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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nNext year, it\u2019ll be entirely possible. After freshly ousted Recording Academy President Deborah Dugan surfaced allegations of vote-rigging and sexual misconduct within the organization\u2019s highest levels mere days before Sunday\u2019s awards, the academy is expected to make an immediate pivot into introspection. Let\u2019s hope for the best. A smart shift in Recording Academy leadership could make the Grammys\u2019 highly secretive voting process more transparent. It could make the awards more inclusive \u2014 and, you know, representative of our reality. It might even cultivate an environment where the artists feel free to speak their minds about the academy\u2019s inner workings from the Grammy dais.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That didn\u2019t happen on Sunday night, and the silence was eerie. The Grammys were trudging through the most contentious internal scandal in their 63-year history, but uninformed viewers would have had no idea. It wasn\u2019t until the very last moment of the telecast when host Alicia Keys vaguely suggested that \u201cwe need to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next year\u2019s Grammys should at least look different on the surface. The telecast\u2019s producer, Ken Ehrlich, is stepping down after 40 years of creating \u201cGrammy moments,\u201d usually via those transgenerational duets that made \u201cmusic\u2019s biggest night\u201d feel more like a sodden veneration of the past than a vital celebration of the present. It\u2019s an approach that brought Ehrlich into direct conflict with various nominees in recent years, including Ariana Grande and Bon Iver. (Dugan has also accused Ehrlich of having inordinate influence over the Grammy voting process. Ehrlich has denied it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless, the Grammy night telecast has been Ehrlich\u2019s baby for decades, and he ended his last one with a soaring tribute to himself: A long, loud, all-hands-on-deck performance of \u201cI Sing the Body Electric\u201d from the 1980 movie \u201cFame.\u201d Aside from the man in the control booth, who was this for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We like to think that the Grammys are for us, but we think wrong. In truth, the Grammys have only ever been the music industry\u2019s overblown celebration of self, a prime-time public relations ritual in which a cutthroat industry pretends to put its best face forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that makes the racism of the Grammys all the more galling. Rap music has been the dominant mode of pop music for this entire century, but here\u2019s a distressing piece of Grammy trivia that we have to keep reciting, year after year: Only one rap album, OutKast\u2019s \u201cSpeakerboxxx\/The Love Below,\u201d has ever won the most coveted Grammy, album of the year. And that was 16 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sean \u201cDiddy\u201d Combs has had enough. At a pre-Grammy gala on Saturday night in Los Angeles, he declared that \u201cblack music has never been respected by the Grammys,\u201d then called on the academy to change course. It\u2019s outrageous that the artists who\u2019ve been excluded from the academy\u2019s highest honors are the ones tasked with initiating reform, but here we are. \u201cI\u2019m officially starting the clock,\u201d Diddy said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got 365 days to get this s— together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the ceremony, Tyler said that the Grammy he later won for best rap album felt like a \u201cbackhanded compliment,\u201d adding, \u201cI don\u2019t like that \u2018urban\u2019 word. To me, it\u2019s just a politically correct way to say the n-word. Why can\u2019t we just be in pop?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, why not? Why not introduce more genre-blind award categories to the slate? Why not invite a wider variety of artists into the Grammys\u2019 most prestigious winner\u2019s circles? Tyler, the Creator has a cascading imagination, but this idea was simple enough. For a Recording Academy that desperately needs to re-imagine itself, it would be a good place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s Time For Radical Change At The Grammys \u2014 And The Clock Is Ticking By Chris Richards <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[81,77,79,78],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment-art-culture","tag-62nd-grammy-awards","tag-grammys","tag-lizzo","tag-radical-change"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/towncryyers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/download-2.jpg?resize=840%2C473\")
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And who in the Grammy electorate wouldn\u2019t have been inspired to do exactly that after Tyler, the Creator literally set the stage aflame on Sunday night? Joined by Charlie Wilson and Boyz II Men, the performance obeyed the law of \u201cGrammy moments\u201d \u2014 thou must collaborate with at least one household name at least twice your age \u2014 but it ultimately felt like an urgent, subversive, playing-with-fire kind of fun. Tyler was the greatest performer of the night. Why wasn\u2019t he up for any of the night\u2019s biggest prizes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/towncryyers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/image-2.jpg?resize=1024%2C683\")