The Grammys Should Eliminate the “Global” Categories

Actually, they should eliminate a lot of other categories, too, including Classical, Jazz, composition, arranging, and engineering. Not because these are unimportant. On the contrary, the first two actually deserve entire awards shows to themselves, and without the last three, none of the other awards would be possible.

No, these categories should be eliminated because neither the Recording Academy nor the viewing public actually care about them. They are there as filler, to draw out the awards ceremony so the show's real stars can have more time to indulge in their nauseating orgy of self-congratulation and preening, and so the producers can sell more advertising.

You can almost sense embarrassment in the awkward acceptances by classical musicians or composers, who know full well that most of the audience have never heard their music, don’t know who they are, and frankly don’t care. They get polite applause at most, and only because those in attendance feel obligated to applaud. It is, frankly, insulting.

The two Global categories, however, are especially offensive. They are worse than calling the American baseball championship the “World Series.”

In baseball, at least, you can argue that what happens in America is definitive (even when we lose, as we recently did to the Japanese in the World Baseball Classic.) Very few other countries even have baseball.

Every other country, however, has music! That fact has apparently only recently dawned on the Academy, as evidenced by the emergence of the Latin categories and their elevation to moderately high status in the overall program. However, Latin artists generally don’t get much mention unless they have charted big in the U.S. or, better yet, have moved here to work. Singing in English gets many bonus points, which somewhat defeats the purpose, but I digress.

So, what of Nigeria, India, Japan, or for that matter, every other country with a vibrant music culture, commercially viable recording industry, and millions of listeners? How can a single “Best Global Music Performance” possibly represent what 96% of the world’s music audience is listening to? Across all genres????

Once you think about it, arrogance and condescension are enough to make your head explode. This is crude, old-fashioned tokenism at its worst in the age of diversity and inclusion.

To our credit, there are listeners in the U.S. who know better. They go to nightclubs where DJs spin fusion dance music from Nigeria and South Africa. For example:

They travel to festivals to see Japanese and Brazilian heavy metal bands. They search YouTube for and subscribe to music podcasts that feature Finnish classical composers, Indonesian jazz musicians, and German and Indian rappers — not to mention musical forms which have no analog here, like Tuvan throat singing and Balinese Gamelan.

Here is a short Gamelan piece. Most are quite a bit longer, but if you’ve never heard Gamelan music, this is a nice intro:

Unfortunately, those who are interested in stuff like this have to make a special effort to find it. The U.S. music industry goes to significant lengths to kill it all (Metallica reference intended). Anything which does not contribute to their cash flow is an annoyance and is even seen as a threat. They try to kill it through studied neglect and active suffocation. The “active” part is the subject of Part II of this series. All I will say now is that, in the immortal words of Dave Barry, “I am not making this up!”

Meanwhile, our music media, even the nominally independent media, largely ignore all that stuff too, until they can’t. Case in point:

Even the staid New York Times recently waxed breathless about K-pop for a couple of years. Unfortunately, they were late to the party because they always are when it comes to popular culture.

As is usual with something they don’t understand, they had to anoint one act, BTS, as a proxy for the whole scene because, well, actually understanding K-pop was too much to ask. Besides, why stir things up and get more people interested? That would just get complicated and annoying.

The funny thing is, there was a time when BTS was a secret known only to an “in” crowd, at least in America. By the time our media noticed them, they had already toured the U.S. multiple times and were so far on the other side of being hip and cool that fans were taking their parents to see them. They were no longer just a singing group but a billion-dollar global brand when our music press belatedly realized something had happened — yesterday.

I don’t want to belabor BTS — I’m not a fan. They are simply the exception that proves the rule: our corporate and media cultures are hopelessly parochial, and they refuse to take any notice of something outside their comfort zone or our borders until it comes along and steps on their heads.

Now, why should you or I care? Well, I love music, and that includes new and different music. I have my old favorites from my teens and twenties, just as most of us do. But I mainly listen to artists and bands that I hadn’t heard of 10 years ago. For a long time now, most of them have come from outside our borders. That’s not a knock on the U.S. — it’s just inevitable, given that we are only 4% of the world’s population.

If you haven’t listened to music from Africa, Asia, or South America, it’s NOT like I’m suggesting you try fried bugs or worms for dinner. Their music has the same ingredients as ours, just arranged differently.

They have often taken our musical forms — violin concertos, jazz improvisation, rock riffs, metal screams, rapping — and presented them in new and startling ways that expand how we hear our old favorites.

When foreign artists’ work is unavailable or hard to find, of course, that is unfair to them, but it is equally unfair to us. I remember the feeling of astonishment and then anger when I first discovered the band Nightwish.

They had been around since the late 1990s, but I had never heard of them until around 2015. They quickly shot into my top ten all-time favorite rock bands, alongside the likes of the Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson. They are that good. I felt cheated that despite practically living in record shops for chunks of my life, I had never come across their albums and had no idea they existed.

Nightwish play to audiences of 80,000+ people in stadiums in Europe and South America, yet it is almost impossible to find any meaningful coverage of them in the U.S. media.

American promoters long refused to work with bands like them (yes, there are others), and they get zero radio play. Heck, they even sing in English, but that didn’t help.

Nightwish does have a small, devoted fan base in the U.S., built entirely through word of mouth and, more recently, social media. For me, the one benefit of the situation is that when I finally got to see them here in the U.S., it was in a hall that holds around 1500 people. That was a lot of fun. But shame on us that a band like this has to play for pocket change here.

So when I say the Grammys should drop the “Global” categories, it is not because they are irrelevant. It’s because including those categories reeks of hypocrisy. They will never be treated seriously by the Academy, are not taken seriously by the audience, and will never be comprehensive enough to constitute even a token acknowledgment that people outside the U.S. have music. It’s nothing more than virtue signalling, and an insult to everyone concerned.

In Part 2, I dive a bit into active measures the U.S. entertainment industry has taken to obstruct foreign artists from gaining traction here. Sound like a conspiracy theory? Follow along and see.