Rap It Up

The Grammy Awards nominations just came out, and white male artists were shut out of Album of the Year, which shocked a lot of people. 

Quite frankly, I don't know why anyone was so surprised by the fact that none of us honkies got nominated for Album of the Year.  The truth of the matter is, white men in popular music have been marginalized by mass taste, and the Grammys are trying to reflect mass taste.  It doesn't matter if a white man makes a superior album (and today's fans and critics will tell you that he can't).  Today's pop audience likes music that makes you want to dance, and we white men aren't good at that sort of thing. We're good at making music you can play air guitar to, or writing boring artistic songs (as Britney Spears would put it) about the meaning of life.  But today's pop audience wants nothing to do with that.  And unless one of us is a cute guy named Justin, they want nothing to do with us.  I don't know how Ed Sheeran got anywhere.

The 2018 nominees for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences' most prestigious award include Melodrama by New Zealandic singer Lorde and 24K Magic by Bruno Mars.  If either one of those LPs wins, I'll have no problem with that.

But here's the problem I do have: The other nominees are rap albums - Childish Gambino's Awaken, My Love!, Kendrick Lamar's DAMN and . . . 4:44 by Beyoncé 's husband, Mr. Shawn Carter.

The preponderance of rap records in the Album of the Year Grammy nominations for 2018 is nothing short of a calculated insult.  Never mind race or sex here.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has not only embraced rap with fervor, it's also told us rock fans that our music doesn't matter.  It's also telling us to get over the fact that rap is the dominant form in pop today and deal with it.  We can complain all we want that rap isn't real music, but we're going to be told to keep our damn traps shut because we're obviously racist.  

One guy on Twitter pretty much set the tone of the attack on anyone who dares to suggest that rap isn't music. "White racists are shook that no white men got nominated for AOTY [Album of the Year] at the Grammys this year. They have the nerve to ask how 4:44 was nominated. How was Beck nominated? How did he win AOTY over Beyoncé?"

How was Beck nominated for Morning Phase back in 2015?  How did he win the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy over Beyoncé?  Maybe it was simply a better album, you twit.  I'll wager that Morning Phase is even better than 4:44 because Beck uses real instruments and actually sings his lyrics.  And to respond to the inevitable point that Beck uses electronics and rap verse in some of his songs . . .  yes, and those are my least favorite Beck songs.  The only thing more painful than listening to a black rapper is listening to a white rocker trying to rap.

I can't deal with people like this anymore.  I am sick of seeing dislike for rap always being explained as a racist rather than an aesthetic issue, and I'm tired of seeing rock acts dismissed and written off for being anachronistic and antiquated.  (One online article I recently read made fun of the current crop of rock bands by talking about how lame they are.  I almost threw a garbage can at the desktop monitor!)  The asinine political correctness in popular music that celebrates rap as a shining, innovative example of America's rich musical "diversity" and the dismissal of complaints about rap as some sort of bigoted "rockism" is unnecessary, misguided, exclusionary, and unbearable.  And if NARAS is going to celebrate rap as music while diminishing rock, then, as far as I'm concerned, they're as wrong to celebrate rap as they usually are when they award the Best New Artist Grammy - an award that has gone to folks like Debby Boone, A Taste of Honey, Milli Vanilli, and, of course, Chance the Rapper.

Oh yeah, Beyoncé's husband got eight Grammy nominations in all this time.  He's bound to go home from the Grammys with something.

In many ways, this is a victory for Kanye West, who's known for sticking up for Beyoncé on her behalf and for hip-hop/R&B in general.  After he interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 when she won an award he thought should have gone to Beyoncé, he was dissed for being a jerk because he interrupted a woman, and Beyoncé herself took the stage with Swift to show that there were no hard feelings.  But when West interrupted Beck's Grammy acceptance speech by momentarily getting onstage with him, Beyoncé and her husband were laughing and applauding wildly in response to the gesture. Although West apologized after charging that Beck was not a real artist, he got what he wanted.  Rock music, whether it's alternative rock performed by a white guy like Beck or traditional rock performed by a black guy like Gary Clark, Jr., is no longer thought of as artistically or culturally relevant.  Kanye doesn't just want rock to fall by the wayside, he wants to push it there!

There may be a new alternative-rock station in New York City, but it's merely one battle won in a war that continues to be waged.