A 3-Step Plan to Fix the Grammys
Since Sunday, the Grammys have been all over our social media feeds and there’s no way to escape it. Critics and fans alike have been spewing their opinions on the winners (and losers) for all the world to hear, and we know Beyoncé fans won't ease up on Beck anytime soon.
Recently, Billboard put out an article giving tips on how to improve the annual show. Since we are obviously more beautiful and more intelligent than anyone at Billboard, we thought we’d bless the Grammy people with our own ideas for some improvements.
1. Redefine the categories. I don’t know about you guys, but, personally, this is by far the most confusing part of the Grammys. What the hell is the difference between record of the year and best engineered album? Why is there a best traditional pop vocal album and a best pop vocal album category? What the fuck is the difference between best rap performance and best rap song? So much music is released in a year’s time, so I could see why they wouldn’t want to group certain artists into categories with other artists, but trying to interpret the different categories is clearly a frustrating process. Get your shit together, faceless Grammy awards committee.
2. Cut back on the collaborative performances. As much as the Grammys catch flak for having too many performances, I don’t mind it as much. I get it — you want to give every category’s popular artists their time to shine, even if that means letting Robin Thicke perform “Blurred Lines” with Chicago. The Grammys have had some successful performances from combining different acts, but most performers this year were amazing by themselves, and it should have stayed that way.
3. Extend the calendar year requirements. This has always been a major issue with the Grammys for me. To have been nominated for the 2015 ceremony, the artists’ music had to be released between October 1, 2013 and September 30, 2014. This sucks because a lot of good music came out in the fourth quarter of 2014 from artists like Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift, and J. Cole. The Grammys always catch heat for this because it puts pressure on artists to release their albums before that September 30 deadline. If they don't, they risk not having their album nominated until the next Grammys (a whole extra 12 months) and having their album potentially miss nominations if the following year a bunch of great albums come out in that time period. To resolve the issue, the Grammys should take a page out of the Academy Awards book and honor music from January to December with nominees announced in January of the following year.
Of course there are many more ways the Grammys could be “fixed,” so if you have any suggestions drop a comment below or tweet us @jerkmagazine!
Art by Shawna Rabbas