In the wake of the annual Grammy Awards, there’s been some controversy surrounding winners in their respective categories, most notably Album of the Year (AOTY). This year’s competition was steep— Charli XCX with Brat, Chappell Roan with The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Sabrina Carpenter with Short n Sweet, Billie Elilish with Hit Me Hard And Soft, and Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter, with the latter winning the big prize of the night.
Cowboy Carter’s win has started some…I’ll say discourse online. Billie Elilish’s devoted fan base of emo twelve year olds immediately rushed to attack Beyoncé and her subsequent win, believing adamantly that Hit Me Hard And Soft, was snubbed, and that Billie Eilish wasn’t just artist of the year, but artist of the century.
Eilish, was seen crying after Beyoncé was announced as the winner of the category, which catapulted the narrative of how “unfair” this was, how Beyoncé didn’t “deserve” her win, and how Eilish was a “victim” to a voting system stacked up against her.
So to her fans that may be reading this— let me bring you back to Earth for a second. Billie Eilish was not snubbed at the Grammys, she simply didn’t deserve the win.
Even if, by some divine miracle, Cowboy Carter didn’t win, Eilish still wouldn’t have won.
“But her streams! ‘Birds of a Feather’ got more streams than all of Cowboy Carter combined!”
Two things.
- I don’t care about streams, and you shouldn’t either. Baby Shark has billions of streams, but you don’t see it getting nominated for anything, do you? Plus, if we are going strictly off of streams, The Tortured Poets Department would have won by a large margin. Please look things up before absentmindedly commenting things.
- Album of the year is all about impact. If Cowboy Carter didn’t win, having an entire summer named after your album and basically copywriting an entire shade would easily give the win to Brat by Charli XCX. Which is a masterclass in icon-ology (I made that up!).
This wrath that Billie Eilish fans are harboring is not as simple as simply being upset that their favorite artist didn’t win a specific award—it has to do with race.
“Oh my god, Mia. Do you HAVE to bring up race in EVERYTHING?”
Cowboy Carter is an objectively better album, from lyricism, to music videos, to impact, to virtually every other component that makes an album great. The reason why everyone is so upset about this, rather than any other category where I could, or anyone could, call out foul choice—is because Billie Eilish is white, and Beyoncé is Black. It’s oh so simple, yet no one understands it.
Beyoncé has been in this industry longer than Billie’s been alive, and she’s never won Album of the Year. She, like many Black creatives in the industry, has never received her just flowers for all of the work and all of the barriers she’s broken to get where she is. The paparazzi/society will look for every reason to tear her down and insult her accomplishments.
The tears that Eilish cried on that 96th Grammys night (and again, we have no idea why she was crying) have been construed to be used as a pillar to victimize her and to paint Beyoncé as this horrific bully.
White supremacy creates white fragility, which perpetuates harmful stereotypes that pigeonhole Black men and women.
I’m not writing this article to bash anyone, and if you leave this feeling angry, you didn’t listen to anything I wrote, at all.
We can respect art without having to tear down others. There is enough room in the industry for everyone to succeed. I hope that in the coming days this “hate train” will cease, and people will get off their phones and go outside.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, and before you go bashing Cowboy Carter again, actually listen to the album, and get some perspective into the genre.
