A focus on recovery after Los Angeles’s destructive wildfires meant that the Grammys 2025 gave little attention to the bedlam unfolding in Washington, DC. Even Beyoncé, one of Kamala Harris’s highest-profile campaign surrogates, kept her comments to the politics of the country genre. But when Alicia Keys took the stage to accept the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, she made a pointed reference to the growing backlash to DEI programs that culminated in President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting them last month.
“This is not the time to shut down the diversity of voices. We’ve seen, on this stage, talented, hard-working people, from different backgrounds with different points of view, and it changes the game,” she said. “DEI is not a threat. It’s a gift.”
She urged the music industry to keep providing opportunities to underrepresented artists. “The more voices, the more powerful the sound. When destructive forces try to burn us down, we rise from the ashes like a phoenix,” she said. “Music is the unstoppable language that connects us all. It’s so beautiful. So let’s keep showing up with compassion, with empathy—what I call soul care.”
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Keys was honored for opening up access to women in music production. In her speech, she mentioned a number of visionary female producers that included musician (and Elon Musk’s ex-partner) Grimes. “I always had to fight for a certain level of respect as a songwriter, a composer, and especially a producer,” she said. “It’s strange that we don’t think of women as producers like Quincy or Dre or Swizzy [her husband Swizz Beatz], but female producers have always powered the industry. Patrice Rushen, Missy Elliott, Linda Perry, Grimes, Solange, and so many more.”
Keys’s comment came shortly after the Recording Academy’s CEO Harvey Mason Jr. highlighted the organization’s Black Music Collective, a diversity initiative launched in 2020, crediting it with helping repair the Grammys relationships with artists, including The Weeknd, who later performed.
Though talk about the national political climate was scarce on Sunday, a few more artists used their acceptance speeches to talk about issues close to their hearts. After winning best Latin pop album for 2024’s Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Shakira dedicated her award to her “immigrant brothers and sisters,” adding, “You are loved. You are worth it, and I will always fight with you.”
When she accepted the award for best new artist, Chappell Roan brought a notebook on stage and read a speech criticizing the common record industry practice of asking newly signed artists to work for little pay and no benefits.
“I got signed so young—I got signed as a minor—and when I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt. Like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized,” she said. “Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection.”
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