Music's Biggest Letdown

This past Sunday at the 56th Grammy Awards, artist Macklemore went home with four awards: Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song for “Thrift Shop,” Best Rap Album for “The Heist” and Best New Artist. After the ceremony, Macklemore uploaded a picture to Instagram of a text that he sent fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, in which Macklemore claims “You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” He was referring to the category of Best Rap Album, for which Kendrick’s “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” was also nominated. Macklemore’s win in this category has been extremely controversial, because a large group of rap fans, myself included, were hoping and expecting Kendrick to take home the award.“Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” came out in October 2012 (late 2012 is still considered part of the year for Grammy eligibility), and within just months of its release, it was deemed a masterpiece and an instant classic within its genre. Now, only a little more than a year later, it is widely considered to be an essential hip-hop album. Its poetic lyricism combined with its rich, vivid storytelling about inner-city life and the hardships that Kendrick and his friends endured growing up in Compton, CA made it—to a vast majority of rap fans, including myself—an easy choice for the best rap album of the year, and clearly the one that will be the most important and influential in the course of hip-hop. Macklemore’s “The Heist” sported three songs that gave it explosive success on pop radio, one of which was a comedic song about thrift shopping.It’s not hard to see why this would make a hip-hop fan seriously question the Grammy Awards’ voting process, which does have some legitimate problems.The Grammys have one big voting committee, rather than separate ones for different genres or different awards, and anybody in this voting committee is welcome to vote for any category that they want. Someone who listens exclusively to rap could easily vote for Best Country Album, and vice versa. The problem that this causes is that the Grammys reward not the artist with the most talent, but the one with the most crossover appeal, or the most popular one. In most categories, voters are more likely to just pick the songs they’ve heard more often, rather than taking the time to carefully examine each option from a truly objective standpoint. Instead of a music awards night, the Grammy Awards is really more of a large-scale popularity contest.The Grammy Awards also have a secret committee, in addition to their actual voting committee, which is not mentioned on their website. They publicly deny its existence, but many different people involved with the Grammy’s have confirmed that there is in fact a secret committee. When the main voting committee has decided on the nominees and the winners, they send their results off to this secret committee. The secret committee then alters the results to get the awards show higher TV ratings. The fact that such a committee exists seriously detracts from the legitimacy of the awards show, and takes away from the achievement artists feel (and fans share) when they win. These shady practices, and blatant errors such as the one this past Sunday, raise doubts about the Grammy Awards as “Music’s Biggest Night.”