Leave it to Beyoncé to shape the Grammy Awards in a year when she’s not even on the ballot.
With 35 trophies to her name, the pop superstar is the winningest artist in the nearly seven-decade history of music’s most prestigious awards show; with 99 nods, she’s the most-nominated act of all time too.
Yet despite her steady presence over the last quarter-century at pop’s creative vanguard, it took the singer until this last February to finally win the Recording Academy’s top prize, album of the year, with “Cowboy Carter” — a long-overdue victory that prompted countless think pieces about the academy’s fraught relationship with race, gender and genre.
In addition to taking the album award, “Cowboy Carter” — Beyoncé’s thorny and audacious exploration of the Black roots of country music — also won for country album at the 67th Grammys, which made her the first Black woman ever to win in that category.
The first — and now the last.
In June, the academy announced that, starting with the 68th Grammys, it would split the country album award into two: one prize for contemporary country album and another for traditional country album.
Some observers wondered whether the organization was bowing to complaints from Nashville insiders — complaints I’ve heard firsthand — that Beyoncé’s openly experimental work had no business beating LPs by industry standard-bearers such as Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson. (Beyoncé’s instantly memed surprise-face when her name was called suggested she could envision the griping to come.)
The more generous read of the academy’s move is that the expansion allows it to recognize more great music, particularly by making room for country traditionalists who might otherwise be crowded out by higher-profile, more pop-leaning acts. Indeed, the Grammys ballot has long featured separate categories for traditional blues and contemporary blues and for R&B of the traditional and progressive persuasions.
“The community of people that are making country music in all different subgenres came to us with a proposal and said … we need more space for our music to be celebrated and honored,” Recording Academy Chief Executive Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard in June.
Yet the new country awards — which bring the ballot to a total of 95 categories — come at a time when the Grammys seem increasingly game-able by artists looking for a competitive edge in all the stylistic slicing and dicing.
Take the Baltimore band Turnstile, a proud product of that city’s hardcore punk scene with five nominations for February’s ceremony including rock performance, metal performance and alternative music performance. Or take SZA, whose five nods put her in the pop, traditional R&B and melodic rap categories.
Each of those nominations recognizes a different song, and there’s no doubting that Turnstile and SZA both make music that spans a variety of genres, even on a single LP like the former’s sprawling “Never Enough,” which by the way is up for rock album. But by flooding the zone with submissions — at the Grammys, a given act decides how to categorize its music, albeit with some oversight from the academy — they clearly boosted their chances of being nominated.
You can say the same for Tyler, the Creator, who steered his “Don’t Tap the Glass” toward a nod for alternative music album — one way to avoid splitting votes with himself for the rap album award, for which he’s nominated with his other eligible LP, “Chromakopia.”
Some instances of what we might call category creep seem motivated by a strategic assessment of the competition. Would Elton John and Brandi Carlile have scored a nomination with their joint “Who Believes in Angels?” for a pop vocal album prize also sought by Sabrina Carpenter and Lady Gaga? Maybe, maybe not.
But traditional pop vocal album? Well, there they are on the ballot. (Curiously, Justin Bieber opted to submit the R&B-steeped “Swag” in pop vocal album after publicly complaining that his 2020 “Changes” was nominated for that prize instead of R&B album.)
Then there are the new country awards. Given the genre’s complicated cultural history — not to mention the talk in political circles about so-called heritage Americans — it’s easy to be suspicious of the racial coding of words like “traditional” and “contemporary,” especially as deployed in the wake of the success of “Cowboy Carter,” which Beyoncé has said grew out of her sense that she wasn’t welcome at Nashville’s Country Music Assn. Awards in 2016.
Then again, the only artist of color nominated for either prize is Charley Crockett, the Texas-born troubadour whose “Dollar a Day” is up for traditional country album.
In its rules, the academy states that traditional country recordings, among other things, employ “traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar and live drums.” Yet those instruments definitely show up on the LPs by Miranda Lambert, Eric Church and Tyler Childers that are nominated in the contemporary country category.
Folks I’ve spoken with in the industry say that the academy could provide more guidance regarding the Grammys’ ever-more-specific awards. More broadly, though, it seems worth contemplating the pros and cons of this niche-ification.
After all, such creep — or fraud, if you want to get serious with it — has been part of the conversation around other major awards shows for years. At the Oscars, it’s most often taken the form of hand-wringing over an actor or actress campaigning in a supporting category when they actually belong in lead; at the Emmys, it’s recently shaped the discourse around what constitutes a comedy (and whether “The Bear” really is one). What seems different about the problem as it relates to the Grammys is the difficulty of policing already blurry genre distinctions, defined by the artists themselves, in a proliferating number of categories.
So far, the trend has almost certainly brought much-deserved attention to the likes of Flo, a sly and crafty British girl group nominated at February’s ceremony for progressive R&B album, and Immanuel Wilkins, a daring young saxophonist up for alternative jazz album. If the promise of the streaming era was the elevation of the mass-cult artist, you can view with optimism a world in which these exciting new talents can get in the mix with the old academy faves. (Don’t worry: The great Mavis Staples is nominated for American roots performance and Americana performance.)
But you can also envision a future of category-creep Whac-A-Mole, with every cycle creating new, ever-smaller niches until even the most ardent Grammy-watcher’s head spins. To say nothing of the artists: What is an award worth if the field of one’s “peers” is defined so narrowly?
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