The Grammys are a week old. Everyone’s already sick of the jokes about Pharrell’s Arby’s hat. We’ve all watched Beyonce’s incredible chair sequence one too many times, and hip-hop fans have all weighed in on the Macklemore fiasco.
For those who somehow missed it, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis took home the awards for Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song, and Best New Artist. Hours after the ceremony ended, Macklemore posted an Instagram of a text he’d just sent to Kendrick Lamar, another nominee, and the critics’ choice, for Best Rap Album: “You got robbed,” The awkward gesture struck notes of both sympathy and respect: “I wanted you to win. It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” Cue the blogosphere frenzy.
Some bloggers hate him because they think white people are taking over hip-hop. To them, I say: spend a couple minutes Googling. White guys have been in the game since Day One. If whites were going to take over hip-hop, Rick Rubin would’ve done it in 1984.
Some hate him because they think his music is terrible, which is fine. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion. And then there’s cute stuff like this: “No [Macklemore] doesn’t make dumb ass songs about ass money and pussy and he doesn’t refer to women as bitches or hoes cause he doesn’t lack RESPECT like 99% of all rappers.” Ahh, obviously a true hip-hop aficionado.
A lot of the people in the “purist” rap corner look to skin color to explain why other nominees—Lamar, Drake and Kanye West—went home empty-handed as well as why many other black rappers have in years past. It certainly did feel funny when a past-his-prime Tony Bennett won Album of the Year in a 1994, the year that saw the drop of some of that decade’s biggest hip-hop records: Ready to Die, Illmatic and Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. But black rappers are not the only ones that have gotten snubbed in the Grammys’ fraught past. The Who, The Beach Boys, and Led Zeppelin didn’t win a Grammy until this year. However, when it comes to hip-hop, some of the Academy’s choices are straight garbage, but the reasoning has less to do with race than you would think. This is why they can’t seem to get it right.
Members of the Recording Academy, also known as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science, get to vote in a wide range of categories, even if it’s a genre in which the member lacks expertise. A lot of members voting in categories they’re not familiar with means less attention to the music and more attention to the numbers: music video views, radio plays and, of course, sales. The Billboard Top 100, a music magazine that charts radio plays, shows that Macklemore’s hit, “Thrift Shop” peaked at #1 and has spent 48 weeks on the Top 100. Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” peaked at #17 and has only been on the chart for 29 weeks. Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” fared slightly better, peaking at #6. When it comes to music video views, Macklemore raked in almost half a billion views on Youtube for the same single. Views of Drake and Lamar’s singles combined barely amount to half of that.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a new trend. When I spoke to our very own hip-hop connoisseur and Professor of African-American Studies, Professor David Canton, he could sense my dismay over Macklemore’s recent accolades. “It’s an issue of expectation,” he told me. “When Will Smith won in 1996, of course I was upset because people like Big Daddy Kane and KRS-One weren’t nominated. I realized it wasn’t about who’s the best MC… it was about the numbers.”
Canton explained that Clear Channel Communications, a mass media company, owns and controls an extremely large percentage of the nation’s radio stations, giving them an audience of 110 million. A mainstream song like “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand” could be played on both Clear Channel’s urban and pop radio stations—in effect, doubling its airtime. Will Smith didn’t take the Grammy home because of his complex lyrical style or counter-cultural message, but rather because his music was inoffensive and more popular, playing on both hip-hop and urban radio stations. His family-friendly content gave him a huge national audience and Grammy voters looked to that as a sign of success.
Do any Conn students remember Naughty by Nature? I doubt it. Yet, in 1996, they took Best Rap Album against Tupac’s Me Against the World, Old Dirty Bastard’s Return to 36 Chambers and Bone Thugs – N – Harmony’s E 1999 Eternal. Perhaps the Academy’s biggest flop of all came in 1999 when Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” lost Best Rap Performance to Young MC’s “Bust a Move”.
“That was getting robbed,” Canton says. And what a perfect example of how content influences popularity. “Fight the Power” will likely go down in history as one of the most influential, game-changing rap songs of the 20th century, but does middle-America want to hear: “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me you see / Straight up racist that sucker was / Simple and plain / Mother fuck him and John Wayne…” or: “In this city ladies look pretty / Guys tell jokes so they can seem witty / Tell a funny joke just to get some play / Then you try to make a move and she says, ‘No way’?” So, you tell me. Which song won the Grammy: the one that rhymes “pretty” with “witty” or the one that raps “fuck Elvis?”
When it comes down to it, through its system of voting the Grammys allows its members to make their choices based off popularity rather than the quality and caliber of the music. Many hip-hop artists use their anger to fuel their songs, and these eloquent and thought-provoking lyricists (Nas, Mos Def and Run-D.M.C) are often pushed aside for pop-rappers like Will Smith, Ludacris, and Macklemore.
It’s nothing against those guys or their style of music; Smith’s “Summertime” will always be a favorite jam of mine. But the Grammys need a new system of nomination and voting that reflects the insight of the practitioners in each genre and doesn’t relinquish power to the uninformed. Let’s hope next time the winners won’t need to apologize for “robbing” an award. •
