“The 2018 Grammys: This Shithole Again”. So read the Pitchfork magazine article covering the results of the award ceremony. Last Sunday, only 17% of Grammy winners were women, despite them being nominated for many categories. Most notably in the pop solo performance category, the only male out of five nominees won against songs like Kelly Clarkson’s “Love So Soft” and Kesha’s “Praying”. “Shape of You” wasn’t even that good, especially not after the thousandth time I heard it on the radio.
Kesha’s new song “Praying” was not only dismissed in the award category, the message behind it was largely ignored following her performance of it on stage. No one spoke of her emotional response to her sexual assault accusations against her producer in 2014 or the judge’s dismissal of her claims in the court case two years later.
The Grammys carried on with performances by Sting and U2, neither of which were up for any nominations. This was after Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich said “there’s no way we can really deal with everybody,” when asked why Lorde was unable to make an appearance on stage. Her new album, “Melodrama”, lost to Bruno Mars’s “24K Magic”.
Really? Bruno Mars? I’m not saying Lorde should have won, but anyone other than Bruno Mars would have been a better candidate. This goes for not only Album of the Year, but the five other categories that he won. For example, the Song of the Year, Mars’s “That’s What I Like”, begins with lyrics that objectify women, and this isn’t something rare in any of his songs. Even if the lyrics were changed, people have asserted that they have “heard better basslines mixed in garageband”. It seemed like a repeat of last year’s show, except that unlike Adele, Mars did not turn down any of his awards.
Mars didn’t deserve to win the awards, but even more, the women in the ceremony did not deserve to be brushed over. Kesha’s “Praying” performance seemed to be an excuse to throw many of the female nominees on stage together and not give them any time of their own. Further research by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative shows that only 9.3% of Grammy nominees between 2013 and 2018 were women. Especially in a time when women are coming together in events such as the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, this blatant disregard for women in the music industry is something that needs to be paid attention to.