Grammy 2023. The triumph of Beyoncé and Harry Styles. How the prize works, its secret committee and why there are so many scandals around it

[ad_1]

The beginning of the 2020s is not the best period for large institutions. Organizations like the UN and the Red Cross are rightly getting the brunt of their weak stance during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. FIFA suffers daily from new evidence of their corrupt nature. The American Recording Academy is no exception – the organization that is the organizer and founder of the biggest award in the world of music, Grammy. The task this year was to do without scandals. Got by. The 2023 Grammy Awards ceremony took place on February 5 in Los Angeles. You can see the full list of winners here. Harry Styles, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar were (as expected) winners, along with Lizzo, Bad Bunny, Brandi Carlyle, and Samara Joy. Music columnist and editor-in-chief of LiRoom Oleksiy Bondarenko tells what is happening with the biggest music award in the world and whether the scandalous award is really on the right track. How is the Grammy voting done? To understand what the main problems of the award are, you need to understand the voting process itself. Members of the Recording Academy vote for nominees and winners. At the moment, there are about 13,000 of them. Anyone can apply for membership in the Academy. You can get the status thanks to the recommendations of other members of the Academy. If you want, you can apply here. Or they will take you even without recommendations, if a previously won Grammy was lying around in a locker somewhere. If you are chosen and want to participate in the Grammy evaluation, you will have to make an annual contribution of $100 to the needs of the Academy. In order to get on the list of nominees, you need to leave an application. This can be done by both labels and musicians themselves. Every year, the Grammys open an online form. After processing requests, they are divided into 91 nominations. And then the Academy’s 13,000 members must first select a long list of nominees. And then vote for the winners. But this whole system was just a screen. At least until last year. Secret Committee and Voting Members The most questions about the work of the Academy have always been caused by the so-called Blue-Ribbon Committee – a secret committee that had not fully understood powers. Its appearance at the Grammys was announced in the early 90s, and in 1995 the committee was first involved in determining the winners in the Top-4 nominations (Big Four, or the Big Four – 4 main Grammy nominations, to which special attention is drawn and which are allocated in a separate category the award itself: Record of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist). The Academy has never disclosed either the composition of the secret committee or how it works. Its influence on the results is known mostly from journalistic investigations. Missy Elliott. Photo: Timothy Norris/Getty Images In 2017, Billboard interviewed an unnamed Academy official who was able to shed some light on how the winners are chosen. The task of the secret committee is to adjust the voting results. The idea of ​​the Blue-Ribbon Committee appeared when Grammy winners began to diverge too much from the real favorites (then The Three Tenors in Concert 1994 and Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged were nominated for Record of the Year, but “forgotten”, for example, Nas’s Illmatic album, which became a classic at the time of its release). The Academy’s leadership has decided that audience voting is not the best way to determine nominees and winners, so it should be overseen by a panel of industry experts. At the stage of choosing the winners, a secret committee reviewed the voting results and could make its own corrections both in the selection of nominees and in the selection of winners. It happened behind closed doors, so we don’t know the participants or their positions. The only thing that is known (again, thanks to journalists) is that decisions were made by secret ballot. The existence of the secret committee was never a secret. Moreover, the Academy insisted that the selection of the winner is a transparent process. At the same time, exactly how the selection takes place and “who are the judges” was really a secret. In 2021, an epoch-making (for the Grammys, but not for the world) event took place – the Academy publicly announced the liquidation of the secret committee (much to the delight of a journalist investigating this topic). Harry Styles. Photo: Timothy Norris/Getty Images In addition to this democratic reform, the Academy went even further and personally invited more than 900 people to become voting members. According to the organizers of the Grammys, this was done primarily for diversification, namely: increasing the number of women and people of color and increasing the expertise of the voting itself. So far, it is difficult to assess the results of these changes. And the secret committee, as it turned out, was not completely liquidated. New nominations and an unexpected return This year, the Academy announced five new nominations in the main categories, as well as one special award. Namely: Songwriter of the Year (Non-Classical) – Tobias Lesso Jr., who has worked with Adele, Harry Styles, FKA Twigs and a bunch of other artists. Best alternative work – Wet Leg with breakthrough track Chaise Longue. The best essay in Americana – the winner has not yet been announced. Best video game soundtrack – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarok. The best spoken word poetry album – the winner has not yet been announced. They also announced a special award for “The best song supporting social change”. And here the strangest thing begins. This is a new separate award, outside of the 91 nominations, and it will be awarded by… a secret committee! And also the Board of Trustees, which is analogous to the Supervisory Board of the Academy. The announcement of this award is the only public mention of the work of the Blue-Ribbon Committee in the Academy’s communications. It is not entirely clear how this will work, especially in the context of the news about their disbandment. It can be assumed that such a move is a kind of sign of respect for the committee members and an opportunity to occupy them with at least something. Or a conscious hint that in the future they will influence other categories as well, but not secretly, but openly. In the end, this mysterious award went to Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour for the song Baraye. The award was presented personally by Jill Biden. A brief analysis of the winners of Grammy-2023 really passed calmly, without big sensations and scandals. It can even be said that the award took a step in the direction of conservatism. If in 2021 the most visible artists were the caricaturally vulgar Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, then this year everything is back to normal. Beyoncé took home four awards, making her a record 32, beating the all-time record held by British conductor Georg Solti, who had 31. And she became the winner in the electronic categories. beyonce Foot: Timothy Norris/Getty Images Harry Styles’ album Harry’s House took home two of the most prestigious awards for Best Album and Best Pop Album (as well as the technical award for Best Sound Engineering). However, the super hit As It Was did not win in any nomination. The Record of the Year went to Lizzo with her About Damn Time, and the clip (by the way, shot by Ukrainian Tanya Muinho) lost to Taylor Swift with All Too Well: Short Film (but Ms. Swift could not be left without a single statuette). Kim Petras became the first transgender woman to receive a Grammy – for Unholy in a duet with Sam Smith. Kendrick Lamar (thankfully) took home all the major rap awards, beating out Jack Harlow. Adele won Best Pop Performance with Easy On Me. Wet Leg took the best alternative. Bad Bunny continues his winning streak of captivating the world with Latin American music and predictably took the best urban album. Ozzy Osbourne, who has just announced his retirement from touring, took home Best Rock Album and Best Metal Performance. Adele Photo: Chris Delmas / Getty Images Of the unexpected, first of all, the statuette for the best song of the year, which went to country singer Bonnie Raitt for the track Just Like That. The calm guitar ballad beat such giants as Adele, Harry Styles and Lizzo. By the way, the best rock performance and rock song also went to Americana singers, namely Brandi Carlyle from Broken Horses. The best young artist went to Samara Joy, a jazz-soul performer from New York born in 1999. She also won the best jazz album. The award to Dave Chappelle for the best comedy album can only be called scandalous. Last year, Chappelle repeatedly ran into criticism for disparaging transgender people. On the other hand, the previously “cancelled” Louis CK was also nominated, so it could have been worse. Sam Smith. Photo: Timothy Norris/Getty Images Overall, even compared to recent ceremonies, the 2023 Grammys have been very quiet in terms of both scandals and winners. The award has moved away from awarding TikTok stars and made more conservative moves. At least DJ Khaled didn’t win in any of his five nominations. So, it seems that the changes in the work of the Recording Academy are going for the better. The era of scandals To understand why we have reason to say that Grammy is improving, it is worth briefly recalling the main stages of the crisis that she had to go through. Difficult times for the award and its management have come in 2018. At the time, the Academy of Music, as well as the MusiCares charitable foundation (associated with the Grammys), was managed by Neil Portnow, who had been the head since 2002. In 2018, the management decided to hold the award ceremony not in Los Angeles, as usual, but in New York, at Madison Square Garden. This caused a lot of problems in terms of organization and financing, the broadcast turned out to be unprofitable. Later, after the ceremony, a letter from one of the former employees of MusiCares was leaked to the press, who accused Portnov of using charitable contributions to cover the financial losses from the Grammys, the postponement of which he promoted. There were also a number of accusations of non-transparent work and dubious contracts with contractors. A year earlier, Portnov had caused anger with sexist remarks. When asked why there are so many more men than women at the Grammys, he said that women just have to “try harder.” Portnow later apologized and said that he simply chose the wrong words, but by then he had already been criticized by a large part of the music industry, and Dua Lipa did it right from the Grammy stage. Julia Michaels. Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images Sexist and corruption scandals led to Portnov’s resignation. In 2019, the Academy was headed by a woman for the first time – Deborah Dagan. However, it did not last long. Within a year, she resigned with a scandal. Her assistant said that the president bullied him and actually forced him to leave. In response, Dagan stated that the Grammys are a “men’s club” that prompted her dismissal, that her predecessor Portnov had raped an (unnamed) singer, and that the entire organization was rotten from start to finish and mired in corruption. The next blow to the award’s reputation came from singer The Weeknd, who was not nominated in any of the top categories in 2021 despite the wild success of that year’s album and hit Blinding Lights. The singer accused the award of corruption and playing with his own, and also called on his colleagues to boycott the Grammys. The call was supported by industry heavyweight Drake, who withdrew himself from the list of nominees. In 2020, the Academy was headed by sound producer Harvey Mason Jr. And already within a year, reforms in the work of the Academy began, which we could see in this year’s results. Read also: Ukrainian pianist received a Grammy. VIDEO

[ad_2]

Original Source Link