Pink performs “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” at the 60th annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden, in New York
APTOPIX 60th Annual Grammy Awards – Show, New York, USA – 28 Jan 2018
Another year. Another Grammys. Another telecast that extinguished fans’ hopes of a forward-thinking awards show in favor of a night that celebrated men, pop music and not much else.
Several months ago, we celebrated the Grammy nominees’ slate for its impressive diversity, with its major categories dominated by artists of color. In the lead-up to the awards, we hoped that song or record of the year could be claimed by a rap song, or a Spanish-language track via Despacito, for the first time in modern-day Grammys history. And with such a strong hip-hop field, led by Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z, 2018 seemed like the Grammys where voters would finally take the genre seriously, hopefully with a long-overdue album of the year win.
That’s not what happened Sunday night. Bruno Mars swept the main categories with his pop-friendly brand of R&B that shares much more of its DNA with Ed Sheeran than Beyoncé. Jay-Z went 0 for 8 in his nominations, despite being fêted with the Recording Academy’s Industry Icons award at Clive Davis’ party the night before. Alessia Cara won best new artist over SZA, a disappointing choice that still managed to be the only solo award a female artist would take home during the telecast. And the Grammys extended their shameful streak of awarding album of the year to the obvious radio-friendly pop release over the category’s more critically acclaimed hip-hop nominee.
Grammy Awards 2018: Bruno Mars wins six honors, including song, record and album of the year
More: Brutally honest rankings of every 2018 Grammy performance
Just look at the dismal album-of-the-year trajectory since 2014, in which Daft Punk, Beck, Taylor Swift, Adele and now Bruno Mars have beaten, in order, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and, with last night’s defeat of Damn, Kendrick Lamar once again.
Yes, many of those pop releases deserved some sort of Grammys recognition. But the pattern here is undeniable: the Grammys look at Kendrick Lamar, and by extension hip-hop, as music that isn’t “album of the year” material. It’s a confounding trend that continues to torture both the artists’ fans and the music critics that continually declare albums such as Jay-Z and Lamar’s the best releases of the year. The racial dynamics of this trend are also impossible to deny; the snubbed artists are often people of color, with Mars ending an all-white streak of album of the year winners stretching back to Herbie Hancock in 2008.
