What does Beyonce have to do to win Album of the Year?
For a third time in a row, Beyoncé has been robbed of the trophy for Album of the Year at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony.
It could be argued that this is her fourth major loss in the category. The singer’s third solo studio album, I Am… Sasha Fierce lost on its 2010 nomination to Taylor Swift’s album Fearless, but Sasha Fierce was never a guaranteed victory. Though it contained some of Beyonce’s most memorable singles–“If I Were A Boy,” “Halo,” “Sweet Dreams,” and, of course, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”–it is still mostly that: a collection of good singles with a few serviceable tracks as filler.
Ironically, I Am… Sasha Fierce still helped kick-start a conversation about how the music industry might be taking Beyonce’s talent for granted. At the 2009 MTV VMA Awards, Kanye West infamously stormed the stage to criticize the win of Taylor Swift for that year’s Best Female Video. “Yo Taylor,” West said after taking the mic from the then-19-year-old. “I'm really happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” West was right and, in fact, Beyonce won the bigger award for Video of the Year (sans any gender specifications) later that night for “Single Ladies.”
MTV meddling aside, the VMAs are supposedly a fan-voted award, meaning artists with an organized fanbase will likely prevail in securing a prize; and Taylor Swift has an absurdly organized fan base–just ask Ticketmaster. Still, Beyonce won the bigger award of the night. West’s diatribe was unnecessary and cruel, making the moment a point of contentious celebrity scandal rather than a reasonable assertion of Beyonce’s worth in the industry.
This kind of overshadowing happened again, albeit with less fanfare, in 2015 when Beck won Album of the Year at that year’s Grammys. Kanye West began a walk on stage before flashing a knowing smile and returning to his seat. He wasn’t going to commit the same bad-form protest as he did in 2009, but West’s stance on Beyoncé’s loss was the same. He told E! News after the show, “All I know is if the Grammys want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us… Beck needs to respect artistry and he should have given his award to Beyoncé, and at this point, we tired of it.”
This time, much of the public was on West’s side. Following the ceremony, “Who is Beck” trended on Twitter as fans challenged the Recording Academy’s decision to award Beck’s album, Mourning Phase, above Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled release. Backlash against Beck himself yet again overshadowed the actual injustice of Beyoncé’s loss.
Rebelling from the constraints of a singles-led campaign, Beyoncé’s self-titled effort popularized what’s now called the “surprise drop” as the singer produced the album in secret before releasing it in full on iTunes sans promo or an official announcement. Instead of marketing a handful of standout tracks, each song was highlighted in the release of the album’s visual accompaniments, popularizing the “visual album” alongside the surprise-release strategy.
Her self-titled release was not the first Beyoncé album to utilize a visual component for each track; the 2006 album B’Day also inspired music videos for all 13 songs, featured on the DVD B'Day Anthology Video Album. What set Beyonce, the album, apart from her previous full-length efforts was the record’s sonic and thematic cohesiveness as well as uncompromising quality. Critics raved over Beyonce’s musical experimentations, sociopolitically-charged messaging, and the diverse styles honed by its artist’s vocal performances. Fellow singer-songwriter Grimes later credited Beyonce for “revitalizing the art of the album” for herself and other artists. The album’s immense success–becoming the 10th best-selling album of 2013 despite being released halfway through December–has even been credited with changing the industry-standard release day from Tuesdays to Fridays.
Absolutely none of the albums nominated for Album of the Year at the 2015 Grammy Awards had any impact comparable to Beyonce, least of all Mourning Phase. Beck’s album was comparable from a critical acclaim standpoint–both records earned Metacritic scores in the 80s (Beyonce: 85; Mourning Phase: 81), while none of their competitors scored above 67–but Morning Phase didn’t have the cultural significance, represented by the fact that much of Millennial Twitter didn’t even recognize Beck by name.
Whatever. Beck is a legendary musician with undeniable influence and talent, even if Mourning Phase is a mostly understated piece of work. It’s hard to say Beck hasn’t put in the work to earn such an accolade, but Beyonce has put in that work too. In some ways, that’s been recognized. With her four wins this year, Beyonce became the most decorated artist in Grammy Award history. She now holds 32 Grammys total, and still, none of those 32 awards bear the title Album of the Year.
Beyoncé was the first album of the singer to undoubtedly deserve the award above its competition, but it’s still not her most outrageous loss. Beyoncé’s next release, the monstrously successful 2016 album Lemonade, took all the self-titled album’s innovations and built upon them, producing a groundbreaking project that combined the metanarratives of Beyoncé's celebrity with biting political commentary and visuals so meticulously designed they would be considered expressive art even without the advent of their soundtrack.
In all of history, there are few albums as immediately impactful as Lemonade. Visually, sonically, and thematically it remains one of the most influential pieces of media ever made. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, it lost Album of the Year to Adele’s 25.
While a smash hit commercially, 25 achieved neither the critical success nor the cultural impact of Lemonade. The album contained one truly notable single (“Hello”) and landed a score of 75 on Metacritic. Lemonade earned a 92 by contrast, becoming one of the most acclaimed albums in the site’s history, while multiple of the album’s tracks sparked widespread cultural discourse on topics like police brutality, the intersectionalities of gender and race, and the limits of genre. More so than on any of her previous releases, Beyoncé’s status as a black woman in America influences the perspective of the entire album.
Adele, a very-white woman whose music caters primarily to the tastes of the Academy’s very-white voters, seemed to recognize the regrettable implications of her album winning over an instantly iconic project from one of the 21st century’s most legendary black artists. “I can’t possibly accept this award,” she said, whilst accepting the award. “I’m very humbled, I’m very grateful, but the artist of my life is Beyonce. And this album to me, the Lemonade album, was just so monumental… so well thought out, and so beautiful and soul-bearing.” Speaking to Beyonce, she continued: “All us artists here fucking adore you. You are our light, and the way that you make me and my friends feel—the way that you make my black friends feel—is empowering, and you make them stand up for themselves. And I love you, I always have, and I always will.”
Similarly, this last week, while accepting the award for Record of the Year, Lizzo looked to Beyonce in the audience. "You changed my life," she said. “You sang that gospel medley and the way you made me feel, I was like, ‘I wanna make people feel this way with my music’… You clearly are the artist of our lives.” Both testaments to Beyonce’s talent and influence were well-received, for the most part. Slightly more controversial was Billie Eilish’s decision to yell, “Sorry I’m not Beyonce” at the end of her 2022 Coachella set. Eilish was headlining the festival.
That event followed Eilish accepting the award for Record of the Year at the Grammys in 2021. During her speech, Eilish turned to fellow nominee, Megan Thee Stallion, saying, “Megan, girl — I was gonna write a speech about how you deserve this, but then I was like, 'There's no way they're gonna choose me.’ You deserve this. You are a queen, I wanna cry thinking about how much I love you, you're so beautiful, you're so talented. You deserve everything in the world, I think about you constantly, I root for you always. You deserve it, honestly, genuinely, this goes to her. Can we just cheer for Megan Thee Stallion?”
Well-intentioned as they may have been, Eilish and Adele joined an unfortunate collection of white people sheepishly apologizing while accepting recognition a black artist arguably deserved more. Most embarrassing amongst them has always been the white rapper Macklemore, who won Best Rap Album at the 2014 Grammys, then posted a screenshot of himself apologizing via text to Kendrick Lamar on Instagram. “You got robbed,” he wrote. “I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and it sucks that I robbed you.”
In all fairness to Adele, Billie Eilish, and Macklemore, the fact that any of them were put into a position in which their white guilt and white mediocrity were on such display was fucked to begin with. Eilish and Adele are at least generally respected artists with undeniable influence over the music industry. The Heist by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis has never once been regarded as a must-listen for appreciating rap as an art form or hip-hop as a genre; it was just a modestly successful hip-hop-adjacent release from a pair of dorky-looking white dudes. The fact that their album won against Lamar’s critically acclaimed, more culturally significant, record Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is not Macklemore’s fault; but it was still outrageous.
Every year, the Recording Academy snubs the work of black artists and other marginalized communities at an obscene rate. In 2016, Lamar lost Album of the Year again to Taylor Swift’s 1989. Swift’s album was more culturally impactful than anything released by Macklemore and/or Ryan Lewis, but still nowhere near as critically hailed as Lamar’s album, To Pimp a Butterfly.
Often the biggest snubs are exhibited by work that doesn’t receive a nomination. After a decade of working in the industry, regularly being named one of the most influential artists of the 21st century, The Weeknd became one of the most snubbed musicians in Grammys history when his 2020 album After Hours, arguably the biggest album of his career and featuring the most-streamed song ever on Spotify, failed to receive a single nomination. Prior to the announcement, The Weeknd had been planning a performance at the award show in a process that reportedly became contentious when The Weeknd decided he would also perform at the Superbowl a week later. The performance was canceled once the nominations were announced, and the Weeknd no longer submits his work for the Recording Academy’s consideration.
He isn’t alone. Fellow Canadian singer, Drake, has also decided to stop submitting work for Grammy consideration. His complaints trace back to 2017 when Drake did win two awards, but not in categories he found appropriate for his work. After his single “Hotline Bling,” a track that contains no rapping, won Best Rap Song, Drake stated, “I’m a black artist, I’m apparently a rapper, even though ‘Hotline Bling‘ is not a rap song. The only category that they can manage to fit me in is in a rap category, maybe because I’ve rapped in the past or because I’m black.”
Following his 2020 win for Best Rap Album for Igor, Tyler the Creator made a similar complaint, telling reporters after the fact, “On one side, I’m very grateful that what I made could just be acknowledged in a world like this. But also, it sucks that whenever… guys that look like me do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a ‘rap’ or ‘urban’ category. I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. To me, it’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word. Why can’t we just be in pop?”
Lemonade didn’t win in most of its categories, but it did win Best Urban Contemporary Album.
Though she now has more Grammy Awards than any other artist, Beyoncé’s wins (with a few exceptions) have all been in genre-specific categories. Those genres are dominantly R&B and “Urban” (whatever that means), with two additional Rap wins for her track with Megan Thee Stallion. Frankly put, Beyoncé usually wins in the genres associated with black people. She may be talented enough to earn 32 Grammys, but Academy voters have continuously sent the message that she’s not quite mainstream enough to win outside her niche arenas.
At least in 2023, Beyoncé has been recognized outside of racially coded genre classifications. Her biggest win this year was for Best Dance/Electronic album for her recent album Renaissance. The award has almost exclusively been given to white artists since its creation in 2005.
In her speech, Beyoncé thanked the queer community for “inventing the genre” of Dance music, specifically her gay Uncle Johnny for inspiring her. The history of Dance/Electronic music can be directly traced back to the Disco movements and subcultures of the 1960s and ‘70s. Though the genre has gone on to inspire much of the current pop landscape, rising backlash against the Discotheque in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s temporarily destroyed the movement’s momentum, almost killing the genre completely. Much of that backlash contained noticeably racist, homophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric given the genre’s history as a creative expression of black, Latino, and queer individuals.
The fact that Renaissance was recognized as an exceptional feat of Dance music is itself significant. The album was, as Beyoncé’s work typically is, one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of its year. It also, as Beyoncé’s work typically does, lost Album of the Year to a record with a more tepid critical response and not a whole lot of cultural impact (despite a few tracks looping endlessly on TikTok).
This time it was Harry Styles, another white man, that took home Album of the Year for his 2022 record Harry’s House. In his speech, Styles thoughtlessly claimed, “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often.” It does. Almost exclusively.
Before the winners of the final few awards were announced, Beyoncé already posted an image of herself and three of her trophies from the night on Instagram. Perhaps Grammy insiders already warned her she wasn’t going to win in any of the major categories, or maybe she predicted her fate from disappointments prior. After all, if Lemonade couldn’t win Album of the Year, no album that bears Beyoncé’s name has a chance either.
Given her 32 Grammys total, it doesn’t appear that her frequent losses have anything to do with her talent, prompting one to wonder what the difference really is between Beyoncé and the artists she keeps losing to.