Front Burner - Drake’s out. What now for the Grammys?

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

On Monday, as the Recording Academy began its final round of voting for the 2022 Grammy winners, people learned Drake was off the ballot. Drake and his management had asked the Academy to pull his two nominations. He still hasn’t offered an explanation, but this is the latest in a series of tensions between Drake and the Grammys: he’s questioned their relevance in his lyrics, defended The Weeknd after a snub and even criticized the Academy while accepting a trophy. Today on Front Burner, music journalist and host of Marvin’s Room A. Harmony joins us to explain why so many Hip Hop artists are expressing frustration with the Grammys, and whether a show with limited recognition of Black talent can remain relevant.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett. We play in an opinion-based sport, not a factual-based sport. So it's not the NBA where at the end of the year you're holding a trophy because you made the right decisions or won the games.

This is Drake on stage at the Grammy Awards in 2019. God's Plan had just won Best Rap Song, and Drake is making a surprise appearance to accept. But while he's waving his fourth ever gramophone around, he's not exactly thanking the Academy. Sometimes, you know, it's up to a bunch of people that might not understand, you know, what a mixed race kid from Canada has to say or or or or a fly or a fly Spanish girl from New York or anybody else or a brother from Houston right there. My brother, Travis. Well, you might also remember this as the speech where Drake got cut off. You don't need this right here. I promise you. You already won. But next, a special Grammy performance.

And it's part of a long history of Drake getting into it with the Grammys. I mean, this is him on Big Sean's Blessings all the way back in 2015. On Monday, tensions between Drake and the Grammys escalated again. Just as the Recording Academy started its final round of voting on next year's winners, we found out Drake asked them to drop his nominations. He's now out of the running, and Drake still hasn't told us why. So today I'm talking to A-Harmony, music journalist, MC, and host of Marvin's Room on CBC Music. She'll walk us through Drake's history with the Grammys, music journalist, MC, and host of Marvin's Room on CBC Music.

She'll walk us through Drake's history with the Grammys, hip-hop's growing skepticism of the awards, and whether artists like Drake really need these trophies anymore, or at all. In a long time, you know, I, I'm way up, I feel blessed. Way up, I feel blessed. Hi, Harmony. Hi, Angela. So let's just get right into it. For the 2022 Grammy Awards in January, Drake was up for Best Rap Album for Certified Loverboy and best rap performance for

Way Too Sexy. And again, we don't have an explanation from Drake as to why he pulled out yet. So, I mean, to speculate, why could he have withdrawn? Yeah, so there's two theories floating around about this. And one is that Drake has been named in several lawsuits stemming from the fatal Astroworld festival that happened out in Houston earlier this year. So some are speculating that he's withdrawing from the Grammys to try and stay out of the spotlight or lay low until his legal issues are resolved. But I don't think that that's it. The other theory that's floating around and the one that makes more sense to me is that Drake has had a long, sordid history with the Grammys, and he's called them out several times for snubbing hip-hop artists, snubbing Black artists,

and not just himself, but his contemporaries like The Weeknd or Pop Smoke. It makes sense to me that he's stepped out of this year's Grammys because of the long history of snubbing of not just him, but his peers. of snubbing of not just him, but his, his peers. Right. And I've also seen critics say maybe Drake is just bitter. You know, he's, he's got 47 Grammy nominations, but only four wins. He's only got two nods this year. What do you make of the idea that perhaps he's just a sore loser? Yeah.

I don't like framing Drake as a sore loser because I think that puts the spotlight solely on him and takes away from the problems that exist within the Grammys overall. And we should point out that this is not unique to Drake in terms of him only having four wins out of 47 nominations. It's a common pattern. So you see Kendrick Lamar, for instance, who has 13 Grammy wins out of 37 nominations. And I remember the year that he, I think he was nominated for seven Grammys and he walked away empty-handed while Macklemore took the Grammy for best rap album. And even Macklemore texted Kendrick and said, you know, it should have been you, you were robbed. This wasn't really my award. It should have gone to you.

And even outside of rap categories, you have artists like Beyonce, who has 28 wins out of 79 nominations. And the year that she lost album of the year to Adele, Adele got up on stage and in her acceptance speech said, Beyonce, this should have gone to you. Like, I don't know what happened here. I'm very humbled and I'm very grateful and gracious, but my artist of my life is Beyonce in this album for me. So, and even if it's not the reason why he withdrew, like I said, he's been very vocal about calling the Grammys out on this in the past. And to call him a sore loser for that is reductive, I think.

Hmm. You know, I mentioned how Drake's acceptance speech was cut off in 2019. You don't need this right here. I promise you, you already won. But there was also a big controversy the next year when The Weeknd didn't receive any nominations for After Hours and Blinding Lights.

I said, ooh, I'm blinded by the lights. After Hours and Blinding Lights. This huge song that charted phenomenally. And The Weeknd said, quote, the Grammys remain corrupt. How did Drake react to that? Drake agreed. And he kind of said, you know what? At this point, we shouldn't really be surprised that the Grammys are corrupt. And he was saying that we should stop being shocked by this and kind of step back and just see the Grammys for what they are and stop expecting them to change because the institution is so flawed and so corrupt that there's no going back. So if they're not respecting certain genres or respecting certain artists, then why do we need them?

Why are we begging for their validation? That was kind of the sentiment behind what Drake posted that year. And there's this idea that a lot of artists in hip hop are showing their frustration with the Grammys in recent years. What are some of the other examples we've seen? Yeah. So, I mean, this goes back years. I remember Jay-Z boycotted the Grammys back in the 90s and he stopped showing up to the ceremonies for a number of years until he started dating Beyonce and wanted to go back to kind of support her on her Grammy journey. But we'll see artists like Kanye West, for instance, he shot a video of himself peeing on a Grammy. Or Jay-Z using his Grammy as a glass one year, or even his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, using her Grammy as a sippy cup.

So beyond that, we've heard lyrics in certain songs, et cetera, where artists have kind of vented their frustrations and kind of said, hey, if this institution doesn't respect us, we don't respect it either. And here's what we think of your trophies. We're not coming to your ceremonies or I'm going to drink apple juice out of this Grammy to show you how worthless it is. We're starting to see that sentiment among lots of artists and it has been apparent for several decades. So since The Weeknd was snubbed, a lot of attention has been put on how the Recording Academy makes its nominations. The Weeknd said he won't even submit his music anymore because of, quote unquote, secret committees.

Up until this year, how did that committee process for nominations work? Yeah, it's funny because the term secret committee sounds like this wild conspiracy theory that The Weeknd is just plucking from the middle of the sky. But up until now, the nominations process was very strange. You had thousands of members of the Academy who were able to vote on who should be nominated for a Grammy. They would submit their votes. But then there was this overarching review panel who got to look at all of the votes that came in and make the final decision or veto votes depending on who they wanted on the panel. And this second vote by a review committee happened with the majority of categories.

So, for instance, say I'm sitting on the panel. Nobody knows that I'm sitting on the panel. Nobody knows who this panel is comprised of. And I look at the votes that have come in from the Academy and I say, well, there's this one artist who I know is going to draw a lot of eyes if they perform at this year's Grammys, but how can I ask them to perform if they haven't even been nominated? We better slap them in there and give them a nomination so that we can ultimately drive up our views. That's just an example, but that is an example of what the review panel had the power to do is they could look at the votes, look at the ballots and make the final decision, even if it goes against the vote of consensus. Wow, that's that's so wild to me. And it's a it's a secret committee.

So we don't actually I mean, I guess they don't call it they call this review panel. Right. Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%.

That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Listen to this podcast. Just search for Money for Cops. In 2019, the Academy brought in its first woman president, Deborah Dugan. She was removed just 10 days before last year's awards, and she launched a sexual harassment and gender discrimination complaint. But what did she have to say about this voting process? Yes. So Deborah Dugan was really vocal about the Grammys as a whole being a boys club, and that was part of the complaint she filed. In terms of the voting process, she said that it was

rigged and she used that exact word rigged, which is a really powerful word to use when you're talking about an institution like the Grammys. She said that there was an instance where she learned that there was an artist who was able to sit in on the nomination process for song of the year. And their song was one of the songs in the running. Their manager was also sitting on the Academy's board at the time. And even though that artist's song came in very low in the ranking in terms of where the Academy had put it, it was something like 18th in the ranking. And yet when the final ballot came out there, that song was. And she was saying that that's not the first instance of a gross conflict of interest or the first time that something like that has happened. I have evidence that in another

room, because there were complaints made in the jazz category. So you do have evidence. That was going to be my follow-up question. And where are you going to present that? I have a claim that I filed. And I guess I should note that the Academy has denied all of these allegations and Dugan and the Academy settled over her dismissal this year. And so in May, the Academy announced it would actually dissolve those review committees so nominees would be based on voting from its over 11,000 members. Is this problem solved now? Well, I wonder about that. Part of me says that, yes, eliminating these committees does solve a big problem. But the fact that these committees existed in the first place says something about the lack of integrity at the Grammys. So I wonder, it's hard to say whether that solves any problems if there were so many problems baked into the process to begin with. So after Tyler, the creator's comments last year, the Grammys dropped the urban label from its categories.

It also dropped world music to avoid, quote, connotations of colonialism. It sucks that whenever we and I mean guys that look like me do anything that's genre bending or that's anything, they always put it in a rapper urban category, which is, and I don't like that urban word. It's just a politically correct way to say the N word to me. So what did the existence of those categories in the first place tell us about the Recording Academy? Well, it tells us a lot about the Academy and also about the music industry as a whole, who has a history of using very coded language when describing genres. Tyler, the creator kind of got at it when he won his Grammy,

basically saying, you know, I make music that is so much more than hip hop or rap. I make pop music. I make all kinds of different sounding music. And you still lump me into this one urban category. And are you doing it because that's how the music sounds to you or because I'm Black? He kind of hit it right on the nose. And a lot of the language that the music industry uses to describe music is really actually

describing the race of the artist or the ethnicity of the artist. Urban, for instance, is used as this catch-all euphemism for Black because they don't want to call it Black music or world is silently understood as music by a non-white person who originates from outside of North America. Because when you think of it, we don't call Adele or the Beatles world music, but we reserve that term for Anjali Keejo. Each one of us, each one of us, we need each other. We need each other now. So ideally, I think genres should describe a particular sound, but often they're used as coded terms to describe race. And that's certainly'm guessing like now that those two labels, urban and world music, are gone, things aren't fixed in terms of the way artists are categorized.

They're not fixed. So for instance, the world category has been eliminated, but it was replaced with the term global. And is that not just a synonym for the world world? It's like the same thing. the world word. It's like the same thing. Exactly. It's the same word. In my opinion, the Grammys has to decide, and this is not just them. Again, it's a music industry thing. People have to decide what exactly are they trying to communicate when they come up with these words? Are you trying to communicate the race or the ethnicity of an artist? If so, do that explicitly and create a best album by a white person or best album by a non-white person, best album by a person who doesn't live in North America. And the thing is when you are as explicit as that, or you're frank in that way, it doesn't feel really good. It doesn't sit really well.

So then you have to ask yourself, why are we doing it? Why are we using these words like urban and world and global, et cetera? What are we trying to say here? Decide what it is you're trying to say. And if you're not in fact trying to segregate artists by race, then come up with words that describe the music and make these words in these categories more about the music. Again, I think that's what Tyler, the creator, was hinting at is that he makes music

that fits several different genres if you listen to it from a sonic perspective. So put him in categories that fit the sound of music that he's making. I can think of Lil Nas X as well, who made a country song and it charted on the country chart and the country industry had a really hard time accepting him as a country artist. I got the horses in the back. Horse stock is attached.

Head is matte black. Got the bushes black to match. And again, we have to have a real honest conversation about ourselves, about what we're trying to connote when we come up with these genre terms. Yeah. And I guess like we don't know what the intention of creating these labels were. But just again, thinking back to the, quote, unquote, Aboriginal category for the Junos in Canada, I think, like, the impetus behind that was, like, Indigenous people just couldn't get in, even though they were charting or, you know, really popular or were making incredible music. They just weren't getting into these awards. So they created this category called the Aboriginal category.

But then people were like, well, what is this? Is it like a global Indigenous award, like people playing flutes and drums and doing more traditional? Or is it like this woman who's Haida, you know, a pop artist, you know, who has love songs, who doesn't talk about anything Indigenous, you know, and then we were having conversations like A Tribe Called Red, now The Hallucination, when Breakthrough Group of the Year. It we are just swapping one euphemism out for another. I understand the desire to be inclusive, but having to create categories or certain parameters in order to remind us to be inclusive is an issue in itself. Yeah, and I love the example you brought up about Lil Nas X.

There's also a difference between nominations and actually recognizing Black artists with the top awards. I mean, the big four, Best Album, Song, Record, and New Artist in particular. How many of the trophies are Black artists actually getting in these categories? So it's really interesting. The Grammys is heading into their 64th prize cycle this year or next year, rather in 2022. And only 10 Black artists in the history of the award have ever won Album of the Year. And I should note within that 10, only three of them are women. So I think of your greats like Beyonce or Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, even none of them have ever earned this honor. The last Black artist to win Album of the Year was Herbie Hancock.

And he did win for a Joni Mitchell tribute. I wish I had a mirror. I couldn't skate away. But it don't snow. It stays pretty green. Which makes me wonder whether Herbie Hancock won that award on his own merit. He's great, great artist. Don't get me wrong. Or whether the vote was really for Joni Mitchell, who's a white artist, and Herbie was kind of like her proxy, it makes me wonder. I should note that in 2021, Megan Thee Stallion won Best New Artist and her won Best Song or Song of the Year for I Can't Breathe. And it's not to put an asterisk to either accomplishment or to Herbie Hancock's accomplishment or any of the artists who have won in these big categories. But in 2020, there was this grand racial reckoning across the world. We saw it in the music industry with Blackout Tuesday, and there were several companies who were putting out statements talking about standing by the Black community,

and everyone was grappling with the murder of George Floyd, et cetera. So it's not lost on me that that was the year that the Grammys decided to award these two artists, and especially for a song like I Can't Breathe on her's part. And again, it's not to take away from what either artist is capable of or accomplished or their talents, because they're both very talented. However, I wonder whether the Grammys made a political choice there, whether they were trying to pat themselves on the back, whether they were trying to undo years of systemic racism or just nefarious voting practices by, okay, we gave this artist an award for I Can't Breathe. So now you can't say that, you know, we've been doing shady things behind the scenes for 63 years.

Yeah. And I mean, those like that moment in time, I guess we were seeing in this like reckoning across North America, like in media as well. I saw that, too, with, you know, some journalistic awards here. And it's like, OK, like more Indigenous people, more Black people, more people of color are getting recognition at these awards ceremony. But then I wondered, like, is this just a 2020 thing? But then I wondered, like, is this just a 2020 thing? Like, is this going to have staying power? Or was this just like their political, like, For example, we need to see those decision-making bodies be representative of, you know, not just one group of people or not just white people. So the Academy is in a years-long effort to increase diversity by inviting more voting members, although still only slightly above a quarter are women and the same for quote unquote underrepresented groups. What do you think it's actually going to take to see lasting

improvement at the Grammys? Yeah, this is a tough question to answer because my gut response is the whole thing needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground. And that's not just the Grammys or the Recording Academy. It's the entire music industry, which is a huge mountain to climb. The thing that I think we lose sight of is that the Recording Academy is not, it's a microcosm of the music industry at large. The people who are members of the Recording Academy are the same people who manage record labels. They negotiate deals. They're routing tours. They're signing artists. They're the engine that makes the entire industry drive. And so a lot of the issues that we see within the Grammys are happening outside of the institution as well

within the music industry at large. And it's like, how do you fix the Grammys unless you fix all of the other things that are happening around the Grammys? It's a complicated question because the answer involves certain groups relinquishing privilege and admitting that they were wrong and building things again from the ground up. I don't think we can put lipstick on this pig, for lack of a better term. And I mean, if fans are pushing artists like Drake and The Weeknd to the top of the charts, but the Grammys aren't recognizing them. I mean, how relevant are the Grammys to music listeners? I mean, I'm thinking of all the artists that never receive a nomination. Right. And I think the same.

Like, anytime I am researching for Marvin's Room, I'm constantly amazed at these great artists who either never won or they've never been nominated for a Grammy or they've been shut out of a major category. Like Gladys Knight, people who made huge impacts. Mariah Carey, like how do they not have an album of the year Grammy? Thing is, even though they've never won Grammys, they're not any less relevant or any less impactful to me as a consumer or a listener, and I'm sure to many of their adoring fans as well. So especially in the environment that we're in now where social media creates this direct-to-consumer environment where me as a fan, I can go on Twitter directly

and tell Kendrick Lamar that his album was definitely the best album of the year and changed my life. And the Grammys doesn't have to have anything to do with that. I think because we're in that environment, the Grammys really is just trying to get in where they fit in. I think there are a lot of people within the Recording Academy and the Grammys institution who believe that they're more important in this industry than they actually are. But I think there are a lot of artists and a lot of fans who are kind of like, we see how flawed this institution is. And really this relationship is, is an A and B thing. It's fan and artist, and we don't need anybody else to kind of step into it. So the funny thing is, you know, the Grammys has been coasting on this reputation of prestige for several decades. And in order for them to remain relevant in a conversation that

they're actually being shut out of these days, they need to take an honest look at themselves as an institution and stop relying so heavily on that reputation they've built because it is flawed and really start making some structural changes or they will be left behind. And I think they'll be the last to realize it too when they've been left behind. And I think they'll be the last to realize it too when they've been left behind. Harmony, it's been so good to chat with you. What a fascinating conversation. And I so appreciate your perspective on this. Thank you so much. It's been great speaking to you. Thanks. That's all for this week.

If you haven't done it already, give us a rating and leave a review on your podcast app. It helps other people find out about the show. And thanks to everyone who's left a review so far. FrontBurner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show was produced this week by Simi Bassi, Imogen Burchard, Ali Janes, Katie Toth, and Derek van der Wyk. Our sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Nuruddin Korane. Joseph Shabison wrote our music.

The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Angela Starrett filling in for Jamie Poisson, and I'll talk to you again soon. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.