Beyonce – 2023 Grammy Awards – screenshot
*(Via LATimes.com) – What does it mean that the winningest artist in Grammy Awards history is not a Grammys artist? At Sunday night’s 65th Grammy Awards, Beyoncé took four prizes to break the record previously held by the late classical conductor Georg Solti and bring her total career win count to 32.
“I’m trying not to be too emotional,” she said as she accepted the fourth award, for dance/electronic music album, for her joyful and audacious techno-disco-funk fantasia, “Renaissance.” “I’m trying to just receive this night.”
Trying, but not succeeding: Eyes closed, her voice trembling ever so slightly, the singer appeared genuinely moved by her accomplishment as she thanked some of those who’d helped her, including God and her parents as well as her Uncle Jonny, whom she’s said introduced her to the art that inspired “Renaissance,” and “the queer community, for your love and for inventing this genre.”
A classy speech, to be sure, and one in which Beyoncé was right to take some pride: As understood all too well by the marginalized pioneers she shouts out on “Renaissance,” shaping culture can be lonely work, and here she was being celebrated by her peers for her innovative vision.
At least until she wasn’t.
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Adele, Beyonce and Lizzo at THE 65TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS – Getty Images
About an hour and a half after that record-breaking win, Beyoncé lost the award for album of the year to “Harry’s House” by Harry Styles. It was her fourth defeat for the Grammys’ equivalent of best picture and the 15th time she’d lost in one of the ceremony’s top categories of album, record and song of the year. In fact, of the 32 Grammys that Beyoncé has collected over the last two decades, only one — one! — has been a major prize: song of the year, which she won in 2010 as a writer of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” All the rest have come in genre categories like R&B song and urban contemporary album.
I don’t mean to suggest that those genre awards don’t matter. (More on why they do in a moment.) But the story the Grammys tells about popular music — tells us today and tells future generations examining the historical record — takes place in the major categories; that’s where the Recording Academy’s taste and value system come into focus.
And that taste, unlike Beyoncé’s music, is fundamentally conservative.
Read the rest of this insightful essay on why Beyoncé Should BOYCOTT the Grammys by Michael Wood at LATimes.
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