Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS

The morning after, here is my public entreaty to the voters of the Grammys: Please, please, please, stop doing this to Adele.

That is: If you really won’t be motivated by a deeper awareness, fairness, and responsibility for, in particular, black lives and culture, the motherlode of American popular music, arguably the major reason most of you have careers … Well, maybe you bunch of graying palefaces (from which I don’t exempt my middle-aging white self) might at least have pity on Adele and the other white artists you sometimes-justifiably love. When you over-reward them, they end up wearing the shame of your collective racial blinders. And by extension, America’s. Just as poor Adele did Sunday night, by winning.




Without that imbalance, it might not seem so obligatory for you all to be so directly political right now. Music manifestly doesn’t have to be dissident to be great music. But with that cultural skew, almost every second that it was less outspoken, the Grammys broadcast seemed like an effort to subdue and distract. Even when it was trying to do the opposite.

Consider Sunday afternoon, during the pre-show part of the Grammys that most people never see (but when the lion’s share of the awards are given). Comedian Margaret Cho, hosting, reacted to a powerful performance from the Alberta-based First Nation group Northern Cree together with Mexican singer Carla Morrison by praising the diversity of the music-industry awards: Casting side-eye on the Oscars, Cho predicted that no one ever would see the Twitter hashtag #GrammySoWhite.

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This is the Grammys’ current pattern: use black performers to draw viewers, bypass them for the main awards.

Everyone knew this year’s Grammys were a showdown between Beyoncé’s rapturously received April visual and aural album and British belter Adele’s sales record­–setting 25, from late 2015 (which through no fault of her own now feels a lifetime ago). The two were competing for Album, Record (as in singular recording), and Song (as in best songwriting) of the Year, all the high-profile prizes except Best New Artist. By putting Urban Contemporary—in which the other nominees were worthy but relatively obscure—in the live telecast, the Grammy producers were making sure Beyoncé would get a speech on TV, even in an Adele sweep. Which is the Grammys’ current pattern: use black performers to draw viewers but bypass them for the main awards.




Beyoncé knew it, too: She seized that Urban Contemporary telecast moment, still wearing her golden-sun-goddess costume from her epic multimedia performance minutes before, reading from a matching gold-embossed card, to give an address that might have been the most measured, grown-up, and thoughtful political speech in awards-show history (at least by a celebrity, not a documentary filmmaker at the Oscars):

Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to beautifully capture the profundity of deep Southern culture. We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness, and our history. To confront issues that make us uncomfortable. It’s important to me to show images to my children that reflect their beauty, so they can grow up in a world where they look in the mirror—first through their own families, as well as the news, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the White House, and the Grammys—and see themselves. And have no doubt that they’re beautiful, intelligent, and capable. This is something I want for every child of every race, and I feel it’s vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes.

And then the Grammys went on flagrantly to repeat its mistakes. Adele beat Beyoncé every time. (As a film, Lemonade even lost to a movie about the Beatles, directed by Happy Days’ Ron Howard. Because of course it did.)

This wasn’t a problem just because of racial dynamics in a moment when the new White House administration and its “alt-right” (i.e., white supremacist) supporters are dragging America back into its vilest vortices. It’s a problem because—as is almost always the case in these faceoffs—Adele’s album, as finely wrought as it is, is simply not the vital bundle of energies and innovations that Lemonade is.




Adele knew it, too. She graciously accepted her accolades until near the end of the evening. But when she got the album prize, she said, tearfully and earnestly, “I can’t possibly accept this.” Although then she did. No doubt because she didn’t know what else to do.



Adele called Beyoncé “the artist of my life” and spoke about how much Lemonade meant—especially, she unfortunately added, to “my black friends,” which only sharpened the awkwardness by invoking a rusty trope white people use to distance themselves from racism. (It was perhaps less obvious to her as a Brit than it might be to an American.)

Adele also said she wished Beyoncé could be her “mommy,” having just mentioned how hard she found it herself to be a mother and that she did not love her own dad (fairly remarkable things for an awards-show honoree to say, reminding us why people love Adele’s frankness). She was genuflecting to Beyoncé’s instantly iconic pregnancy with twins, the theme of Bey’s show-stopping, gravity-defying, mythopoeic-African-matrilineal, performance-art set of “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles” earlier in the show (touchingly introduced by her own mom, Tina Knowles). But the “mommy” line was still too presumptively intimate and invasive on Adele’s part.

Overall, despite the “Hello” singer’s well-meaningness, despite her gesture being much braver than Macklemore’s after-the-fact apology, her speech will go down as more white tone-deafness—which, for someone whose fantastic ear is her calling card, is sourly ironic.




Maybe Adele should have stepped down from the stage and handed the statuette to Beyoncé directly in her seat. But that would have been a hard, ungrateful-seeming, and, as far as I know, unprecedented act. (The closest I can recall is Marlon Brando turning down his Oscar for The Godfather in 1973 for political reasons, but he didn’t do it in person— he sent a Native American woman in his stead.) Even Kanye West, who’s so often anarchically acted as the racial subtext–exposing conscience of awards shows (including this year, by not showing up), has never done it, though he, too, has said from the stage that awards he’d won rightfully belonged to others.

So again, Grammys, please, stop putting people in these positions. Positions where Rihanna and Beyoncé smile through gritted teeth or sparkly flasks. Where Adele stumbles over herself to make amends for you. And where Frank Ocean, who put out one (or two) of last year’s most-praised releases, doesn’t even bother to submit for nomination, because he doesn’t believe you have any credibility.

How to fix it? After the furor over whitewashed nominations in 2016, the Oscars made much-needed reforms. I’m aware that the music academy makes efforts at recruiting more diverse young members, though Ocean’s stance demonstrates the barriers there. And the Grammys already do better at the nomination stage than the Oscars do. The problem is what wins. And that’s down to the demographics of the voting body, as well as the faster-changing nature of music culture.

The Oscars have decided to rule out people who haven’t produced work in a decade or more, which can help because Hollywood is such a big machine—even in the digital age, it’s dicey to make movies on your own. Not so with music. There’s already a rule that you have to have worked on a release in some capacity in the past five years. But old duffers have home studios. For the Grammys, a more ruthless approach to grandfathering-out would be necessary.

And it is necessary. Otherwise, senior citizens still will exercise a de facto veto in the big categories. The Beyoncés and Frank Oceans will go on being also-rans, and the industry’s Becks, Adeles, and Taylor Swifts will go on being tainted winners. And the Grammys’ grasp on reality, if any, will get flimsier and flimsier.