Music’s biggest night is finally changing its tune on rap
Clutching his lustrous new hardware on the dais at the Grammys back in February, hip-hop colossus Kendrick Lamar delivered a few words in a serious voice: “At the end of the day, [there’s] nothing more powerful than rap music.”
Was he speaking truth or prophecy? For decades, the Recording Academy’s relationship with hip-hop music has been frustratingly fraught, but in that moment things suddenly appeared to be turning around. Lamar — a generational voice repeatedly snubbed — had just won two of the academy’s most highly desired prizes, song and record of the year, for “Not Like Us,” a spontaneous Drake diss that mutated into a national shout-along. For once, it felt like the Recording Academy had recognized rap’s rightful place at the top of popular culture. Great song, too.
Now, more surprises. When Lamar comes back next February for the big one — the academy just nominated his 2024 opus “GNX” for album of the year — some of his strongest competition will come from three other rap albums: “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” by Bad Bunny, “Let God Sort Em Out” by Clipse, and “Chromakopia” by Tyler, the Creator. The other four in the bunch are “Man’s Best Friend” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Mayhem” by Lady Gaga, “Swag” by Justin Bieber and “Mutt” by R&B phenom Leon Thomas. Half of the academy’s nominees for album of the year make rap music.
On top of that, Lamar leads the field of nominees at the 68th Grammys, announced Friday morning, with nine nods. Bad Bunny had six. Clipse, Tyler and rapper Doechii each landed five. It sure took long enough to get here. The Recording Academy didn’t even create a category for best rap album until 1995. And since then, only one rap album has won the big, genre-blind prize for album of the year — OutKast’s “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” way back in 2004. (OK, two if you count Lauryn Hill’s hybridized “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999.)
Rappers have been boycotting the awards off and on since 1989, when DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (now Will Smith) refused to accept their inaugural prize for best rap performance after Grammy telecast producers decided to cut the award’s presentation from the show. But throughout his prize-hungry career, Lamar has remained faithful. Ten years ago, the Los Angeles native was nominated for 11 Grammys, including album of the year for “To Pimp a Butterfly.” Here’s how he explained it to Billboard magazine at the time: “I want to win them all.”
The question remains: Why? Hip-hop has long proved that it doesn’t need the Grammys to give shape to its greatness. Rap music has its own ways of self-consecrating, self-canonizing. We don’t need 2Pac, Wu-Tang Clan or DMX to have Grammys to know that they’re essential to the story of American music (they don’t; they are). The Grammys remain an industry awards show that can only tell us what the music business thinks of itself. When we shovel Grammy victories into our history books, we are participating in a corporate history, not a people’s history. That isn’t changing here. But at least with this new slate of nominees, the academy seems more interested in aligning its story with reality.
In other precincts on the nominee slate, reality is weird. In the country music field, the top prize has been split between best traditional country album and best contemporary country album — a crybaby reaction from all the gross industry types in Nashville who couldn’t deal with Beyoncé winning best country album earlier this year. Meantime, up in the top categories, “Golden,” a song from the animated children’s movie “KPop Demon Hunters,” is nominated for song of the year, pitting music from the fictitious band from the movie, Huntr/x, against the songs of Billie Eilish, Carpenter, Lamar and others.
So, yes, when Grammy night finally rolls around on Feb. 1, it could be a sea change evening for rap music. But Kendrick Lamar might also lose to music from a cartoon.