Every year I tune into the Grammys anxiously wondering if this will finally be the year that they "get it right." But this year I realized the problem isn't that the Grammys are giving me the wrong answers but that I'm asking the Grammys the wrong question.
The questions I normally ask the broadcast are pretty obvious. What was the album of the year? Who was the best new artist? Obviously art is subjective, and while you can award a gold medal to the person who definitively ran the 100m dash the fastest, you can't award a golden gramophone to the person who definitively put the best sounds onto a computer. So I've never looked to the Grammys for any sort of scientific, objective statement.
The problem is that the Grammys also haven't shown any competency to answer these questions with a sound subjective statement. Music critics have gotten better and better at predicting what tricks are hiding up the Academy's sleeves every year, and that's not difficult when that "trick" is usually just picking the artist that is a) whiter and b) lamer. You can point to an absurd number of Album of the Year contests in the last ten or so years where a record from a more generic white artist beat out a consensus better record by a boundary-pushing minority artist. Babel over Channel Orange. Morning Phase over Beyoncé. 1989 over To Pimp a Butterfly. 25 over Lemonade. Harry's House over Renaissance. I think in five years (or five days) we'll look back and say the exact same thing about Midnights over SOS. All art is "subjective," and I enjoy all of those winning albums, but I don't think time has left any amount of subjectivity in any of those contests. We got them all wrong, and in the same exact direction. Once is a mistake. Twice is a coincidence. Three is a pattern. Four is a prejudice. Five is a systemically flawed and credibly bankrupt system.
And so if we don't get a solid subjective statement from the Grammys, then what do we get? Well, isn't it obvious? We get a statement. That's it. We just get a statement. The people of the Recording Academy aren't so much domain experts in my mind as much as they are theater kids turned bourgeoisie in the park with big "Change My Mind" poster boards. They're not giving the "right" answer. They're just giving an answer.
Which is why part of me still loves the Grammys: because they're always an interesting conversation starter. Even when the Academy shanks the nominations list or the winner, they give armchair critics like myself an entry point when talking to other music fans. They still bring the music community together in conversation in a way few other things in music can even if it's probably more often in anger than in awe. But this does feel more frustrating with the Grammys than the Oscars or the Tonys or the Emmys because we always think of music as being for the people. It's the only one of those art forms that is supposed to be experienced alongside your day, not as an aside from it. Film and theater are very much still about the industry and the clout and the high-art and the celebrity and the exclusivity. But music is for everyone. Compton feels much closer than Hollywood or Broadway.
And that's why it pains me when the statement we get from the Grammys so seldomly seems to represent the "everyone." Because the "everyone" is what makes music so cool.
I'm done seeing the Grammys as any sort of credible statement on music quality. To me, all they say is, "We surveyed 12,000 of the most biased people you could possibly ask this question to, and this is what they answered." It doesn't make the Grammys worthless, and you can bet I'll be anxiously waiting to talk about next year's nominees as soon as they get released. But as a definitive measure of quality, I think the Grammys are worth their weight in plastic.
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