LOS ANGELES.- Musicians and critics have accused voters of Grammy for ignoring the work of the women, but in this year’s edition it is highly probable that they will be the ones who will take the biggest prizes. awards of the night.
At Sunday’s gala, seven of the eight nominees for album and record of the year are women or gender fluid people, including Taylor Swift, SZA and Olivia Rodrigo.
“Female pop artists went from dominating the red carpets to completely dominating the Grammys,” said Kristin Lieb, who researches the relationship between entertainment marketing, music and gender.
“It’s a significant change,” he told AFP. “The focus is more on their talent and charisma than on their bodies and outfits.”
Swift, SZA and Rodrigo compete for the gramophone for album and record of the year along with Miley Cyrus, the indie group Boygenius and Lana Del Rey. Janelle Monae rounds out the best album category, while Billie Eilish and rising star Victoria Monet are the other contenders for album of the year.
Grammy Statistics
The only male representation competing for the two coveted awards this year is Jon Batiste, the jazz star who swept the awards two years ago.
It is a drastic change from a statistical point of view.
In 2018, then-president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, said that women seeking recognition in the industry just had to take one step forward. “I think they would be welcome,” added Portnow, who was accused of rape by an artist last year.
But the numbers differ.
Between 2012 and 2022, 86% of nominees in the main Grammy categories were men, according to the Think tank Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Already at the 2023 ceremony, although men continued to dominate the categories that award album and record of the year, half of the nominees for best new artist, a category that recognizes emerging talents, were women, as was a third of the contenders for song of the year.
women in music
But last year the winds of change blew, with historic records for women of color on the Billboard charts, according to the most recent Annenberg study.
“The women had very good music,” said the current president of the Academy, Harvey Mason Jr., in November after the nominations for the 66th edition of the awards. “And that obviously struck a chord with our voters.”
Many of the nominees have years of career and are part of a diverse spectrum of genres and styles, in a world that traditionally groups the majority of female artists under the umbrella of pop.
“If a woman sells enough, she will lose her original genre and become a pop star regardless of her context,” Lieb said. “And in general, the way pop is interpreted is as a synonym for something artificial and fleeting.”
In contrast, stated Lieb, a male artist: “will be constructed as a genuine, authentic, talented artist.”
This framing also serves to diminish the talent and success of women who are focused on pop, a category that is often perceived as unserious.
Lieb is cautiously optimistic about the change that is taking place, both in the industry and in criticism and the academic world. “Pop music can be art, it can deserve serious debate. It can be worthy of reflection,” she said.
And while the change in genre mapping is welcome, academic Christine Wisch hopes the industry will move more toward a point: “where we can really look at art for its own sake, and less based on certain identities.”
Wisch, a classically trained musicologist, teaches at Indiana University. Her course focuses on women in music, from the medieval era to modern times. She says that her students have expressed special admiration for the Boygenius group.
The trio, which has six nominations, plus one individual for its member Phoebe Bridgers, regularly mocks the label “women in rock.”
“As a musician and educator, I look forward to the day when this is no longer a conversation,” Wisch said. “The day when gender is not part of the conversation, when we are not surprised that women dominate this or that.”
FUENTE: AFP
