The 63rd Grammy nominations: is there hope for progression?
The Recording Academy has made numerous pledges to become more diverse, but for every step forward, it takes two steps back.
Source: Flickr
In 2019, Stevie Nicks became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a second time. During her speech, she talked about how she is certain that her accomplishments will enable more women to follow in her footsteps, citing, almost prophetically, “the girls in Haim” as an example. The Grammy nominations announced on November 24 listed the aforementioned sister-trio as one of the contenders for Best Rock Performance, alongside Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Alabama Shakes lead singer Brittany Howard, Grace Potter, and the female-fronted Big Thief, marking the first time in the Academy’s history that this category is 100 per cent female. Haim could not have picked a more befitting title for their album than the deft and droll “Women in Music, Part III”.
Another first of this sort was achieved in Best Country Album, where all the nominees are female-fronted acts. Even when we look at the big picture, women dominate this year’s nominations - Beyoncé topped the nominees, earning nine nominations, in a year in which she has not released an album in the traditional sense. She was closely followed by Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Dua Lipa, with the latter two also scoring nominations in the prestigious Album of the Year category. In fact, women prevailed over the four main categories — Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
This should seem a clear sign of progress and an exponential improvement from the blunder that was the 2018 edition of the Grammy Awards when, out of the 86 nominees, there were only 17 women - or even from the most recent, corruption-ridden edition of the ceremony; and yet one cannot help but notice the glaring snubs of this year. The Weeknd’s record-breaking “Blinding Lights” was ignored completely despite its commercial success, prompting the Academy to issue a lukewarm apology, whilst the idiosyncratic “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” did not make the cut for Album of the Year, contrary to predictions. Moreover, the 2021 Grammy ceremony marks the return of Dr. Luke, the producer who was accused of sexual assault by Kesha. Needless to say, we have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the true willingness of the Recording Academy to change fundamentally, and we should definitely question whether its recent strides to be a more inclusive environment - such as renaming the controversial “Best Urban Album” as “Best Progressive R&B”, and “Best World Music” as “Best Global Music” - are genuine, or just a hollow attempt to cling to relevancy by trying to emulate ‘progressive’ behaviour without actually following through.
The Grammys have a patchy history at best and, taking stock of what Fiona Apple said in her much talked about Acceptance Speech at the 1997 MTV Awards, we should not place that much value on these kinds of awards. However, there is at least one positive aspect to this year’s slate of nominations: over the last couple of years there has been a spike in the number of critics stating that “rock is dead” and, whilst it is true that there are considerably less guitar-led songs making it to the top of the charts nowadays, that does not translate to the definitive vanishing of rock music. Rock as a genre is not disappearing any time soon, as supported by a plethora of albums released this year - Hayley Williams’ “Petals for Armor” or Alanis Morissette’s “Such Pretty Forks in the Road” being some other examples in addition to the Grammy-nominated ones. We just need to start looking for it in the right places, paying more attention to the likes of Haim and Brittany Howard. Entire genres of music do not evaporate, they just change their gears every once in a while.