Run the Jewels 2 came out too late in the year to be eligible, and the works that did make the cut – from otherwise compelling artists Schoolboy Q, Common and Wiz Khalifa – were not their makers’ best.įor sure, The Marshall Mathers 2 LP’s victory may have been another case of a glorified lifetime achievement award, similar to the best actor Oscar finally awarded to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman. The best rap album category, on the other hand, was undeniably weak. At least Macklemore had the good sense to feel bad about the whole thing.Īt the 2015 Grammys, Eminem himself took an award away from more deserving black performers, but it was for best rap/sung collaboration, winning for The Monster with Rihanna over Tuesday (ILoveMakonnen featuring Drake) and Bound 2 (Kanye featuring Charlie Wilson). On the subject of Macklemore, the Seattle rapper’s victory over Kendrick Lamar last year was seen as an epic calamity – not just because Lamar is black, but because his 2012 album Good Kid, Maad City was a once-in-a-generation work. From Miley to Iggy to Macklemore, the concept of black appropriation came to the surface again this year, everywhere from Azealia Banks’s Twitter feed to glossy magazine think pieces. Not to mention that, at a time when the sound of pop music is very black, the artists performing those sounds, as least the most popular ones, are very likely to be white.
As Kris Ex wrote for Complex, opening the show with AC/DC was like “the planting of a great, Viagra-stiff, Dad Rock flag emblazoned with the words ‘Fuck You’ via arthritic hands”. It’s because, in a subpar category, Eminem’s latest served as the bulwark against Iggy Azalea’s The New Classic – a victory that would have been, in the opinion of most tastemakers, a catastrophe of Milli Vanilli proportions. It’s not because his winning work, The Marshall Mathers 2 LP, was so amazing, because it wasn’t. Amid the latest Kanye West saga – his demand that Beck renounce his Grammy for best album in favor of Beyoncé – the winner of this year’s Grammy for best rap album, Eminem, hasn’t been talked about much.
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