The Grammys are only willing to award Black artists if they’re making ‘Protest Music’
The Recording Academy has historically only deems Black art worthy of their highest honors when it is explicitly tied to Black pain, strife, and struggle.
When the nominations for the 63rd Annual Grammys were announced, there were, as usual, many surprises.
The expected heavyweights pulled in a hefty load of nominations (Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa scored six nominations each), but the night’s most-nominated artist was a name that surprised most viewers. Despite releasing just a handful of new music during the eligibility period, Beyoncé came out of the announcement ceremony with a staggering 9 nominations for her Black Is King film, “BLACK PARADE,” and “Savage (Remix)” with Megan Thee Stallion.
Beyoncé is no stranger to leading Nominations Day, currently holding a grand total of 79 nominations and 24 wins under her belt to date. However, something felt off about “BLACK PARADE” earning the title of most nominated song of the night. Of the 20-plus songs to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year, “BLACK PARADE” was not one of them. In fact, the song stalled at #37 in its debut week and has yet to score any level of certification from the RIAA.
The Recording Academy may pride itself on prioritizing and rewarding artistic excellence over commercial success, but, more often than not, these two categories converge when it comes time to look at the nominees. For example, in the Record of the Year category (awarded to the artists and producers of an individual song), 6 of the 8 nominees this year were Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. The exceptions were “BLACK PARADE” and “Colors,” the latter by the Black Pumas on their Album of the Year-nominated, self-titled debut. Even if “BLACK PARADE” was nominated for its artistic merit, it’s arguably one of Beyoncé’s worst singles from a lyrical standpoint.
Beyoncé’s prominent featuring in several categories is interesting. Despite a few worthy songs from The Lion King: The Gift, the party banger “Savage (Remix)” and her innovative new version of “Find Your Way Back,” her biggest bet at Grammy gold this year comes courtesy of “BLACK PARADE.”
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Similarly, H.E.R. released a ton of new music during the eligibility period. From “Sometimes” to “Slide”, nearly every release in the last year-plus has been sublime. Yet, her only solo song to receive a Grammy nomination this year was “I Can’t Breathe”, H.E.R.’s only contender in the “General Field” categories this year.
Inspired by some of George Floyd’s heartbreaking final words, “I Can’t Breathe” failed to enter the Hot 100 and topped out at #20 on Hot R&B Songs. The song’s music video has actually garnered as much acclaim as the track itself, if not more. Funnily enough, the Academy snubbed “I Can’t Breathe” in their Best Music Video category, in favor of videos from Harry Styles for “Adore You,” Woodkid for “Goliath,” and Anderson .Paak’s “Lockdown,” another protest-inspired song and video.
Beyoncé and H.E.R. had remarkable years, but no artist dominated the year like Lil Baby. His sophomore album, My Turn, was the most-consumed album of the year and drew praise from music critics and fans alike. Shockingly, though, My Turn yielded exactly zero nominations at this year Grammys despite eligible hits like “We Paid,” “Sum 2 Prove,” and “Emotionally Scarred.” Instead, the Academy chose to recognize Lil Baby for “The Bigger Picture,” his most straightforward and traditional “political” track.
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“BLACK PARADE,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and “The Bigger Picture,” are the marquee mainstream songs inspired by or released in response to the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people across the world in Summer 2020. That season gifted us (or plagued us, depending on your view), with a slew of songs that sought to be “protests songs” or “protest music.”
In essence, many of these songs tried to become anthems of the Black Lives Matter movement without first feeling like genuine responses to the intensity of the moment. The Recording Academy has had, and continues to have, their issues with rewarding Black artists — specifically in the General Field — but this year’s crop of nominees seems to confirm a troubling trend. Black art is more likely to be deemed as valid by this white awards institution if the music is explicitly connected to Black pain, strife, and struggle.
From Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” to Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE,” only a handful of hip-hop songs have ever been nominated for Record of the Year over its 60-year history. No hip-hop song won until Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” crossed the finish line in 2019, which was really a subpar redux of Beyoncé’s “Formation” and arguably one of the weakest songs in the category that year, took home the award and made history. Granted, “This Is America” was an iconoclastic cultural moment for white neoliberals who wanted to believe that they were “woke” — it debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — making its victory all that more unsurprising.
In recent years at the Grammys, for every light-hearted rap song nominated in the General Field, like Drake’s “God’s Plan” (Drake) or Cardi B’s “I Like It” with J Balvin & Bad Bunny, there is also a more “political” song, like JAY-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love” with Mary Lambert, or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” At the most basic level, the way these white awards institutions define “political” is the problem. All Black music is political, because it is created and exists within a system that seeks to destroy, exploit, and silence it.
For awarding academy bodies like the Grammys, a Black song is political when the artist is singing about “rubber bullets bouncing off them” or things being “bigger than black or white.” Chloe x Halle getting ready to go the club on “Do It” deserved a Record of the Year nomination, but those spots were reserved for songs that explicitly invoked the protests of the summer. Even songs like “Savage (Remix),” “Rockstar,” “The Box,” and “Dior” have their political bents. The latter two songs became surprise protest anthems, “Savage (Remix)” took on a deeper meaning in terms of Black joy and Black Girl Magic after Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting, and DaBaby and Roddy Ricch even released a “BLM Remix” of “Rockstar.”
Even when artists make traditionally “political” albums, they’re either snubbed outright (Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Jay-Z’s 4:44) or still denied the glory of Album, Record, or Song of the Year (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly).
The prioritization of “politics” in music from Black artists is reaching a breaking point. Maybe we’ve already passed that point. Black music should be celebrated and uplifted, even when we’re not singing about being killed by police or rapping about our joy in the face of racial violence. Bodies like the Grammys already don’t reward us — a Black artist has not won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008, and he won for an album of covers of songs by a white woman. Only three Black women (Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, and Lauryn Hill) have won Album of the Year, ever. It’s one thing to continuously ignore the genius and innovation of Black musicians, but to set up these invisible-but-not-invisible parameters around what kind of Black songs are valid is downright sinister.
None of this is new information, but it is another reminder that divesting from these white awards institutions is in our best interests. They have never deemed us or our art worthy, and they never will. We’re 63 years into the Grammys timeline and things still look a bleak and destitute mess. It’s time to move on and begin breaking down the relevancy of this awards show and others like it.
