When British torch singer Adele won five Grammy Awards – pretty much sweeping every category she was nominated for – her fans were thrilled. A more vocal group of fans, though, weren't so happy. The passionate devotees of Beyoncé, who was also nominated in those categories, felt strongly that their queen had been rudely snubbed. Even many critics agreed that Beyoncé's 2016 offering, her dazzling multimedia Formation, was a greater artistic and musical achievement than Adele's safe and predictable 25.
The Adele detractors may have a point – and it’s the height of recklessness to get in the middle of Adele fans and Beyoncé fans as they duke it out – but the history of the Grammy Awards suggests that choosing the wrong artist to celebrate is something of a tradition.
Each year, the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences – which is about as silly and pompous a name as can be imagined for an outfit that once gave an award to song called Boogie Oogie Oogie – hands out statuettes to honour recorded music in a blizzard of genres. There are awards in almost 80 categories, and thankfully many of these are dispensed with in a smaller (and cheaper) ceremony held a few days before the splashy show business spectacle where Adele walked away with an armload of tributes.
The categories she was nominated in – Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Vocal album – all sound like they should actually be one award. Music industry insiders, naturally, can explain to an outsider how to make a distinction between, say, Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, but to the rest of us it all sounds suspiciously like a lot of invented ways to make sure that everyone walks away with some gold-plated hardware. The Grammys often feel like a very expensive and indulgent school, where cosseted pupils are spoiled with praise and guaranteed to win prizes.
What often happens, though, is that one artist runs the table and collects all of the prizes. Years ago, when the competitors were – just to pick two out of the past – the Captain and Tenille (nominated for Love Will Keep Us Together) and Barry Manilow (nominated for Mandy), it was hard to get too upset either way. When Andy Gibb, Foreigner and Shaun Cassidy were battling it out for 1977's Best New Artist award, it would have been churlish – not to mention silly – to fly into outrage when the award went to Debby Boone instead.
Unlike winning an Emmy or Oscar, which often launch the recipient into higher levels of fame and riches, winning a Grammy can end a career. When German fake artists Milli Vanilli won their 1990 statue, all it did was encourage a lot of unpleasant scrutiny, which resulted in the revelation that the two lead singers weren’t actually singers.
They were just two guys who danced around and pretended to sing, which apparently isn't enough of an artistic contribution to deserve celebration. (Again, seems kind of snooty for a group that honoured a song called Who Let the Dogs Out? by a never-heard-from-again group called The Baha Men.)
When the Starland Vocal Band won the Best Vocal Arrangement award in the 1977 Grammy for a particularly awful song titled Afternoon Delight, they beat out Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. The band felt crushed by the expectations for their next effort by their audience and the press and unable to deliver anything as compelling as Afternoon Delight, they languished for a few years and eventually disbanded. Queen, you may recall, went on to a cascade of hit records. But Queen, despite several nominations, never garnered a Grammy statuette.
In other words, the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is spectacularly fallible. Winning a Grammy ain’t all that.
Despite the chequered history of Grammy oversights, slights and misjudgements, Beyoncé fans took to Twitter and other social media to register their anger at their queen's humiliation at the hands of Adele. The day after the awards saw a flood of overthought think pieces and overlong longform essays about what it means that Beyoncé lost out to Adele. Some suggested that the clearly political themes and statements that ran through Beyoncé's Formation turned off the more staid and middle-of-the-road members of the recording academy. Others surmised that in the reactionary age of Donald Trump, the Grammy voters preferred a more traditional, and less ethnic, headliner. Lost in all of the debate: Beyoncé already has 22 Grammys, not to mention nearly US$1 billion. She'll survive this terrible trial.
Lost in the debate as well: the Grammys make mistakes all the time. It's very well possible that Formation is the superior work, and that it will last longer, and mean more, than Adele's 25. Losing a Grammy doesn't diminish a recording. Neither does winning one, for that matter. After all, Adele's album is really terrific. It's right up there with Afternoon Delight and Boogie Oogie Oogie.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
