It’s too late for Beyoncé to grow a conscience
You didn’t see me at the Grammys, did you?
Internets,
This week, Beyoncé lost all of the Grammys that actually mean anything to Adele, and then Carlos Santana said she can’t sing. And to top it all off, she’s pregnant again–with twins–at 35 (supposedly). Does this signal the beginning of the end of her career? We can only hope.
I didn’t actually watch the Grammys, because why would I watch the Grammys, but I heard Beyoncé’s performance consisted of her leisurely strolling back and forth across the stage as if she were a rapper, and sometimes sitting in a chair, as if she were some sad, elderly blues singer with 40 some-odd kids to feed and loads of IRS debt.
If she’s that debilitated now, how will she be able to perform at Coachella, which isn’t until April? She might have to wear one of those velour pregnancy sweatsuits, like Al Sharpton used to rock back in the ’80s, and get rolled out on stage in a wheelchair. Word on the street is that, per her contract, she gets paid the same amount regardless of whether or not she performs.
If she does pull out, she shouldn’t receive credit for having protested against known homophobe Philip Anschutz, who owns Coachella, in much the same way that any SJW music writers who didn’t denounce Migos are no longer worthy of respect. The time for her to make a statement was six weeks ago, when I told her to. (Not to get all Ike Turner about it.)
I’d suggest that someone else should have performed at this year’s Grammys, but they may have been hard up for black performers. Kanye, who’s mental now, said he wasn’t going, possibly because he feared the Illuminati would be in attendance (which they were); and Frank Ocean, who wasn’t about to win anything anyway, because his music sucks balls, said he wasn’t going either. Drake, who actually won an award, wasn’t there, be he had an excuse. He’s on tour in Europe. I better not hear him taking credit for telling the Grammys to go fuck themselves.
The Grammys should go fuck themselves though. Just because they had the good sense to give an award to Adele over Beyoncé doesn’t mean their awards are at all accurate or relevant, generally speaking. Case in point, this year’s award for Album of the Year obviously should have gone to Anything But Words by Banks & Steelz, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even nominated. Pshaw!
If they’d given the award to Banks & Steelz, it would have solved the problem of them having only given Album of the Year to one black artist in the past 10-plus years, and even then to an album that hardly qualifies as black music. I could see the lily-white nature of the Oscars, because as Complex once explained, black filmmakers aren’t worthy of awards, based on merit, but music is one of the few things black people can actually do, along with sports and fill-in-the-blanks humor.
[insert ostensibly humorous Crying Jordan image]
It’s not that black people haven’t won Grammys. Kanye, Beyoncé and Jay Z each have more than 20 of them. (Biggie, 2Pac, Nas, Snoop Dogg and Public Enemy, meanwhile, don’t have a single award between the five of them.) But few, if any of those awards were in categories that actually mean anything, like Album, or Song, of the Year. Black artists, if they’re nominated in those categories at all, usually lose to white artists like Adele and Taylor Swift. Instead they have to settle for awards in the R&B categories.
R&B isn’t even an actual genre of music. It’s just white supremacist code for music performed by black people. Music by black performers used to be called race music, but they changed it to R&B in the years following World War II, so it didn’t sound as, erm, racist. (The trend today is to categorize anything by youngish black people as hip-hop, thus necessitating use of the term real hip-hop.)
As Carlos Santana pointed out, much of Beyoncé’s appeal lies in the fact that she performs in her underwear, and I don’t know if that’ll be an option for her once she has these twins. Well, I guess it’ll always be an option, especially with PCP, but it’s not anything I’ll want to see. If she were going to win an award that actually means anything, it would have been this year. But she didn’t, because the Grammys are racist. Alas, it’s too late for her to refuse to perform, on principle.
Take it easy on yourself,
Bol
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
