The 2024 Grammys have come and gone, and it was action-packed. It seemed like every star in existence showed up to this year’s awards. Did the winners deserve their awards though? I will be going over the top categories and their winners.
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” took home the Grammy in five different categories, those being Best Rap song, Best Rap performance, Best Rap Music Video, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. This completes one of the most historic years ever for a rap artist. Kendrick Lamar took home his 18th through 22nd Grammys last night, giving him the 3rd most by a rapper ever, and he is now only three behind Jay-Z for the top spot.
Were these Grammys deserved though? In my opinion, Kendrick did not deserve to win song of the year. I believe that Birds of a Feather deserved to win this award. While Not Like Us was one of the biggest hits of the summer, its sphere of influence was smaller than Birds of a Feather, which was the most streamed song of the year, with over 1.7 Billion listens, while Not Like Us has only just recently eclipsed One Billion. With a gap in streams that large, the committee messed up on this one. While the committee is working on diversity and including more people of color, gender, and culture, it is still not a perfect system. The number of streams a song has should be one of the most important factors in a song. It is not however, and the opinion of 13,000 voters eclipsed the hundreds of millions of people who believed this song should win.
However, song of the year was not even the biggest robbery of the night. The Album of The Year award, the most coveted award at the show, and the final award given that night was also controversial. With eight albums nominated, realistically, four stood out as clearly better than any other album released this year, and all four of these albums deserved to win the award. These four were Short n’ Sweet, by Sabrina Carpenter, which sounds exactly like the title, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, by Chappell Roan, a story of her journey to a chance at stardom as a singer. The other two were brat by Charli XCX, a electric dance-pop album with party song after party song, and the final album was Hit me Hard and Soft, by Billie Eilish, which she tells about all the weird, and confusing parts about herself.
None of these amazing albums won. Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter won the award, which I didn’t even know existed until Taylor Swift handed her the award for best country album. Why did this win? With pop music being at an all-time high, and four amazing pop albums being nominated, why did the only country album win? There was a reason five of the eight albums nominated were of the pop genre.
According to Billboard, Cowboy Carter had “archival ambition, depth of research, courage, experimentation, soul,”
Apparently, none of the other albums had those aspects.
This is just wrong. Both Birds of a Feather and Brat had all of these features and had more than one good song. Eilish continues to be one of the only artists making emo-pop music at this large of a scale, she continues to tell more and more about herself, talked about the vulnerable parts of herself. All these aspects are more prevalent in Eilish’s song “Lunch” than Beyonce’s entire album.
The Grammys need a rework. Why do only a certain group of people get to vote on what is the best music? I probably listened to more music last year than most of these voters did. I think that everyone should have a chance to vote on what they think is the best. Maybe some people should have more voting power than others. At its core, the Grammys is a popularity contest. Why should the population not vote on it?
