Leave it to Beyonc\u00e9 to shape the Grammy Awards in a year when she\u2019s not even on the ballot.<\/p>\n
With 35 trophies to her name, the pop superstar is the winningest artist in the nearly seven-decade history of music\u2019s most prestigious awards show; with 99 nods, she\u2019s the most-nominated act of all time too.<\/p>\n
Yet despite her steady presence over the last quarter-century at pop\u2019s creative vanguard, it took the singer until this last February to finally win the Recording Academy\u2019s top prize, album of the year, with \u201cCowboy Carter\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a long-overdue victory that prompted countless think pieces about the academy\u2019s fraught relationship with race, gender and genre.<\/p>\n In addition to taking the album award, \u201cCowboy Carter\u201d \u2014 Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s thorny and audacious exploration of the Black roots of country music \u2014 also won for country album at the 67th Grammys, which made her the first Black woman ever to win in that category.<\/p>\n The first \u2014 and now the last.<\/p>\n In June, the academy announced<\/a> that, starting with the 68th Grammys<\/a>, it would split the country album award into two: one prize for contemporary country album and another for traditional country album.<\/p>\n Some observers wondered whether the organization was bowing to complaints from Nashville insiders \u2014 complaints I\u2019ve heard firsthand \u2014 that Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s openly experimental work had no business beating LPs by industry standard-bearers such as Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson. (Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s instantly memed surprise-face when her name was called suggested she could envision the griping to come.)<\/p>\n The more generous read of the academy\u2019s move is that the expansion allows it to recognize more great music, particularly by making room for country traditionalists who might otherwise be crowded out by higher-profile, more pop-leaning acts. Indeed, the Grammys ballot has long featured separate categories for traditional blues and contemporary blues and for R&B of the traditional and progressive persuasions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe community of people that are making country music in all different subgenres came to us with a proposal and said \u2026 we need more space for our music to be celebrated and honored,\u201d Recording Academy Chief Executive Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard in June.<\/p>\n Yet the new country awards \u2014 which bring the ballot to a total of 95 categories \u2014 come at a time when the Grammys seem increasingly game-able by artists looking for a competitive edge in all the stylistic slicing and dicing.<\/p>\n Take the Baltimore band Turnstile, a proud product of that city\u2019s hardcore punk scene with five nominations for February\u2019s ceremony including rock performance, metal performance and alternative music performance. Or take SZA, whose five nods put her in the pop, traditional R&B and melodic rap categories.<\/p>\n Each of those nominations recognizes a different song, and there\u2019s no doubting that Turnstile and SZA both make music that spans a variety of genres, even on a single LP like the former\u2019s sprawling \u201cNever Enough,\u201d which by the way is up for rock album. But by flooding the zone with submissions \u2014 at the Grammys, a given act decides how to categorize its music, albeit with some oversight from the academy \u2014 they clearly boosted their chances of being nominated.<\/p>\n You can say the same for Tyler, the Creator, who steered his \u201cDon\u2019t Tap the Glass\u201d toward a nod for alternative music album \u2014 one way to avoid splitting votes with himself for the rap album award, for which he\u2019s nominated with his other eligible LP, \u201cChromakopia.\u201d<\/p>\n Some instances of what we might call category creep seem motivated by a strategic assessment of the competition. Would Elton John and Brandi Carlile have scored a nomination with their joint \u201cWho Believes in Angels?\u201d for a pop vocal album prize also sought by Sabrina Carpenter and Lady Gaga? Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n But traditional pop vocal album? Well, there they are on the ballot. (Curiously, Justin Bieber opted to submit the R&B-steeped \u201cSwag\u201d in pop vocal album after publicly complaining that his 2020 \u201cChanges\u201d was nominated for that prize instead of R&B album.)<\/p>\n Then there are the new country awards. Given the genre\u2019s complicated cultural history \u2014 not to mention the talk in political circles about so-called heritage Americans \u2014 it\u2019s easy to be suspicious of the racial coding of words like \u201ctraditional\u201d and \u201ccontemporary,\u201d especially as deployed in the wake of the success of \u201cCowboy Carter,\u201d which Beyonc\u00e9 has said grew out of her sense that she wasn\u2019t welcome at Nashville\u2019s Country Music Assn. Awards in 2016.<\/p>\n Then again, the only artist of color nominated for either prize is Charley Crockett, the Texas-born troubadour whose \u201cDollar a Day\u201d is up for traditional country album.<\/p>\n In its rules, the academy states that traditional country recordings, among other things, employ \u201ctraditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar and live drums.\u201d Yet those instruments definitely show up on the LPs by Miranda Lambert, Eric Church and Tyler Childers that are nominated in the contemporary country category.<\/p>\n Folks I\u2019ve spoken with in the industry say that the academy could provide more guidance regarding the Grammys\u2019 ever-more-specific awards. More broadly, though, it seems worth contemplating the pros and cons of this niche-ification.<\/p>\n After all, such creep \u2014 or fraud, if you want to get serious with it \u2014 has been part of the conversation around other major awards shows for years. At the Oscars, it\u2019s most often taken the form of hand-wringing over an actor or actress campaigning in a supporting category when they actually belong in lead; at the Emmys, it\u2019s recently shaped the discourse around what constitutes a comedy (and whether \u201cThe Bear\u201d really is one). What seems different about the problem as it relates to the Grammys is the difficulty of policing already blurry genre distinctions, defined by the artists themselves, in a proliferating number of categories.<\/p>\n So far, the trend has almost certainly brought much-deserved attention to the likes of Flo, a sly and crafty British girl group nominated at February\u2019s ceremony for progressive R&B album, and Immanuel Wilkins, a daring young saxophonist up for alternative jazz album. If the promise of the streaming era was the elevation of the mass-cult artist, you can view with optimism a world in which these exciting new talents can get in the mix with the old academy faves. (Don\u2019t worry: The great Mavis Staples is nominated for American roots performance and Americana performance.)<\/p>\n But you can also envision a future of category-creep Whac-A-Mole, with every cycle creating new, ever-smaller niches until even the most ardent Grammy-watcher\u2019s head spins. To say nothing of the artists: What is an award worth if the field of one\u2019s \u201cpeers\u201d is defined so narrowly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leave it to Beyonc\u00e9 to shape the Grammy Awards in a year when she\u2019s not even on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[44993,12837,7167,44987,44986,28644,44992,25307,28646,48,52,51,44989,47,50,49,44990,330,44991,28642,44988],"class_list":["post-78133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-album-award","tag-artist","tag-ballot","tag-beyonce","tag-category","tag-country-album","tag-country-music","tag-genre","tag-grammys","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-last-february","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-lp","tag-music","tag-pop-superstar","tag-recording-academy","tag-top-prize"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}