The most anticipated night for music has come and gone, and like the years before, there were so many questionable occurrences. One of the most baffling of them was that Billie Eilish won Grammys in every category she was nominated in.
The January 27 ceremony was shaping up to be one of the more interesting of recent years. The 2020 Grammys had an engrossing list of nominees reflecting the exciting new terrain pop music has taken in recent years.
As it turned out, that competition was only ceremonial.
US singer Billie Eilish made a clean sweep of the awards by winning five categories, including the big four: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist.
This is in no way intended to hate on Billie. There is no doubt the 18-year-old had a brilliant year. However, her domination of the ceremony simply doesn’t reflect the dynamism coursing through pop music today.
Other nominees this year did a stellar job in taking their respective genres in new and interesting directions.
Lizzo has carved out her own place in pop music with her inspirational brand of soul and RnB.
Lana Del Ray’s dark-pop balladry confounded genre expectations, taking a psychedelic rock twist in Norman F*ching Rockwell.
Lil Nas X has managed to merge the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of country music and hip-hop.
To simply discount the efforts of these amazing artistes and focus on Eilish’s achievement alone smelt of convenience and bias. It was triumph of popularity over risk, thus rendering this year’s ceremony as a dud, once again.
I love Billie Eilish. Her Gen Z brand of dark pop is the Lorde lite that the masses can consume comfortably. But, in a sea of brand promotion campaigns disguised as awards, the Grammys is the rare music institution that aims to reward artists based on creative merits.
The problem with the Grammys
Running since 1959, it commands a brand of authenticity and history unparalleled in the music industry. However, those qualities are slowly eroding.
There have been a series of missteps that is at risk of rendering the awards irrelevant. It seems that each year, the ceremony manages to escape a potential crisis only to create a new one.
Last year, the awards proved it was socially on point by giving Childish Gambino the Record of the Year for This is America; only for them to overshadow it by the general mistreatment of hip-hop artistes across all categories that particular year.
That ruckus came on the back of a series of missteps throughout the last decade. This includes a flawed list of nominations and winners that reflect a whole bunch of issues; from conservatism to sexism, as former CEO Deborah Dungan tried to expose.
The Grammys committee has acknowledged some of these problems by expanding its membership base to include fresh blood; in addition to creating new selection panels to ensure a more representative list of nominees. But, it still feels like they are a few beats behind.
The dynamism of the music industry
The Grammys is now facing its biggest challenge yet; that’s coming to terms with how modern technology has so thoroughly disrupted all aspects of the music industry.
From the composition, production, and consumption of music, technology went on to not only create new music genres; but also increasingly rendered existing and established forms as irrelevant.
The Grammy Awards has failed to acknowledge that trend. Yes, it made efforts to acknowledge music streaming as a source of an artiste’s popularity (as opposed to pure sales). But, it has yet to evolve its award structure to accommodate the changes happening on the ground today.
One of the mutations they fail to recognize is how genre is now an irrelevant definer of an artiste’s work. Technology created an exciting new landscape where artists have happily discarded musical conventions in the pursuit of higher creative expression.
It is time now for the Grammy Awards to follow the artistes’ lead and shake up its obsolete nomination categories. This means jettisoning nonsensical categories; such as the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album and Best Urban Contemporary Album, in favour of new descriptions more in tune with today’s scene.
This also means a deeper interrogation of all nominees’ work and thus, extending the two-month-long period in which Grammy members cast their votes for all nominations.
Such changes could aid in the Grammy Awards in providing a more accurate picture of what is happening with the music industry today.
With pop music evolving at a rapid pace, the Grammys need to stay in tune, or risk becoming obsolete. In the words of Charles Darwin, it’s either you adapt or you die.