Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?

Beyonce's Lemonade and Dr. Nardone's subsequent speech, for me, upheld my unfavorable view of the Grammy Awards. Hip-hop group Public Enemy, in 1988, immortalized the contentious relationship between music that expresses black culture and the Grammy Awards with their much-quoted line "Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?" A 2011 release by Jay Rock and Kendrick Lamar in 2011 echoes Public Enemy's message with the tongue-and-cheek chorus "You don't gotta like it, the hood's gone love it."

These two songs immediately came to mind when Adele's album 25 won Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards over Lemonade. While 25 was beautifully produced, well-written, and soulfully performed, it lacked the cultural impact and far-spanning concept of Beyonce's album. I had a similar reaction when Taylor Swift's 1989 beat out Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, when Beck's Morning Phase beat the self-titled album Beyoncé in 2014, and when Mumford and Son's Babel beat out Frank Ocean's Channel Orange for Best Album in 2013. 

In all of these cases, the Recording Academy demonstrates that it is either out of touch with reality, or that it does not judge music based upon its sociopolitical impact, which, in my opinion, is the only metric of music that matters.

Initially, I believed Beyoncé deserved the Album of the Year Award solely due to her ability to bend musical conventions across genres such at country, pop, punk, ska, in order to express her singular message. However, Dr. Nardone's presentation showed me that Beyoncé's message is everything but singular, that she was purposeful in showcasing black women as more heterogenous, complex, and ultimately, human than her genre and industry normally allows. Beyoncé's meticulous research and wide-ranging references gave her work a social, political, and cultural meaning beyond any album released in 2016. The proof? Try as I might, I could not find a single college-level course on Adele's 25. Beyoncé's Lemonade is the center of five different courses at five different colleges.

The Academy, it seems, does not care. To be fair, they are the Recording Arts Academy, and so, they perhaps base their awards strictly on the quality of recording, and judge via criteria such as the crispness of sound envelope, the utilization of the full range of frequencies, the avoidance of standing waves through studio design, or the manipulation of waveform through software in order to match a room's resonant frequency. 

If these criteria sound like gibberish to you, that is fine. I know about them because I wish to enter into music professionally, and find the science of sound to be fascinating. But I understand these techniques are means to an end, rather than ends themselves. Music is a medium, we use it in order to communicate meaning. Perhaps the Grammy's have a place as keepers of recorded music as a medium. I certainly believe it important to respect the craft of making as something valuable in itself. But it is the meaning that is, for me, what makes music important. Like most of the population, I am left echoing Public Enemy's timeless question: "Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?" 

Are the Grammy's a good measure of music that is technically "good" - meticulously produced, virtuosic in execution, and elegantly sculpted in post-production? Yes.

Are they a measure of music that matters, that starts conversations, that people care about, that will change the world? No. They have never been, and, barring significant change, never will be.