2009: Taylor Swift's music video for "You Belong With Me" beats out Beyoncé's video for "Single Ladies" in MTV's Best Female Video category, prompting the infamous #Kanyegate
2014: Macklemore wins best rap performance, best rap song and best rap album over Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Kanye West
2014: Iggy Azalea's The New Classic is the highest charting debut album by a female rapper since Nicki Minaj's 2010 debut
2015: Beck's Morning Phase beats Beyonce's Beyonce for album of the year
2015: Eminem wins best rap album for the 6th time, setting the record for the most number of wins in the category (Kanye West comes in second, with four wins)
2015: Taylor Swift music video for "Blank Space" beats out Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj in the MTV's Best Female Video category
2016: Taylor Swift’s beats Kendrick Lamar’s for album of the year1989 To Pimp a Butterfly
2017: Adele's 25 beats Beyonce's Lemonade for album of the year
"In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure [...] Black and white musicians continued to trade, borrow, and steal from one another, but white artists typically made more money and received more acclaim".
Sasha Frere-Jones, "A Paler Shade of White"
You must have read some of the many think-pieces that dissected Adele's domination of the 2017 Grammys, as well as her personal tribute to Beyonce upon accepting the coveted album of the year award. You probably heard of Solange's instinctive outrage, and sadly realized that Frank Ocean had a strong case for declining to submit his albums for consideration at the Grammys all along:
"I’VE ACTUALLY BEEN TUNING INTO CBS AROUND THIS TIME OF YEAR FOR A WHILE TO SEE WHO GETS THE TOP HONOR AND YOU KNOW WHAT’S REALLY NOT 'GREAT TV’ GUYS? 1989 GETTING ALBUM OF THE YEAR OVER TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY. HANDS DOWN ONE OF THE MOST 'FAULTY’ TV MOMENTS I’VE SEEN. BELIEVE THE PEOPLE. BELIEVE THE ONES WHO’D RATHER WATCH SELECT PERFORMANCES FROM YOUR PROGRAM ON YOUTUBE THE DAY AFTER BECAUSE YOUR SHOW PUTS THEM TO SLEEP. USE THE OLD GRAMOPHONE TO ACTUALLY LISTEN BRO, I’M ONE OF THE BEST ALIVE. AND IF YOU’RE UP FOR A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE CULTURAL BIAS AND GENERAL NERVE DAMAGE THE SHOW YOU PRODUCE SUFFERS FROM THEN I’M ALL FOR IT. HAVE A GOOD NIGHT".
Frank Ocean, Tumblr
Music and athletics are two industries where African Americans have demonstrated their talents, ingenuity and sheer hard work most prominently, with Michael Jackson's phenomenal success paving the way for other black artists - Prince, Whitney Houston, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Pharell Williams, Rihanna, Kanye West, The Weeknd, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Beyonce, Nicki Minaj etc - to aspire to similarly stratospheric commercial and critical acclaim. And yet, even the most acclaimed African American artists have to contend with a frustratingly unbreakable black ceiling, which only points to the greater barriers that the community faces in other parts of American life, where great barriers to entry persist. The relative lack of diversity in the voting members of the Recording Academy is indicative of institutional racism, while their history of voting hints at implicit personal racism, a bias for Eurocentric ideas of art, and a long history of viewing individuals of African descent as being less human, less equal, and less deserving of recognition.
What do we want the future to sound like? Innovation in popular music rests on contradictory appeals of familiarity and newness. To consistently opt for the familiar, retro-gazing aesthetics that Adele and Taylor Swift draw upon hints at a collective general nostalgia for the past - when an African American president was an impossibility, when terms like 'privilege', 'intersectionality' and 'political correctness' had not been invented by academics, when American cultural citizenship was unquestionably predicated on assimilation into mainstream whiteness, when pop stars did not explicitly stand as advocates for feminism, LGBT rights or racial equality, when black artists consciously catered their musical output to white taste.
Grammys or not, it is heartening to see that African American artists, like Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, are insisting on making art that puts black people first. As Chris Rock eloquently pointed out, "Black stardom is rough, dude. I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you’re a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?”
Frank Ocean's Blonde (2016) may not be as overt about racial politics as Beyonce's "Formation", Solange's A Seat at the Table (2016), or Blood Orange's Freetown Sound(2016), but this is because his brand of minimalist avant-garde R&B revolves around profound lo-fi confessionalism instead of the storied tradition of crowd-rousing protest music. In "Nikes", the only single on the album, Ocean establishes a poignant identification with the Black Lives Matter movement in a single, devastating line: 'RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me'.
Ocean's distorted vocals (pitched up to an eerie chipmunk falsetto) dominate the beginning of the song as he dwells on gold diggers, materialism, hedonism, sex, sexual and gender ambiguity, intimacy, loneliness, the process of growing up, a love triangle, Shakespeare, Amber Rose, basketball references and religion. The song lacks a chorus, and no hooks are repeated - but the propulsive beats and the mystery in the drum pads and acoustic guitar strings in the background keep you listening. "Nikes" comes across as a drug-fuelled mind trip, and a confession that would not seem out of place on Tumblr or the confession booth. When Ocean's undistorted voice appears on the second verse, his lines (which are repeated thrice) sound like a convincing premonition that we have all been waiting for:
'We'll let you guys prophesyWe’ll let you guys prophesyWe gon' see the future firstWe'll let you guys prophesyWe gon' see the future firstLiving so the last night feels like a past lifeSpeaking of the, don’t know what got into peopleDevil be possessin' homiesDemons try to body jumpWhy you think I'm in this bitch wearing a fucking Yarmulke?Acid on me like the rainWeed crumbles into glitterRain, glitter'
Lyrics: Genius
Most critics have signed up for the future that Ocean predicts. Pitchfork listed 3 tracks from Blonde in its list of the 100 best songs of 2016: "Nikes" (no. 25), "Pink + White" (no. 13) and "Ivy" (no. 4). The Grammys and Ocean may not need each other to survive, but the failure to graciously provide seats at music's most prestigious table for black geniuses like Ocean will always be a missed opportunity, and a slap in the face to the ideal of meritocracy.
