Daily Times

Grammy voters are white and male – perhaps not coincidentally, Beyoncé chose the Year of Trump to make her most explicit statement on African-American pride, particularly in ‘Formation’, in which she sings, “I like my Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils.”

Numerous Republicans hated her fantastic Super Bowl performance of the song last year – one congressman called Beyoncé “pro-Black Panther and anti-cop”. Although record-industry folks tend to be more liberal than the population at large, they’re still heavily white and male. People of colour are traditionally better represented in the Grammys than in the Academy Awards – Chance the Rapper did win Best New Artist last night – but it’s not hard to envision a campaign similar to #OscarsSoWhite.

And old – one Grammy voter had predicted to Rolling Stone that the not-quite-cutting-edge nature of the electorate could favour Adele over Beyoncé. “Beyoncé should win because her song was more culturally significant and more innovative. Adele – we feel like we’ve seen that show before,” the voter said. “But I would not underestimate the average age of Grammy voters, and the chance that the sort of ‘elder median age’ could put Adele in.” The Grammys have a post-nominations panel designed to avoid embarrassing gaffes, like Jethro Tull’s defeat of Metallica in the Infamous Hard Rock Upset of 1988. But giving an Album of the Year award to Adele? Seems safely in the “not a gaffe” category.

The ’25’ LP was simply more popular than ‘Lemonade’ – Grammy voters were far more likely to have actually heard the Adele album than ‘Lemonade’. Although Beyoncé was more culturally important than Adele in 2016, swinging a baseball bat in an indelible image in the Lemonade video album, playing a Hillary Clinton rally in Ohio and grossing more than $256 million on tour, Adele was more visible. Her tour hit just $168 million in sales, but she played 107 shows to Beyoncé’s 49, according to Pollstar.