"Win Y'all Hearts Before I Win a Grammy": Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Grammy Wins
Well, it was what we thought it was. The 2014 Grammy Awards came and went, with the same frustration and disappointment that seems to follow the milestone award ceremony year-to-year. After a run-up to the show that included the judges for Hip-Hop suggesting that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis not be included in the rap category for their album, The Heist, which eventually stayed put, winning that and sweeping the rap category. A lot else happened at this year's Grammys, but this may have been the biggest robbery since Naughty By Nature's Poverty's Paradise beat out 2pac's Me Against The World in 1996, the first year the title was a part of the festivities. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis deserve a ton of credit, and they certainly received it last night, but The Heist was not the best rap album of the year by any stretch. To be fair, Kendrick's Good Kid, m.A.A.d City should have been last year's Rap Album of the Year, having been released in October of 2012, but nonetheless was the most powerful album on the list by far.
Last night Macklemore & Ryan Lewis very well may have realized both the best and possibly most damaging moment of their careers. A lot was written about 'white privilege' in hip-hop and the Grammys at large and the inevitability of the Seattle rapper walking away with the golden gramophone. To be fair, The Heist deserves accolades, but different ones. It is a huge independent success that has laid a road for artists like Chance The Rapper to keep from signing, and furthered the ability of an artist to create music creatively and find an outlet, but even he knew what would happen if the Grammy voters were as un-inventive as ever, choosing him for every award available. In an interview with The Source Macklemore said: "“We’re up against Kendrick, who made a phenomenal album. If we win a Grammy for Best Rap Album, hip-hop is going to be heated. In terms of [that category], I think it should go to Kendrick. He’s family. TDE is family, and I understand why hip-hop would feel like Kendrick got robbed [if he didn’t win]."
One thing is for sure; Kendrick got robbed. No one in the building or watching on TV last night can dispute that, but at least they got it wrong with the right guy. With a message behind his music that saw 33 gay marriages happen live onstage, Macklemore allowed an optimistic spirit in a year when we crept to the edge of the fiscal cliff several times while battling each other over petty social issues seemingly on the daily. The hip-hop game needed a breath of fresh air and got it in Kendrick Lamar, but the greater world needed a breath of fresh air from day-to-day life, and that's what Macklemore & Ryan Lewis provided. On his 2009 mixtape, The Kendrick Lamar EP, K Dot rhymes, "See y'all don't understand me/My plan B is to win y'all hearts before I win a Grammy." With those bars in mind, perhaps no one understands Kendrick's loss better than him.
Macklemore's text to Kendrick afterwards.
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Grading the Grammy Nominations
As the music industry has evolved over the past decade into the digital world, things have changed quite a bit. Hard copies are hardly ever bought anymore, nor does anyone seem to buy whole albums at all, as the iTunes Store model has taken over and the industry has increasingly become about what the consumer wants as opposed to what the labels want the listeners to hear. While this has resulted in a sort of musical reawakening, creating a culture where listeners can stream, download or play any track they can think of with the touch of a button, music has expanded at a rapid pace, creating new genres and sub-genres and infinite new off-shoots that don't fit cleanly into any one established genre or sound.
Standing behind this industry, bearing the largest prize of all, is the Grammy Awards. This year, the award show enters its 56th installment and, while a dance music category was finally introduced last year, the judging seems more out of touch than ever, but of course this has been an issue for some time. The Grammys are like Social Security. You don't really care about it much until you're too old to get up from the sofa. Generations have rallied against the award for years. In 1991 Sinead O'Connor simply refused to show up and boycotted the show, despite being nominated in four categories. After winning "Best Hard Rock Performance" in 1998, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder stood onstage perplexed and, staring at the golden trophy, said into the microphone, "I don't know what this means. I don't think it means anything." It's not news that the team behind the Grammy Awards has been out of touch for some time, but at no time in history has it been so blatantly about the money in an industry that today makes significantly less money than it used to. It's macroeconomics of the current American condition played out with celebrities and gold gramophone statues. Plus, Kanye already spoke out. So, for this latest round of Grammy nominations, I figured I would sift through who was chosen and offer up my own choices for the top prizes in music this year.