Why No One Cares About the Grammys Anymore

Bruno Mars won the Grammy for Album of the Year on January 28, 2018, and the Internet was furious. Interestingly enough though, most of the hate wasn’t directed toward Mars, but rather toward what his award represented. To detractors, Mars’s victory was only the most recent entry in the Grammy Awards’s long history of failures, and for many, it was the last straw.

The Grammys are awards given out annually by the Recording Academy to, supposedly, celebrate achievements in the music industry. A televised ceremony is broadcast live, with the award dealing mixed in with star-studded performances. The awards used to be seen as the most prestigious honor a musician could receive, and as the music industry continued to push the Grammys as an important event, it soon earned the title of “music’s biggest night.” In the past few years however, that weighty reputation has been slowly fading away.

The 60th Annual Grammy Awards, where Bruno Mars won Album of the Year, had a viewership of 19.8 million viewers, the lowest number the ceremony has received in a decade. This year’s ceremony received 19.9 million viewers: slightly better, but far from the Awards’s peak in the ‘80s when the 26th Annual Grammy Awards in 1984 received 51.7 million viewers. In addition to weak ratings, the Grammys have also come under fire from both fans and artists. Some of the biggest names in music have openly criticized the awards, with even more artists turning down invitations to attend the ceremony. With all that in mind, it seems like the Grammys have been on a major decline in cultural relevance. How did the event that bills itself as “music’s biggest night” have such a fall from grace?

Simply put, the Grammys don’t represent the modern culture of music, at least in their current form. The awards have struggled to maintain their importance due to their lack of adaptation to our shifting culture. The 60th Annual Grammy Awards was the ultimate symbol of this failure. Bruno Mars’s winning album, “24K Magic” (2016), is a record that was massively successful, having been certified 3x platinum, yet relatively safe and unambitious. The album’s win over projects from Kendrick Lamar, JAY-Z, Lorde, and Childish Gambino validates one of the major criticisms of the Grammys: overlooking artistic achievement in favor of commercial viability. Each of these albums had a level of cultural impact and critical acclaim that “24K Magic” just didn’t have, but the win went to the safest, least impactful album. It stands as a testament to why the Grammys are losing relevance.

It also represents the Grammys’s lack of respect for hip hop. Both Lamar’s “DAMN.” and JAY-Z’s “4:44” (2017) were among the year’s most critically-acclaimed albums and were released by two of the most important figures in hip hop. If either album won Album of the Year, it would have honored the cultural impact of one of the most defining musical movements of our time. But as it stands, no hip hop album has won Album of the Year since 2010. When you realize that hip hop is the most popular music genre in the United States, you also realize how little the Grammys care about reflecting modern culture.

The Grammys are no longer tastemakers in 2019. Living in the Information Age, it seems almost absurd that the Album of the Year could be dictated by a small, insular pool of voters from the music industry when streaming and video services enable listeners to indulge in whatever music they desire. The safest, most boring picks aren’t going to cut it anymore, and that overreliance on familiarity has been the cause of much of the backlash against the Grammys. Even the artists the awards claim to celebrate have criticized them.

Artists like Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West have expressed displeasure with the awards in recent years. On the track “APESH*T” (2018), JAY-Z raps “Tell the Grammys [EXPLETIVE] that oh for eight [EXPLETIVE],” referring to his eight nominations with no wins at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. Even Drake, arguably the biggest name in music, has pushed back against the awards, saying in his acceptance speech for Best Rap Song at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, “This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand what a mixed race kid from Canada has to say, or a fly Spanish girl from New York, or a brother from Houston.”

But perhaps Frank Ocean said it best: “That institution certainly has nostalgic importance. It just doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from and hold down what I hold down.”

If the Grammys don’t represent modern culture and if they don’t acknowledge some of the most impactful music of our time, then they become a relic of the past. Besides, watching the entire three-hour ceremony seems like a waste of time when we have the ability to read the results and watch the performances we care about at our fingertips. If the Grammys can’t adapt to the times and celebrate the music that’s pushing our culture forward, then don’t be surprised as their relevance continues to fade.