Jay-Z criticized the Grammys for never having given Beyoncé an album of the year award wasn’t the most important thing he said on stage.
Jay-Z criticizing the Grammys for never giving his wife, Beyoncé, the coveted album of the year award, was what most people will remember about his time on stage Sunday night. (Jay-Z was accepting his award for winning the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award.) “She has more Grammys than everyone and never won album of the year,” he said. “So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work. Think about that. The most Grammys, never won album of the year. That doesn’t work.”
But to focus exclusively on Jay-Z’s belief that his wife has been snubbed is to miss a far more important point about the Grammys, other awards shows and the music and entertainment industry as a whole.
“Some of you are going to go home tonight and feel like you’ve been robbed,” he said. “Some of you may get robbed. Some of you don’t belong in the category.”
I don’t know if Jay-Z planned to say that. “When I get nervous, I tell the truth,” he said. Whatever his intentions were, though, he indirectly called attention to a big reason awards show such as the Grammys will always leave many artists — particularly Black ones — embittered: The awards are based on the fallacy that music should be categorized. And it’s hard, if not impossible, to categorize music in a way that doesn’t make tired assumptions about the people recording it or the people presumed to be listening to it.
The absurdity of categorizing music was impressed upon me by the late composer and producer Harold Battiste, who, among other things, played with Ellis Marsalis and behind Ike and Tina Turner, arranged Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and helped launch Dr.
