Switched on Pop - A History of Whammies at the Grammys - Into It with Sam Sanders

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

It's Grammys weekend and Sam Sanders, host of Vulture's Into It podcast, is ready for disappointment! Sam is joined by Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding and Reanna Cruz to break down the Grammys' history of tone deafness when it comes to the night's biggest awards. Will Beyoncé lose Album of the Year again... or will the voting body finally give her her due? Subscribe to Into It: https://link.chtbl.com/intoit?sid=stw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm

songwriter Charlie Harding. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz. And I'm Sam Sanders. Big fan of the pod. All right, Sam. Okay. You're charged. Yeah, let's go. All right. Dear listeners, you are listening to Intuit from Vulture and New York Magazine. And we are heading into Grammy weekend, which means I'm most likely going to be disappointed because more often than not, the Grammys get it wrong. They give the awards to the wrong people. So I could think of no better way to talk about the Grammy Awards in advance of this year's Grammys other than dragging the Grammys and their bad taste with my two favorite music journalists. So thank you all for indulging me. That's high praise. Thank you, Sam. So we spent some time researching and digging through what the three of us believe are the worst Grammy snubs of all time.

And we must start with the award for Album of the Year at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards, held in 1985. Bruce Springsteen was up for Born in the USA. Cindy Lopper was up for She So Unusual. Prince and the Revolution were up for album of the year for Purple Rain. Tina Turner for Private Dancer But Charlie, Rihanna, I'll let you all tell everybody who won that year Who won album of the year that year and beat out all those other nominees? Lionel Richie

Lionel Richie! Lionel Richie! Can't slow down. Is that not the greatest Grammy snub of all time? Like, how do you do that as the Grammys? I feel like it's up there. The Lionel album is interesting because it's... Interesting. What do you mean by that?

Well, it's only eight songs, and I think three of those songs are like iconic, still played on, you know, adult contemporary radio stations. All night long, hello, and stuck on you. I hear those all the time. Are any of those songs better than Purple Rain? Are any of those songs better than time after time? Are any of those songs better than any song on the Bruce Springsteen album born in the USA? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think, like, this is a terrible snub over all of these great albums. Are any of those songs better than what's love got to do with it? No. Come on. I think the tough thing about any of these moments is that the Grammys are, to a certain degree, declaring what is going to enter the canon. And Vienna's right. We still hear Lionel, no doubt. Important record. But it just pales in comparison. I mean,

Purple Rain. Born in the USA is probably one of the most played tracks of all time. It resurges every four years or every two years as it is constantly misappropriated for political usage. It's a song about America

falling apart, but politicians love it. And there's just... Time after time. Like, time after time is one of the most covered songs ever. Like, all of these other things are just more classic. I mean, what does that kind of snub with some of the titans of modern pop. What does that say about the Grammys to the two of you? I mean, I think it says

that Grammys will always award, I think, the thing that's more milk toast rather than, you know, the political, sexy, dangerous album of it all. What was that dangerous? I'm not saying, I think, like, in comparison, nothing is really that dangerous. But, like, you know, you look at a song like Darling Nicky on Purple Rain. It's like, I can feel some of the Grammy voters in, yeah, it's, you know, I feel like it might not be their first choice in the sort of we have to pick something that represents the Grammy's regard, you know? Yeah, you can also look at like Shebop, that Cindy Lopper song. It's about something special. Yeah, you have a record which is truly unusual.

She's so unusual. And it is a different sort of sound, Purple Rain and private dancer, both full of charged sexual energy, born in the USA, you know, deep political. commentary, you go with what's going to work on adult contemporary and play for the next 40 years. Wow. All right. That is my favorite, it's not the word. It's my least favorite Grammy Award situation of all time. We've got some other big snubs to go through. What's the next one? Yeah, a snub that I have been fixating on while researching where the Grammys got it wrong is the 2001 album of the year race. So, you know, you're entering a new millennium. You think that the Grammys would, you know, maybe want to come back in the new century with a little bit of

freshness to them. But I don't know, you can't give the Grammys too much credit because the album of the year that year went to Two Against Nature by Steely Dan. Steely Dan. I know. Over. Kid A by Radiohead. Boom, bum. Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem. Night Vultures by Beck and, you know, a random Paul Simon record, you're the one. You're the one.

You put my heart. You make me cry. But two against nature over Kid A and Marshall Mathers LP, which are, in my opinion, two of the foremost canonical albums of the 21st century. It's crazy. Well, also, were all those nominees for Best Album that year, White Guys? That's also very true. Okay.

Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes the Grammys does this thing, right, where I'm sure we're all aware, where they will award album of the year or other big awards to legacy acts in a way to like, I don't know, like affirm their legacy or some shit. I don't know. But this year they gave it to Two Against Nature by Steely Dan. They do it again in 2008 when they gave it to Herbie Hancock over Amy Winehouse. This is like one of the general issues of the Grammy is that I think it manifests here clearly. Yeah, and particularly with Steely Dan, this is happening because they hadn't put out a record in like 20 years. So when you're looking at the older, skew, white male of the voting members of the Recording Academy, they're like, oh, Steely Dan, I have not seen you in a minute. We love you, Steely Dan. And I have to defend the random Paul Simon record. I think Paul Simon, by contrast, is one of the most successful late careers of someone who's been around since the 60s.

Like, he puts out records that continue to have songs on them that absolutely bring me to tears where lyrics and melody continue to push boundaries. So I actually don't think of him as random. But he's also on there, obviously, for the legacy reason as well. And I don't, I mean, I like Steely Dan. It's just not the right pick. It's like I consider myself part of like the Steely Dan Renaissance. You know what I mean? Like, like Steely Dan is back in a big way.

Please call it Danansans. Yeah, the Danesance, baby. Yacht Rock is back and it's not going away. But even then I could look at this, you know, this list of five albums and even be like, you know, Midnight Vultures by Beck is a really, really great album and is doing more than the two against nature, the Steely Dan record. It's crazy. Yeah. You know, when we, it's funny that you mentioned this snub as it leads into the new century. But I feel like the largest overriding long-term snub in this. new century with the Grammys. It's just been the way that every time Beyonce releases an album

that fundamentally changes the music industry and shakes the world, she can never, ever, ever get album of the year. Yeah. Like, it's happened now with her self-titled album. It's happened with Lemonade. And my big fear is that this coming Sunday at the Grammy, she gets snubbed again for Renaissance. It's annoying. We'll talk more about it later, but that is also one of the biggest snubs of all time. But I want to pivot and talk about a third big snub from like yesteryear involving a little group you might have heard of called the Beatles. I mean, there's many Beatles snubs throughout the Grammy's history, which I think is just great to revisit. You know, again, the safe pick does win. So if you go back to 1967, the Beatles revolver, which is often

considered, you know, their magnum opus after Sergeant Pepper's. Someone come and fight me. It loses over fanks, Sinatra's, a man and his music. The next year in 1968, Hay Jude loses song of the year to a song called Little Green Apples. Who is that? I somehow have... Who is? Can you play it? You know, what? I have never heard it, Sam. On the fly fact check. Little Green Apples. I mean, some boomers very upset at me right now. O.C. Smith. A little green apples I gotta hear it Can we pull it up?

Yeah Oh my wake up in the morning With my hair down in my eyes And she says how I'm sorry what Stumbled to the breakfast table While the kids is going off This is ridiculous

Oh my gosh Wow She reaches out and takes my hair It's remarkably cheesy. I want to see if I know the chorus I know we gotta wait for it What is the way? Oh, God didn't make little green apples.

It don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime. Listen, I don't hate it. I hate it. Oh, I hate it. I hate it. Let me tell you. I hate it. But it beats Hey Jude.

And Mrs. Robinson was also not going to eat that same year. Oh, my God. What the hell? And lastly, though, it's great just two years later for their record, Abby Road. the Beatles lose to blood, sweat, and tears. So Abby Road loses to that. And just to be clear, Spinning Wheel has 16 million plays on Spotify,

and I'm not going to even go look at the Beatles. So, yeah, you know, not quite getting the canon of popular music right here. Ever. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived on the new Google Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character Gourman and addicive.

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let you end up your sensia I want to talk about some more snubs

throughout Grammy history but I do want to take a break and just ask YouTube music experts

how the Grammys can snub an artist while still giving an artist a Grammy

and this requires kind of a conversation about the big four categories and all of the other categories. So we've seen in this century artists making black music, R&B, and hip hop, getting a lot of Grammys, but still being shut out of what's called the Big Four categories. How does that happen? And what's the Big Four and all the other stuff? Okay. So the Big Four categories, record of the year, song of the year, which is the composition like lyrics and music, whereas the record is the production. You have album of the year, and you have Best New Artist. Now, all of the members of the Recording Academy can vote in the Big Four. And then most of the Grammys are actually sub-genre awards. There's

dozens more. It usually doesn't even air on the Grammys itself. There are countless awards for every genre imaginable. And recording Academy members are supposed to vote in three of those fields that they call them, sort of genre areas, and within their genre areas, they can vote 10 times. And so part of what's going on is that you've got an institution that is older, skews more white, skews more male, because people in the academy have been in it for a long time, and all of our issues of historical inequality exist within this institution. And so those voters are voting in the big four and getting their say about the biggest categories, even though really where they might be experts are in their subgenres and things that really have nothing to do with those big four.

And so there's all kinds of waiting and skewing that happens because of just the population of who's voting. Yeah. Well, and then they still get to do the thing where they say, well, Kendrick got a bunch of rap Grammys. Beyonce got a bunch of R&B Grammys. Aren't you happy about that? Right. But even then, sometimes the Grammys put an artist that has a lot of accolades, you know, in, the journalist world and in the music realm and they put them in these categories but don't award them with anything anyway. Like Kendrick Lamar, right?

2014, great year. Good Kid Mad City had come out. He was nominated for album of the year. Best rap album. Best new artist. Best rap performance and best rap sung performance. And he lost all of them. To who?

Rolling in hell of deep, headed to the mezzanine. Dressed in all pinks and my gator shoes. Those are green. Oh, to McLemore. What? I forgot about that. I think it's worth mentioning that Maclemore and Ryan Lewis didn't just win Best New Artist over Kendrick Lamar. They also won over Casey Musgraves, James Blake, and Ed Shearin. And obviously you have this issue of a white rapper winning over a black rapper during a time of raising consciousness of racial inequality.

Kendrick Lamar's album, Good Kid Mad City, paint such detailed imagery of exactly those issues. Same like the whole city go against me Every time I'm in the street I hear yack, yack, yack, yack, yack And so of course people are going to be riled up over that And that is what sticks in our memory But it's worth mentioning that Casey Musgraves James Blake and Ed Sheeran

Have all had arguably much longer and more profound Careers with greater impact than Maccamoire Ryan Lewis When we brought the idea of talking about Grammy snubs To you both Y'all went ahead and made Excel spreadsheets that break down the snubs by various demographic categories. Based on your research, what type of artist is most likely to be snubbed

by the Grammys in the Big Four categories? Well, it depends when you're looking over time. Like, if you go back to the beginning of the Grammys at the end of the 50s and through the 60s, you know who wins? A lot of white dudes. Yeah. Women don't really start winning actively until the 70s.

If you're looking at the Big Four categories recently, there is more of a gender mix, but you don't have a lot of representation of non-binary and trans folks in there. If you look at race, the same kind of story. While a lot of white folks winning a lot of Grammys for a very long time, though, in the 80s and 90s, a lot more black winners, a lot more multiracial groups winning.

And there's a decline or regression, though, that happens at the same era of the, the decline of the CD, 2007 through 2017, a lot of white folks winning the big four again. More recently, it's kind of been split over the last couple of years. It's also worth noting that in the last 20 years or so, there's been a lot more consensus voting, meaning there have been more artists who are sweeping more categories in the big four rather than having three or four unique artists in the big four categories winning those awards.

I've noticed that. So there's this kind of phenomenon that I see with the Grammys in the last several years where every few years they find a very charming white woman to give all the awards to. And I like these women's music, but it's like all the awards? Like Adele will sweep the Grammys.

You know, Billy Eilish sweeps the Grammys. Taylor Swift sweeps the Grammys. And it's kind of like there's a special place among those voters for a certain kind of white woman who is popular enough and also critically loved enough to just take everything. I mean, welcome to America. Yeah, for real. And listen, no shade on any of those women. I still play that first Billy Elish record. It's impeccable.

But like to see Billy Elish have a good album and win all the awards and then see Beyonce make several great albums and not. get the same awards, that's my problem. Right. And she wins record of the year, the year after that she sweeps the Grammys over other artists could have been Duolipa, Post Malone, Megan the Stallion. Of course, the weekend wasn't nominated for anything that year, but there is a conservative quality to the voting in the big four. And so it seems as like, well, we'd like Billy, Billy was great last year. And, you know, if you're a, there are a ton of classical musicians who are represented in the Grammys. And they ought to be awarded Grammys in their category, of course. But if they're voting in the

big four, they might not be following pop music. And they're like, Billy, I know that name. Okay, Bill. I know her. She's everywhere. Exactly. So you write it in. Well, and then it's like, when I think of some of the ways the Grammys have tried to fix their problem, which is ultimately, at its core, kind of a race problem. One of their biggest fixes

kind of hasn't fixed anything. I'm thinking about the Latin Grammys. This is a whole new award show. But there's like, some demographic issues and controversies there as well? Yeah. I mean, look at, you know, there was an uproar because despite the qualification for the Latin Grammys being like any music that's released in Spanish or Portuguese, you know, language-wise, Rosalia won album of the year for Motomami, which is a great record, but a lot of people were, you know, angry because she's not from Latin America, you know, and it's...

She's from Spain. Right, exactly. She's from Spain and... She's a white Western European woman. Exactly. Exactly. And despite the Grammys having these sort of, or the Latin Grammys rather, having these sort of nebulous qualities where it's like, well, you know, it has to be in Spanish and that counts as Latin music. It's still a weird sort of thing. And it's the recording academy's job to sort of deal with that criticism, you know. I think it's become an increasingly uncomfortable issue when the rise of Latin American music.

Spanish language, Portuguese language music in the United States has become deeply integrated with the Hot 100, which paved way for so much Spanish language music where these boundaries of what is music that's happening in Latin America, which there should be an award show for music, which is predominantly played in Latin America, absolutely. But then a lot of that music has also played in the United States, and it's unclear where those boundaries and I hate to say about, borders should exist. There's also the weird sort of discrepancy between the, you know, American Grammys, if for lack of a better term, and the Latin Grammys. Because Rosalia won album of the year at the Latin Grammys,

and Bad Bunny was nominated, but didn't win for Unverano Sinti. So it's like, Unvarano Sinti is nominated for the American album of the year. So it's like, it's a weird, like, interesting difference between the things that even get nominated. at both Grammys. Yeah. I think I'll do all the voting. I'll tell them who should get the awards.

And it's going to be Beyonce up and down that ballot. Because why not? It's time. It is. What do you think is going to happen this year, Sam? I think the Grammys know that they've got to honor Beyonce. If you recall last year at the Grammys, which were outside because it was still kind of a pandemic moment.

I remember those. But they made a big hullabaloo about Beyonce. getting one of the lesser category wins, but they made a big to do out of it because it made her at that point the most awarded woman in Grammy history. So they already know it is a moment in which to give Beyonce her flowers. So I think if the voters can at all read the tea leaves and recognize a good art, it goes to Renaissance. That is my hope. If you look at the other albums in the category. I think it's more pointing to Beyonce, but there's also formidable contenders like 30 by Adele, the Bad Bunny record. I think is my favorite album of the year, and I wouldn't be

mad if it won. But there's also like Grammy favorites in there that kind of muddy the waters a little bit, because the Grammy voters, there's an ABBA record in there for, you know, their first record after 30 years or so. There's the Brandy Carlyle record, which I know the Grammy voters go like crazy over. There's a random cold play record that I've never heard of before. There's... Not cold play. I know. There's special by Lizzo, which they also love. The Grammy voters love Lizzo over there and, you know, Harry's house. And Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morrell and the Big Seppers. But not a great Kendrick album. I'm sorry. I know. I think it was a great Kendrick album. I'll fight somebody over that. A subconscious step over. We all want to forget this latest

Kendrick album. Sorry, Kendrick Love, you mean it. I think part of what Rianna you're acknowledging here is that you have the same historical artists, potentially Abba, you know, even Coldplay fits in there a little bit. Right. And Mary J. Blige. Mary J. Blige had a record out this year? Good morning, gorgeous. That's what it's called. Oh, okay. Good for her. But I didn't hear it. That must have been under a ride. It's pretty solid. So take me back to the early 2000s, Mary. Go ahead. Yeah, I enjoyed it. All right, last question As we close this episode

Will the Grammys ever get better at this? I'm going to say no Charlie I want to believe in progress A hopeful cynically optimistic yes I like that I have no hope

I have no hope But we shall see Tell the Grammys fuck that O for A shit Listen Charlie Rihanna thank y'all so much For being here This was a delightful chat with a bunch of music

which I love. Listeners, go check out Switched on Pop right now. Do it. Thanks, Sam. Thank you, Sam.