words.
"As ever, one of pop culture’s preeminent provocateurs was hanging over all this without actually being in the building. Kanye West’s valid complaints tend to get lost in his increasingly prolific stream of nonsense, but one of the most resonant points he ever made was this one from his 2013 New York Times interview: Despite winning an entire trophy case worth of Grammys in less than a decade, he had never sniffed any of the four major categories. Or as Kanye quasi-accurately put it, “I’m assuming I have the most Grammys of anyone my age, but I haven’t won one against a white person.”
I couldn’t help thinking about that as I watched his frenemy Swift take the stage to celebrate being “the first woman to win Album Of The Year twice.” That’s a big deal for women, and Swift is as deserving as any woman in the business. I wish she would have taken down Daft Punk in 2014, to be honest — give me Red over Random Access Memories any day. In a vacuum, a win for Swift is something to celebrate. But it felt wrong to see a low-stakes rom-com like 1989 carry the day over To Pimp A Butterfly, a universally recognized masterpiece that had meaningful things to say about these tumultuous times.
At this point we’re 12 years out from the last rap Album Of The Year (Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below) and eight years from the last black Album Of The Year (Herbie Hancock’s soporific Joni Mitchell covers album). In a pop cultural context ever-more defined by hip-hop and young black sensibilities, that’s a ridiculous gap. But it’s not just a race thing or a rap thing. It’s not even an underground vs. mainstream thing so much as a need to acknowledge how much more expansive and electrifying the mainstream has become, how many mainstreams continue to proliferate outside the narrow and bizarrely gerrymandered borders the Grammys have drawn for themselves."
STEREOGUM: The Grammys, As It Turns Out, Are Still The Grammys
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