Culture critics have long hammered the Grammy Awards as tragically unhip. So CBS knew there was one way to get hip quickly: Sunday night’s awards ceremonies will be their first show with a male trophy presenters and….a trans woman presenter.
Actor Derek Marrocco and transgender model Martina Robledo will hand out awards alongside the typical blonde – model/actress Hollin Haley. AP’s Lynn Elber hailed the nod as breaking with hoary male-chauvinist tradition. “Changing up the Grammy trophy presenters isn’t window-dressing.”
Robledo, who’s from San Diego, said she was honored to join Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox and other transgender people in the more-inclusive media spotlight. But she expects viewer reaction to her presence will be mixed.
“I know it’s going to make some people uncomfortable and make others weep for joy,” she said.
“I’m just going to step out there and strut and make sure I deliver my best, because there’s people out there looking up to me.”
That may include transgender boys and girls or other minorities, she said, calling them “the people I want to speak for … to let them know that there is a better world out there for us.”
Washington Post music critic Chris Richards is one of those Grammy grumps, as he proved with a Sunday Arts piece headlined: “A Grammys Pity Party: Kudos to the Recording Academy for honoring youthful voices, but why so many songs drip with white-boy melancholy and ego?” The online headline is harsher: “No Grammys for old men! And don’t let these millennials win, either.”
Richards argued himself into a pretzel, that somehow, "The deeper the Grammys sink into meaninglessness, the more meaningful our shouts become." The Grammy judges are giving the top awards to young whites, and not black "social justice" musicians:
Last February, Grammy voters chose Taylor Swift’s “1989” as its album of the year over Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and on Sunday, they’ll be making a similar choice — between soothing, white radio-pop and imaginative, black agitprop — when Adele’s “25” competes with Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” for the evening’s most coveted prize.
Inside the paper, the headline was "Grammys Wallow in Millennial Misery." Richards gave a bit of credit that the awards aren't all thrown at artists past their prime, but....
Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this year’s voters are listening to young music through old ears. That’s because four songs nominated for the night’s biggest trophies — Lukas Graham’s “7 Years,” Mike Posner’s “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out,” and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” — each seem to reinforce some of the most tedious stereotypes about millennials. These songs feel self-absorbed, superficial, entitled, whiny. Do older listeners hear that as authenticity? Let us discuss them now and never again....
Individually, these songs are little more than pesky melodic irritants, but together, they seem to be burnishing a new aesthetic of millennial white-boy melancholy — a sound that has clearly resonated with the membership of the Recording Academy.
He's not wrong that a more seasoned critic can easily dismiss teen-appeal acts like Bieber or Twenty One Pilots as Lite. But part of it is explicitly racial: "Self-pity won’t float a ballad if the vocalist doesn’t sound genuinely wounded. Self-absorption is more magnetic when it’s scandalizing (see: Kanye West) than when it’s austere." Richards even compared these young whipper-snappers to the late Andy Rooney, the caricature of the grumpy white grandpa (now that's taking the fight to CBS):
And if whining about these whiners makes you feel as if you’ve suddenly been possessed by the roving spirit of Andy Rooney, it’s important to remember that there are still armies of young maestros forging ambitious, self-aware music out of hope, fury, freedom and desire. Some are competing for best new artist on Sunday night (Chance the Rapper, Maren Morris), some will compete for lesser prizes, (Lil Yachty, Gallant), some were unceremoniously snubbed (YG, Alessia Cara, Young Thug), and one wisely decided to boycott the Grammys outright (Frank Ocean).
Richards is championing the black millennials, like Yachty, YG, and Young Thug, who at 25 has had "six children by four women." Ocean bit the Grammy hand in just the right way to thrill journalists: he compared himself to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. “I think the infrastructure of the awarding system and the nomination system and screening system is dated,” he said. “I’d rather this be my Colin Kaepernick moment for the Grammys than sit there in the audience.”
