Adele, Beyonc, and the Grammys’ Fear of Progress – The Atlantic

Set aside Adele splitting her Grammy like Solomon; forget, for a moment, all the pre-ceremony analysis about the awards fraught history with race and taste and tradition. Based solely on the performances last night, viewers would need to be arguing about Adele vs. Beyoncits hard to think of a more meaningful distinction in popular music than the one between them.

Adele performed twice on darkened stages where the focus could be on nothing other than her singing. For her George Michael tribute, she flubbed some notes and started again, because otherwise what would the point have been? Beyonc meanwhile offered a floral golden swirl of performance art and video wizardry and spoken word, with holographic and real bodies evoking da Vincis Last Supper. Some people will worship it, and some people will mock it; either way, sans sound, Beyonces performance could survive as gifs and memes and mashup videos. Adeles meanwhile could be ripped to MP3 and lose nothing for lack of images.

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Adeles song-no-dance routine, while often impressive, creates less entertaining TV and less daring art than Beyoncs audiovisual spectacles do. But the Grammys have made clear which it considers the better approach to music. Adele won all five Grammys for which she was nominated, including the three big awards where she competed with Beyonc: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year. This extends a sweep of every category in which shes been nominated since 2011, resulting in a total of 15 Grammys.

If Adeles dominance seems unseemly to you, Adele sympathizes. Accepting Album of the Year with her team of producers and co-writers, she tearfully offered thanks and then pivoted: I cant possibly accept this award My artist of my life is Beyonc. Addressing Beyonc in the audience directly, Adele said that Lemonade was so monumental and so well thought-out and so beautiful, and that the way you make me and my friends feel, the way you make my black friends feel, is empowering. At the end, she broke her Grammy statue in twopresumably to split it with her idol.

Debates will now unfold about the optics of the moment, Adeles manners, the awkwardness of mentioning her black friends, and the parallels with Macklemores apology after beating Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys. But Adeles sincerity burns brightlyjust try to be cynical about her backstage testimony of being a Beyonc stan since she was 11 years old and now wondering what the fuck does [Beyonc] have to do to win Album of the Year?

Good question. A follow-up to the megaton musical engine 21, Adeles comparatively restrained 25 was a strong display of ability from a powerful singer; it sold well but got mixed reviews. As an artistic statement, Lemonade smokes it. Its not just that Beyoncs album had a fully realized video component; its not just that it played with juicy tabloid rumors; its that it told a story as it alchemized disparate sounds for seriously entertaining songs that no one but Beyonce could have made. It said something about its creator and its world, and it pushed at the boundaries of pop. It was progress.

But the Grammys arent, in the end, interested in progress. Adele could have pulled off last nights performances basically in any decade of the Grammys existence. Last years Album of the Year winner, Taylor Swifts 1989, was explicitly retro; Beck beat Beyonc in 2015 with a collection of folk rock that needed no timestamp; the only black artists to have won the Album of the Year prize in the last 14 years were septuagenarians performing covers.

Beyoncs display at last nights Grammys, by contrast, needed the now. Thats not only in a technological sense (I wasnt sure what was real and what was fakewere you?) but also an aesthetic and political one. Her forthright celebration of black sisterhood and maternity, her references to contemporary art, and, yes, her musicthe synth tapestry of Love Drought especiallyall reflect the moment. So does the notion of a singer who does more than sing, who disregards traditional notions of musical respectabilitythe ideal of a woman in a gown standing alone and beltingfor a broader sense of the mediums potential.

Black artists from Prince to Michael Jackson to Kanye West have been on the forefront of this sort of expansion of what pop music means. Maybe that fact has something to do with why they have mostly fared poorly in the Grammys general categories over the years even as they have served up exactly the kind of performances that make the Grammys worth watching at all. Or maybe its just a deeper sort of bias: With only three black women ever winning Album of the Year (Lauryn Hill, Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston), little in Grammys history suggests a non-white Adele would have the success of this white one. Beyoncs one televised win last night was for Best Urban Contemporary Albumfounded in 2013 surely to include more artists of color, but with the effect of highlighting how they are sidelined in the general categories.

The awards success of traditionalists like Adele, ultimately, comes across as a rejection of the forward thinkers, a rejection that stings especially when it fits a clear pattern of excluding black visionaries. Its not as if old-fashioned singers need the Grammys to defend them: 25 has moved more than 10 million copies, while Lemonade sales and streams figured out to 2.1 million units in 2016. Surely change is necessary when even the avatar of tradition, Adele, knows somethings amiss. By saluting Beyonc on stage, she joins a trend with Frank Ocean, Kanye West, and other influential stars pointing out how strange it is that the Grammys judgement of the best in music, year after year, looks about the same.

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Adele, Beyonc, and the Grammys' Fear of Progress - The Atlantic