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| Rapper Kendrick Lamar. "The number of hip-hop songs that have have won Record of the Year or Song of the Year. Let me stress: Zero. None, ever." - Tom Mandel (Photo by Jon Elbaz) |
By Tom Mandel
The Grammy Awards Sunday night confirmed something we
already knew: not only is the National Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences dumb, it's also racist. I'm sure their board meetings are not a
bunch of white dudes sitting around dropping the n-bomb, but the system
is institutionally discriminatory against black artists, especially
artists who don't perform whitewashed genres like jazz.
RELATED STORY: Hip-Hop at the Grammys - Macklemore Wins, Kendrick Lamar and the Rest of Rap Music Lose
The Grammys have a history of ignoring great music. Do yourself a favor and open up the Grammy Wikipedia page for Album of the Year.
Start Apple+F'ing (or Control+F'ing if you're a corporate machine) some
of your favorite artists. Led Zeppelin? Zero results. Hendrix?
Nah. Jay-Z? One result, but it's in the footnotes, not in the section
for winners or nominees. But now I'm just listing my personal favorites
who got snubbed. Let's get in with numbers.
1: The number of pure hip-hop albums that have won Album of the Year. OutKast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below in 2003. Lauryn Hill won for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but that was really an R&B album.
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