Among the most ridiculous assertions one can make is that the “wrong artist” won a Grammy Award. Make no mistake, it’s a ridiculous assertion I make almost every year, but one need only take even a cursory glance at the wide range of nominees for album of the year to understand that you’re usually comparing rutabagas to Volvos.

Of the five, I felt three had an arguable case for winning: "Sound & Color" by Alabama Shakes, "To Pimp a Butterfly" by Kendrick Lamar and "Traveller" by Chris Stapleton. The other two — eventual winner "1989" by Taylor Swift and "Beauty Behind the Madness" by The Weeknd — are perfectly fine albums, but not really in the other three’s league on any artistic or technical level. Swift’s record sales are hard to deny, though, considering she spent the last year keeping the record industry alive. Why "Madness" wasn’t jettisoned for D'Angelo and the Vanguard’s “Black Messiah” — which did thankfully win best R&B album — is a mystery to me, but there you are. The Grammys is a beast that will never please everyone. That it ever pleases anyone is kind of remarkable.

And yet, we try to make it feel like it’s all one, big happy musical world, don’t we. And sometimes we succeed. One suspects there aren’t a whole lot of teenage music fans who knew who Jackson Browne was as he joined the surviving members of the Eagles on stage for a rendition of “Take it Easy,” which he co-wrote with the late Glenn Frey, but one imagines the tenderness in that moment translated. Even Lady Gaga’s technically proficient-but-choppy salute to David Bowie felt like it bridged groups of fans, even if one would have preferred she’d simply limited herself to one or two of his songs, instead of the Vegas-style medley which limited both her ability to put an individual take on anything or develop any emotional resonance.

And then there’s Kendrick Lamar’s performance of his songs "The Blacker the Berry" and “Alright,” from “To Pimp a Butterfly.”

The performance itself starts with an image of mass incarceration, Lamar and his dancers entering in a prison chain gang. The band performs from behind steel bars.

“I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” raps Lamar, punctuated by gunfire drum beats, each one more electrifying than the last, “Once I finish this, if you listen, I’m sure you will agree/I’ve been feeling this way since I was 16/Come to my senses/you never liked us anyway … your plan is to exterminate my culture.”

It was an overtly political performance, made in overtly political times, as racially charged as the issues haunting the evening news, every inch of it arresting viewing. Lamar is as tremendous a performer as he is a songwriter, and as the scene on the stage transitioned from the jailhouse setting to dancers in African dress in front of a bonfire, as he weaved textual elements of jazz and hip-hop into something unique, it was clear we were watching a piece of art, and not mere entertainment. But then, I’ve never quite liked the word “entertainment” as a term of division, as though something of substance couldn’t be entertaining, and something utterly light couldn’t be brilliant. But the point is, what Lamar put on that stage was so viscerally packed with emotional content and so technically accomplished that it eclipsed just about everything else. This is not merely a matter of taste. Love it or hate it, the power of that performance was an indelible fact.

Not that it seems to be receiving much visible hate, although surely the song’s stark racial politics unnerved some. No, the morning after it was greeted with headlines such as CNN, declaring that he “won the Grammys.” Still, I find it hard to believe that such an aggressive, political piece isn’t facing much backlash as of this writing, no matter how brilliant I think it was. We are, after all, only a little more than a week since Beyoncé seemingly turned the world upside down with her performance of her song “Formation” during the Super Bowl Halftime Show.



The performance, which famously featured dancers dressed in a manner reminiscent of Black Panthers, actually isn’t anywhere near as overtly political as Lamar’s, and indeed, it comes sandwiched between verses of Bruno Mars singing “Uptown Funk,” which mitigates how threatening something can be perceived. Not even the whole song is sung, just a handful of lyrics: “Earned all this money/but they never take the country out me/I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag.”

Now, the actual music video for the song, released shortly before the Super Bowl, is far more overtly political, featuring references to Katrina and police violence against African-Americans. The most powerful image from the video is a phalanx of armed police officers lined up in front of a black child, and the officers putting their hands on their heads as if to say, “Don’t shoot.”



There are numerous reasons why one performance is being judged more harshly than the other (especially when, to my mind, they were both masterful.) It’s nothing new that female artists are almost always lashed at more savagely when critiqued, and Beyoncé, who is not often overtly political, might have been seen as “safe” to audiences that would be threatened by that sort of message, whereas it’s more expected from Lamar. Perhaps it’s simply that more conservative audiences watch the Super Bowl than the Grammy Awards. Maybe it’s just that the people threatened by this sort of artistic statement find Beyoncé scarier than Lamar.

I’m not at all certain, but it almost all seems beside the point. Merely critiquing or arguing the politics of artistic statements of works such as “To Pimp a Butterfly" or “Formation” (particularly the video) is a fool’s game, and debases the works’ importance. It’s inane to argue whether the anger and pain that they paint so expertly is real or not. It clearly is, and works such as these give us an opportunity to engage with that pain and anger, to come to understand it. Work like this is a gift, and it should be treated as such. It’s there to be listened to. If possible, it’s there to be listened to again and again, no matter how painful that action is, until the message the artist is trying to convey is understood. Whether or not you reject the message or, indeed, the artwork is irrelevant. This is art that is not disposable, and perhaps that’s what scares some people most.

But in any case, there’s one thing I know for certain, no matter how ridiculous it is to say. “To Pimp a Butterfly” should have been album of the year.



Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.