Maybe the real psyop made us think maybe he wouldn't win.
Accepting the award for pop vocal album for “Midnights” at Sunday's 66th Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift thanked the Recording Academy, thanked her fans and then announced the upcoming release of an LP that is sure to take her to the 67th Grammy Awards.
“It's called 'The Department of Tortured Poets,'” he said with a knowing chuckle, and you had to marvel at the confidence required to base the launch of a project on the assumption that your name would be inside that envelope.
Then again, did Swift really need stage time to pull off this reveal? At the end of her speech, she told the crowd that she was heading backstage to release the new album cover, an acknowledgment of the direct line she has to her 280 million Instagram followers. (Whatever number the broadcast ultimately reaches in the ratings, it won't come close to that.)
If things hadn't gone her way, perhaps she could have made her announcement next week at the Super Bowl, where she is expected to see her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, the football star involved with Swift in some sinister government plot, according to several right-wing media. wing conspiracy theorists: playing for the Kansas City Chiefs.
The point is that Swift is now bigger than the Grammys, something the Grammys know all too well. There was a sense of inevitability to Swift's triumph on Sunday, culminating in her winning album of the year for the fourth time, more than any other artist in history, including Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, with whom she had been tied. with three victories each.
Given her absolute domination of pop culture last year (due more to her career-spanning Eras tour and her successful re-recordings of her previous work than to “Midnights”), Swift arguably deserved to take home the show's most prestigious award. academy. The organization has been fighting for years to show that it is in contact with modern music. To give album of the year to anyone other than pop's biggest superstar would be to risk sending the message that nothing has been learned since the good old days, when Steely Dan beat Eminem or Herbie Hancock beat Kanye West.
However, Swift's win raises questions about what (and who) this iconic award is intended to recognize. What defines an album of the year? The Grammys have long sought to enshrine the sweet spot where creative ambition and critical acclaim overlap with commercial success and cultural impact. And sure, that sometimes means a monster like George Michael's “Faith” in 1989, Adele's “21” in 2012, or even Swift's pandemic-era “Folklore” in 2021.
“Midnights” is solid, but it doesn't live up to that standard, with only occasional flashes of Swift's storytelling genius and little to make the listener think about the art of confessional songwriting in a new way. Her Grammy anointing feels like a thoughtful response to Swift's omnipresence, the effect of which was to crowd out more impressive works, namely SZA's masterful “SOS,” a witty and bold exploration of the singer's fraught romantic life that forged new connections between R&B. , hip-hop and pop punk and found a mass audience while illuminating the singer's most intimate thoughts.
Obviously, the whole idea of an “album of the year” is a matter of taste, which is what separates the Grammys from data-driven shows like the Billboard Music Awards or the iHeartRadio Music Awards. But the historical record demonstrates a pattern of neglect to which SZA's defeat now belongs: in the six and a half decades of the Grammys, only three black women (Natalie Cole in 1992, Whitney Houston in 1993 and Lauryn Hill in 1999) have won. its most prestigious award. a discouraging statistic that clearly does not align with the reality of pop history.
Jay-Z nodded to the issue Sunday while accepting the academy's Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, invoking his wife Beyoncé's repeated defeats in the category, most recently for 2022's stunning “Renaissance,” even though He has won more Grammy Awards than any other artist. .
“Think about it: the most Grammy Awards ever won album of the year,” he said. “That does not work”.
Addressing the academy's members, he said, “We want everyone to do well, at least almost well,” that is, to reward music of great importance in categories with the appropriate scope. His advice to artists who have been marginalized in this way (recognized, as SZA was, with awards in genre categories that suggest their innovations have limited value) was to “keep showing up until you get all the praise you can get.” you feel you deserve. “
And to some extent, Sunday's ceremony confirmed the effectiveness of that approach. There was Miley Cyrus, who finally won her first two Grammy Awards (including “Flowers” being named record of the year) after years in which academy voters seemed to have her Disney Channel past against her. . There was the best new artist, Victoria Monét, comparing herself to a plant that is finally making its way in the music industry thanks to the nourishment of hard work.
Most vivid was Tracy Chapman, returning to the Grammy stage after years out of the spotlight to sing “Fast Car,” her gentle but determined anthem of self-determination, alongside Luke Combs, the country star who had a great success last year. with a version of the song from decades ago. As Chapman sang and played guitar, she seemed content, serene, almost beatific. But of course, she wasn't at the Grammys to compete.
