Hip Hop’s Beef with the Grammys

Hip+Hop%E2%80%99s+Beef+with+the+Grammys

Since 1959, The Recording Academy has held the Grammy Awards ceremony to recognize artists achievements in the music industry. With such a deep history and level of prestige, the Grammys are held in very high regard amongst the music community and earning such an award is an honor. However, this feeling is not mutual across the board, particularly with artists in the hip hop genre. This can be seen significantly with this year’s Grammys. 

The awards this year took a major step forward in the recognition of hip hop by having the most nominations across all genres as well having Childish Gambino’s “This is America” winning hip hop’s first ever song of the year award and Cardi B becoming the first ever female to win the best rap album of the year. 

However, there are still many underlying issues. For example, Drake’s speech for “God’s Plan” winning best rap song is a great example of the hip hop community’s feelings about the award show. Upon winning his award, Drake said, “If there are people who have real jobs who are coming out in the rain [and] in the snow, spending their hard earn money to buy tickets to come to your shows, you don’t need this right here (Grammy award), you already won”. 

The Grammys responded to this by cutting Drake’s speech short and going to commercial break. Drake’s speech is a result of years of the Grammys failure to correctly recognize hip hop at their show. 

The Grammys first introduced rap into their show with the best rap performance award in 1989. News later broke that the award would not be televised due to time constraints. This resulted in a boycott by three of the five nominees including DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, who would go on to win the award. This started hip hop’s beef with the Grammys that is still present today. 

The issues that continue today center around who exactly is voting for the award. It seems that those who typically win an award in the hip hop genre were not the people who the community believed to truly deserve the award. When Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s The Heist won best rap album of the year over Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, m.A.A.d City there was a massive uproar from the hip hop community with even Macklemore himself posting his text messages with Kendrick to Instagram that read “You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and it sucks that I robbed you.”

In response to such controversies, the Grammys added a Rap committee, “[to add] an additional round of checks and balances to eliminate the potential for a popularity bias that puts emerging artists, independent music, and late-year releases at a disadvantage.”

This, however, has not completely fixed the Grammys’ issues, as seen at this year’s show with the committee electing Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy for Best Rap Album instead of Pusha T’s Daytona. Not to take away from Cardi’s wild success, as she had a breakout year, but it seems almost as though the Rap committee has fallen flat on its face in terms of accomplishing what it was set up for. 

It still appears to be a popularity contest as Pusha T, who has also had an amazing year, with his triumphant victory over his feud with Drake and being crowned by Complex Magazine as the best rapper of the year, is not as big of a household name as Cardi B. 

Though Daytona was applauded by music critics for its lyrical depth and storytelling ability, it was still not enough to compete with the glamour and popularity of Cardi B. Despite the Grammys’ efforts to be more aware and inclusive of hip hop in its show there still is much more work to be done in order to base its winners on true hip hop talent and to end their beef with the community as a whole.