The Grammys Have One Job—and This Year They Actually Did It

Among the various creative maxims offered by Brian Eno in his deck of Oblique Strategies cards, my favorite has got to be: “The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.” I was thinking about that last night as the Grammys finally ended, and Beyoncé won Album of the Year for the first time. The Recording Academy surely hadn’t forgotten Beyoncé, the most awarded artist in Grammys history, but year after year, they relegated her victories to the genre categories, and instead picked winners like Taylor Swift, Adele, Billie Eilish, and late-career Beck. Those artists’ oft-sheepish acceptance speeches became a genre unto themselves—how many white people would apologize to Beyoncé for winning AOTY, before she won one herself? 

Meanwhile, Beyoncé has spent the last dozen years embracing the album format, using each project to tell a specific story or experiment within a different genre (and reclaim it in the name of Black musicians). Isn’t that the whole point of AOTY? The situation represented the thing forgotten, or put a different way: The Grammy Awards have one job, and that’s to separate the wheat from the chaff within the most commercial parts of the music industry. Their objective is to determine which wildly popular work has the most artistic value. Yet there’s often some kind of bias, whether racially or towards an out-of-touch sensibility (call it major-label brain rot). 

Over the last few years, however, the Grammys have been on a quest to publicly right their wrongs. For one, they’ve added thousands of new voting members, many of them young, female, and racially diverse. Harvey Mason Jr., the Recording Academy CEO since 2021, said as much on stage Sunday night, in a “we here for you”-esque introduction of a performance by certified Grammy hater the Weeknd. The 2025 ceremony could be considered a culmination of these corrective efforts, with the Big Four awards going to Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar (Song and Record of the Year for “Not Like Us”), and Chappell Roan (Best New Artist). Whatever your taste is, if you paid attention to the cultural zeitgeist last year, you can see how that could be considered Correct. And it’s even kind of fun: Kendrick Lamar, winkingly dressed in a Canadian tuxedo, getting the gold for one of the most reputation-ethering diss tracks ever. 

Other accolades that were simply Correct: Doechii winning Rap Album of the Year, the third time a woman has ever done so, and the first time we’ve seen an unabashedly queer woman take home the trophy. Charli XCX finally getting something—even if it was just in the dance-music and art direction categories—and trashing the stage, Brat-style, during her closing set. Sabrina Carpenter nabbing Best Pop Vocal Album (she may not be my cup of espresso, but this makes far more sense than half the other nominees). Cowboy Carter marking the first time a Black person has won Best Country Album, ever. Taylor Swift winning nothing (!) and having a great time anyway—she even cheers’ed Jay-Z while Beyoncé accepted AOTY, as if to say, It’s about damn time. 

There was something about the telecast that felt like triage, as well. Many Grammy parties were cancelled due to the wildfires that ravaged entire neighborhoods in L.A. last month, and at first people weren’t sure if the ceremony was going to move forward as scheduled. Instead, the show’s producers turned it into a telethon for wildfire relief efforts—via onscreen QR codes and constant needling from cheesemaster Trevor Noah—and raised upwards of $7 million. They highlighted local businesses that lost everything and honored L.A. firefighters. I could have done without the cross-genre all-star mega-jam of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” to open the show, but maybe that’s because it felt too throwback—a real “Grammy moment,” as they’d say in the Neil Portnow/Ken Ehrlich days.  

Award shows are always a strange beast in times of political turmoil, trying to strike a balance of forced fun and obligatory meaning behind it all. Was I annoyed that it took three hours for someone—anyone—to acknowledge the frightening attacks on trans lives? (Gaga: always good for wearing a weird outfit, belting her face off, and shouting out the queers.) Or that Trevor Noah joked crassly about “illegal immigrants”? (Doechii hit ’em with the eyeroll, at least.) Sure, but the fact that the ceremony was trying to provide materially (not just symbolically) for wildfire victims made whatever wasn’t said feel less glaring. 

That said, Chappell Roan used her time at the podium in the most perfect way: by asking the major labels to treat their artists as employees and provide them with health insurance. She summed it up simply: “Labels, we got you, but do you got us?” This is personal to Roan, who was dropped by Atlantic Records as a developing artist, before hitting it big years later with Island. Maybe this line of thinking will lead to material change for still-emergent musicians signed to the majors, whose path to joining a union is often obscured (there are routes, like SAG-AFTRA). Maybe it’s a sign of where the industry is headed as far as young artists’ tolerance for being fucked over. But Roan’s speech shocked me in its straightforwardness, that no one had ever said this specific, obvious thing—which gets at so many bigger problems in the field and in our country—while standing in front of the most powerful figures in the music industry. Sometimes, just being Correct is enough.