I think the deification is fine. The country is always looking for royalty to admire. The power couple of Beyoncé and Jay Z give us what we crave.
People are constantly raging about how the Kardashians are famous “for doing nothing.” People shouldn’t be equally as angry at Beyoncé for being famous for having decades of hard work behind her talent.
I grant you, she is a higher grade of fake royalty than Kim K.
I’m fine with people liking her that much, too. But turning this into some public angry controversy only makes it harder to get people to pay attention or not be dismissive when we’re angry about actual important issues.
Even if it’s just the media playing it up, I wish they wouldn’t.
It’s not “fine” when we care more about celebrity “royalty” (and typing that made me want to puke) than we do about who’s running the country.
Cast in that light, electing a celebrity to President seems rather efficient.
touche.
At the time, Ian Anderson pointed out “The award was not for Best Heavy Metal artist. It was for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Artist. Are we heavy metal? Obviously not. Are we hard rock? Yes, in a pinch. The songs we’re best known for are hard rock.”
Which is true. You’re free to dislike Tull, but the award wasn’t as ridiculous as it’s often made out to be.
I’ll care about Beyonce’s feels just as soon as she starts to care about the feelings of all the artists (dancers, visual artists, etc) she’s plagiarized from over the years and passed off as “inspiration”.
Not a fan?
To be fair in music the line between the two is pretty fine.
I think we’re going to be seeing the race card played a lot in future awards shows. Is it sometimes justified? Yes. Is it more often a salve for a black artist’s ego for not having won? Most definitely yes.
This rant by a black female journalist exemplifies the current Grammies race card. Ludicrously she claims that black women will never be seen as equal to whites, and this after just having mentioned Oprah Winfrey, arguably the most powerful woman in all media. None so blind.
She also seems to be in the habit of capitalizing “Black” but not “white”.
I can’t deny Beyonce’s talent or beauty but it always feels to me as though she believes her own press. It’s irrational but I can’t stand any of the Knowles women (that would be Beyonce, crazy sister Solange and mega bitch mother Tina). They seem a bunch of unpleasant divas.
I don’t mind her other than the plagiarism, although Kelly Rowland is my Destiny alum of choice…
I’m talking mostly about her videos, not her music.
More of the same…
And her videos are more of a central product for her than most recording artists these days.
Great point. To the extent that I see coverage of the Kardashians at all, it seems to carry an inherent imprimatur of insubstantiality. Whereas Beyonce is often talked about as though she is Very Important.
Now, I am not a big fan of either Adele or Beyonce. Both talented ladies, but neither of them particularly appeals to me. So, I offer no opinion as to which of them “deserved” the Grammy for Best Album.
What I’m baffled by is the widespread assertion that the Grammies are too white. Over the past 40+ years, I can think of LOADS of albums by minority artists that have won the Best Album Grammy. Stevie Wonder (a bunch, all by himself), Michael Jackson, OutKast, Lauryn Hill, Natalie Cole, Quincy Jones, Carlos Santana, Whitney Houston, Ray Charles…
Is there really a valid argument to be made that black artists are underrepresented among the winners?
Astorian, I take it you only read the OP and maybe some of the last few posts, but skipped some in the middle?
I started from the same premise you did and went to Wikipedia to bolster that argument. To recap: what I found was that what you are saying was true from the early Eighties until 2008. In that quarter-century span, black artists won 17 of the 50 Grammys awarded to Best Record and Best Album. But then the moment President Obama took office, this mysteriously stopped and we have had 18 white winners in a row over the past nine Grammy ceremonies. For a young BLM activist, that is going to seem like forever.
ETA: I see you stated “minority artists” which is slightly different from “black artists”. I only counted African Americans, but it’s actually higher than 17 of 50 if you include people like Carlos Santana or Norah Jones. But the 18-0 record over the past 9 years is all white no matter how you slice it. If the pattern of the previous 25 years had held, it would be more like 11 whites, six blacks, and one other.
So, what percentage of these awards SHOULD go to minority artists? If there’s a quota, please let us know what the quota is.
Well, the extrapolation shows that more awards should have gone to minority artists that would be predicted. So the question is why. If we look at Metacritic scores, we find that there have been a few occasions where the winner of Best Album (that’s the only one I looked at) was lower than a minority runner up. This year may have had one of the the biggest disparities - Adele’s “25” had a Metacritic score of 75/100 compared to Beyonce’s “Lemonade” which had a Metacritic score of 92/100.
You are blatantly shifting your goal posts. I started with my arms crossed in the same skeptical stance, but it appears that unlike you, I was willing to shift my perception based on new data. You are instead just retrenching.
You asked “Is there really a valid argument to be made that black artists are underrepresented among the winners?” And I think most people would say it’s at least a valid argument to point to 18 white winners in a row in the top two categories. But now you seem to be making an unfalsifiable argument that there is no minimum number one should expect over that span of time.
Since black recording artists have for many decades been punching above their weight in terms of sales and popular culture, then one would expect them to get at least the percentage of the top Grammys that they represent in the population of the US. That would mean getting 2 or 3 of those 18 awards rather than zero.