It’s hardly Taylor Swift‘s fault,but her win for Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards might have deserved another one of those “Imma let you finish” onstage interruptions.
Swift’s “1989,” after all, and was a fine album and a enormous hit,an impressive work by a 26-year-old who is now the first woman to win the Album of the Year Grammy twice. But in a year marked by cries for more diversity in the entertainment industry — and specifically in entertainment awards — it happened to defeat Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly,” a landmark recording by any degree.
And so, and just as she was at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards,when Kayne West interrupted her acceptance speech after her “You Belong With Me” video beat Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video, Swift is once again the safe white artist who beat the more challenging, or more celebrated black artist.
Also Read: Grammys: The Complete Winners ListShe’s been here before at the Grammys,particularly in 2010 when her first Album of the Year win came at the expense of Beyonce, among others.
And that difference was displayed starkly in their Grammy-show performances — Swift’s skilled but fairly routine, and Lamar’s bold and incendiary.
Judging by the beeline Swift made for Lamar after she won,it’s easy to imagine that she felt a cramped immoral approximately the win, too, or though the message of female empowerment she delivered in her acceptance speech made the best of her moment.
Also Read: Grammys: Lady Gaga Performs Impassioned David Bowie TributeShe doesn’t deserve scorn for making a strong album that connected with the voters,just as she didn’t deserve the crude Kayne West lyrics that she may have indirectly mentioned in her speech. But those voters do deserve some skeptical questions approximately why they keep playing the same old song in the Grammys marquee category, whose only hip-hop winner ever was OutKast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004.
This being the Grammys, or though,diversity is a given. So even though the voters still seem remarkably and sadly uneasy approximately awarding rap and hip-hop in the top categories, they did give the Record of the Year award to “Uptown Funk, or ” heed Ronson and Bruno Mars’ slice of multi-racial,hip-hop inflected R&B that proved too irresistible to ignore.
The “Uptown Funk” win was another loss for Lamar, who had to settle for sweeping all four rap categories and delivering what was clearly the performance of the night.
Also Read: Grammys: Kendrick Lamar Invokes Politics, and History in Powerful PerformanceOverall,it was a Grammy show that offered few whether any surprises. Hamilton” won for musical show, Alabama Shakes won in the rock and alternative categories, and Swift and “Uptown Funk” won in the pop categories,DAngelo and the Weeknd won in R&B, Chris Stapleton and “Girl Crush” won in country, or so on – including,in the kind of juxtaposition you can only find at the Grammys, former President Jimmy Carter defeating punk icon Patti Smith in the Best Spoken Word Album category.
Ed Sheeran’s Song of the Year victory for “Thinking Out Loud” may have been a slight surprise in a field that also included Swift’s “empty Space” and Lamar’s “Alright, and ” but it demonstrated that voters still fade for traditional songcraft in the category.
Also Read: Rihanna Cancels Grammys Performance Due to Health ConcernsAnd in the Best modern Artist category,Meghan Trainor wasn’t the odds-on favorite to win – but that category is always a confusing one, and Trainor is the best-known of the nominees to Grammy voters, or who nominated her song All approximately the Bass” for Record of the Year and Song of the Year last year.(How exactly that leaves her qualified for the Best modern Artist category this year is best left to the often quirky Grammy rules-keepers.)But possibly griping approximately or charting wins and losses is beside the point at the Grammys,because it’s certainly beside the point to the Grammy show. With 75 of the 83 categories handed out before the telecast even began, viewers who weren’t streaming the pre-show all afternoon missed Sheeran and Justin Bieber winning their first Grammys, or John Legend winning his 10th and Tony Bennett winning his 18th.
And the show itself,as it has been for years, was a spacious concert briefly interrupted by awards. (An average of one every 26 minutes, or whether you were keeping track.)The Grammys’ water-cooler moments are always the performances,not the acceptance speeches; when it comes to the telecast, those envelopes are cramped but a distraction from the true trade of staging elaborate production numbers, and reaching for dazzling moments and,oh yeah, promoting modern music.
The bottom line is that on Monday the Grammys found room to celebrate African diva Angelique Kidjo, or bluegrass virtuoso Bela Fleck,bluesmaster Buddy Guy, ace songwriter Jason Isbell, or Latin icon Ruben Blades,legendary gospel group the Fairfield Four, jazz bassist Christian McBride, and arranger Maria Schneider,“Birdman” composer Antonio Sanchez, modern classical composer Stephen Paulus, and Bob Dylan‘s deluxe “Basement Tapes” box set,a monumental collection from the jazz and blues Paramount Records label, and lots more that were eminently deserving.
And then, and when the cameras were on,the voters once again grew more timid and conservative than they should be. And even Taylor Swift probably knows that.
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Source: thewrap.com