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The Grammys are bullshit. The artists know it, the critics know it, and the viewers know it. By Monday morning, there were already tons of reviews discussing how bad the show was. This year wasn’t an exception in Grammys history — musicians and fans have criticized the Grammys for being out of touch for years and years — but Sunday night’s ceremony made it clearer than ever that they are irrelevant and, one more time, bullshit.

Let’s start with Adele, who took home three of the “big four” trophies (Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year) plus Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album. Adele is fine. Adele is talented. But who in their right mind thinks 25 is a better album than Lemonade? It is an album of breakup songs that sound like every other breakup song Adele has ever done. She sings them beautifully, of course, but the farthest she pushed herself on 25 was getting Max Martin to make her an almost-dance track with “Send My Love (To Your New Lover).” And that’s not even the song that won! By contrast, Lemonade covers everything from country to gospel to rock, shows Beyoncé pushing herself artistically and politically, and makes a clear statement about being a black woman in America. What is the statement of 25? Love sucks?

But Adele, who broke her Grammy in half because even she knew Beyoncé deserved to win it, is not to blame here — the Recording Academy is. CBS didn’t show this one on TV, but Beyoncé also lost Best Music Film to Ron Howard for his Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week. I haven’t seen it, but I don’t need to see it to know that a movie about four white guys whose last album came out in 1970 has nowhere near the cultural relevance that Lemonade does. Even my boyfriend, a Beatles stan since birth, rejected my offer to watch it with him because he was sure it was “nothing I haven’t seen before.” And this lost to Lemonade? Then there’s “Daddy Lessons,” which the Recording Academy rejected as a country submission, yet during Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood’s “country” performance, you could find plenty of people wondering what exactly made their notably twang-less song country. How did that count as country when "Daddy Lessons" didn't?

This isn’t the first year the Grammys have done Beyoncé wrong either — it’s just the most egregious. Back in 2015, she lost Album of the Year to Beck for Morning Phase. Again, Beck is fine. But Morning Phase is a nothing album in the history of his formidable career, whereas BEYONCÉ was arguably the album that launched Beyoncé into the untouchable stratosphere she now occupies. Beyoncé herself might even have suspected she was going to lose this year, because she gave her excellent prepared speech while accepting the trophy for Best Urban Contemporary Album, which has only existed since 2013 and at this point seems like the consolation prize for artists who would have won Album of the Year if they happened to be white. (Frank Ocean, noted Grammy boycotter, won the first one for Channel Orange.)

It’s also not like Beyoncé is the only victim of the Grammys’ insane voters, who are either deaf, racist, or both. Academy members can only vote in 15 categories for the various genre awards (and are encouraged to only vote in areas in which they have expertise), but everyone is allowed to vote for the "general" big four. This goes a long way to explaining why extremely popular albums tend to dominate, despite the fact that the Grammys aren't supposed to be about sales. Last year, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (324,000 copies sold in its first week) lost Album of the Year to Taylor Swift’s 1989 (1.287 million copies sold in its first week). As is the case with 25, 1989 isn’t bad, but it does not even come close to matching the level of ambition and boundary-pushing displayed on TPAB.

Best New Artist alone is one of the craziest categories in the Grammys. Chance the Rapper winning it was one of the best things to happen on Sunday, but then you remember that (1) his first mixtape came out five years ago and (2) there was a real possibility he could have lost to the objectively terrible Chainsmokers. When the Grammys gets this one wrong, they really get it wrong. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis famously beat Kendrick for Best New Artist in 2014, which led to the awkward public text exchange where Macklemore admitted he knew Kendrick deserved the award yet did not actually give it to him. Kanye West lost to national scourge Maroon 5 in 2005, Erykah Badu and Fiona Apple lost to Paula Cole in 1998, and in 1996, Brandy, Alanis Morissette, and Shania Twain all lost to — wait for it — Hootie and the Blowfish. Please, Grammy voters, tell me what drugs you’re doing, because I think they might make my nightly MSNBC-induced panic attacks more enjoyable.

The rebuttal to all this is that the Grammys don’t matter, so who wins is not important. But they do matter, in a very tangible sense. Record sales go up when an artist wins. Adele sold 730,000 additional copies of 21 after it picked up six awards at the 2012 Grammys, more than a year after it debuted. This doesn’t make much of a difference for someone like Beyoncé, but it might have for Sturgill Simpson, the only not-quite-household name nominated for Album of the Year. The Grammys also represent, for better or worse, a stamp of approval from peers in the industry, and while that may change as young artists like Frank Ocean call them out, for now they remain the most “legitimate” music award.

The Oscars faced similar backlash last year when there were no nonwhite nominees in any of the acting categories, and after a public outcry, the Academy added more nonwhite and women voters to their ranks. This year, the Oscars are not as white, but they still have a long way to go, and despite the progress the Academy made this year, you can bet they’ll still give everything to La La Land. If the Grammys want to remain relevant and (marginally) respected, they’ll have to take similar action. They probably won’t though, in which case the only solution is for more artists to copy Frank Ocean and refuse to perform or submit their music for consideration. Without the music, they have nothing.

Also, they don't even put the performances on YouTube after the show. It's 2017, grandma!

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Eliza Thompson senior entertainment editor I’m the senior entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan.com, which means my DVR is always 98 percent full.

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