you’re not familiar, the music on Kendrick Lamar’s emotionally and culturally charged album, To Pimp a Butterfly, received eleven (11) nominations this year, including Best Album. And it’s incredible. In a time when racial unrest is as high as it seems to have been in America since the early 90’s, or even the Civil Rights era, Kendrick put together a piece of work that’s not only a seemingly perfect narrative to the time, it’s also musically complex: feeling like it comes from a modern-day jazz musician who plays with his words rather than a saxophone. Structurally, he dabbles in intriguing cadences and time signatures that don’t lend themselves to the typical structure of a rap song. Content-wise, there’s a lyric from Kendrick himself that still pokes at me with it’s simplicity and clarity, “I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on the inside looking out. I’m in the dead fucking centre, looking around”. Similar to lyrical legends like Bob Dylan or Nina Simone, Kendrick has the ability to be among the people and the culture, feeling everything we’re going through, while still having the uncanny ability to step back and articulate these protests into something we can all sing along to.

Vince Staples’ album, Summertime ’06, on the other hand, received zero (0) nominations. A shame, as it very well could be one of the best pieces of journalism in the last 5 years. Period. For a rap album, really? Yes. It explains on an extremely personal level, from the mouth of an intelligent and energetic 22-year-old, what it’s like to grow up and live in a place where everyday decisions are rarely so black and white. As a kid from the crime-ridden area of Long Beach, CA, he’s able to point the finger at himself, everyone around him, and you all at the same time, as the source for the violence and unrest. As a listener, you get angry and frustrated in one moment, and feel as though you can practically touch his humanity in the next. And why is this art more important to celebrate than Back To Back? I’ll take it from Vince’s mouth directly:

When speaking to the website Genius.com in regards to his Summertime ’06 song, ‘Señorita’, Vince explains:

I don’t feel like I need to go too deeply into explaining my lyrics. People don’t care about what’s happening in Long Beach, or Compton, or Watts. They still look at us like we’re living in a Mack 10 video. When they look at these areas, and look at these people, they don’t see themselves. Until people really see themselves within other people, they can’t genuinely care for their betterment. It’s hard to understand and respect things that are different than us. We need to start looking at each other eye-to-eye.

Let that marinate… Listen and watch here in the meantime:

In summation, Vince or Kendrick might not be a meme, but their music holds far more cultural significance, and is much more monumental than Back To Back. If I were the Grammys (personification), I sure as shit wouldn’t waste my platform celebrating petty, ego-driven fluff, especially when there are artists who are acting as a significant voice for hundreds of thousands of people, while at the same time, giving us fun music to dance to. Let’s amplify these voices to be much louder than the whines, and let all the extra’d out bullshit fade back into where it came from.