As Grammy nominations roll out Nov. 16, will they hit a sour note after the decision by one of the planet’s biggest boy bands to just skip the 2027 awards?
In unveiling additional categories earlier this year, the Recording Academy seemed to strike the wrong chord with global K-pop sensation BTS. The Korean boy band announced they would not submit their music for consideration this year, in apparent protest of the new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category, stating on Instagram that they “hope music itself can be heard and loved rather than being distinguished by region or language.”
It’s a concern that’s been echoed by other artists like Tyler the Creator and Justin Bieber, who’ve questioned the way the Grammys categorize music, along with more recent public criticism following the country album category being split into two following Beyoncé’s win.
Musicologist Dr. Alexander Carpenter, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus, discusses whether the Recording Academy is staying in harmony with a changing industry.
Are these artists right to be concerned about being pigeonholed?
BTS is making pop music more or less in the mould of generic international pop music, which is largely indistinguishable from North American pop, so they may have a good point. The idea that (a special) category would be necessary because the music itself is different and so there have to be different criteria applied doesn’t really work.
From the perspective of BTS, they want to be judged as an international act rather than as a narrowly pigeonholed Asian act. The justification for creating the (Best Asian Pop Music Performance) category was to recognize artists that have been enormously successful in the Asian market. At the same time, the Grammys claim to be not a market-driven award. They tout the fact that the awards are based on peer evaluation — the voting members are musicians, producers, people in the music industry. It is not supposed to have anything to do with how popular you are or how big you are in one market or another. So that in itself is a little bit contradictory.
On the flip side, do you think there’s a need for creating new award categories?
In some ways, categories are necessary when the music is made differently and it’s trying to accomplish different things. How do you weigh rock bands against rap artists when they’re both making pop songs but using completely different techniques and the aesthetic is completely different?
It doesn’t mean you can’t transcend the boundaries, but the genre sets up the expectations. And music can not only be aesthetically different, but it can come from totally different cultural contexts, like world music. It’s hard to imagine how you would put these things side by side unless you narrowed the field.
Is categorizing musicians and their work an inherent problem for awards bodies like the Grammys?
(Music and film) award shows are, at least in part, in service to the industry, and the benefit to the industry is to have artists showcased. You have participation by some artists, and pushback from others who don’t want to be pigeonholed; they want to make the art that they want to make. And some artists are more beholden to the industry than others. So I think there are built-in pressures and contradictions in the business of evaluating and adjudicating art. There’s this bigger question of what all of this is for anyway, and what is the value of it.
Does adding more categories lessen the value of winning a Grammy award?
It’s a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, because of the very real possibility that if you’re in a genre that is an outlier with respect to the popular music landscape, then (without new categories), you might never be acknowledged. But then again, you have this pushback you’re seeing with BTS saying, “We would like to be put side by side with everybody and have our own merits shine through, not win an award in a narrower category.”
How are music streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple and YouTube changing the awards landscape?
The way people consume music has changed. They now have the ability (through created and curated lists) to listen to anything they want at any time. In the past, the music industry relied heavily on generic categorization to determine where to put its money in marketing and recruiting artists, and how to push the maximum number of units to the right consumer audience. I think the Grammys are an outgrowth of that, and the organic link between the two is starting to degrade, because people are consuming music in entirely different ways.
It will be a question of how long something like the Grammys can continue to go on when the imperative to construct rigid categories of music for the sake of driving product toward target audiences is no longer the case.
Controversy aside, what’s your advice for Grammy fans who just want to tune in for the fun of itnext February?
I would say the same thing about the Grammys that I would say about (European song contest) Eurovision: It’s a spectacle to enjoy, a kind of cultural phenomenon to engage in. It doesn’t have to be prescriptive in the sense of, “This is the music I should be listening to.”
I think some people watch the Grammys just to get mad about it, to say this is outrageous that this person won or this person didn’t win, or whatever. Eurovision is like that too. People are factionalized, and it really is just a big spectacle.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
