Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid boundaries that constitute any category in our society, racial or otherwise. Looking at the past decade of winners in the chart provided, are we really to believe not a single black person made contributions to Grammy-winning rock or pop music yet won in Urban/R&B every single year?
A reconceptualization of award categories for music genres at the Grammy’s is obviously in order. Sociologist Stuart Hall conceptualizes “new ethnicities” by arguing that there is no one single black subject or experience that is constructed by nature or any other essential force, and because of this, “it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically.” This is ethnicity: a non-coercive, diverse understanding that “we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture.” Understanding “new genres,” if you will, easily follows: there is no one “black music,” and all artists, black or otherwise, are operating from a particular place, history, and experience that does not necessarily bound them to any one genre. While R&B and rap have their roots in black culture, they are not the only genres in which black artists operate. One only needs to look at bands like Living Colour or Meet Me @ the Altar to find black artists rocking outside of these genres and blurring categories across them.
Of course, a music award show needs categories, and I am certainly not arguing for a complete explosion of the award show system. I am, however, arguing that we need to expand our understanding of music genres and who goes where; we must take where an artist is speaking from on each individual album rather than speak for them to contain them into categories that essentialize their work based on their race or ethnicity. Although artists are free to submit their album to multiple genres, the final say lays in the hands of the Grammy’s voting committees and members. My call is for these voters to expand their understanding of what constitutes these genres and who is representative of them. While we’ve broken down the monolith that is urban music, at least in labeling genres, we must now reconceptualize what these genres represent and who represents them. Music genres, much like ethnicity, are not stable, static categories: they are always influenced by other genres and people as they move through time.
Furthermore, opening these categories pushes dominant genres like pop and rock to expand their boundaries and include more artists who see themselves as working within these genres. If we continue to have rigid definitions of what counts as pop/rock and what falls outside of it, we only continue to highlight the same voices and people repeatedly, and those who fail to meet the qualifying boxes are continuously left out or relegated to “other” categories which receive significantly less fanfare. While this is arguably a non-issue for people outside of media industries, this is reflective of larger issues in our society: if you do not fit into the categories already laid out for you or want to blur boundaries, there is little to no room for movement. Even if you are the best at what you do, if you are not easily categorizable or push back against the category you are placed in, you are left with no rewards while those who play the game reap them in. If we allow artists to speak for themselves in terms of genre rather than place them in static categories based on assumptions, we all may just find that the categories we are bound by in our lives loosen up.
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