The most awaited time in the music industry is here. The Grammys 2020 nominees have been announced, and mixed feelings are pouring in. As this year’s nominee list is out, fans have been left surprised and disappointed by the lack of diversity and acknowledgment of artists.
This year’s Grammys will be hosted by fifteen-time Grammy award-winning Alicia Keys on January 26, 2020. While it is a win for LGBTQ+ and women representation as Lil Nas X received multiple nominations and eight of the 'Album of the Year' nominees are women, including Lizzo, Lana Del Ray and Billie Eilish, fans still pointed out the Grammy’s infamous cultural blindspot.
As The Grammy nominee list was announced on Wednesday night, people noticed a massive problem of a lack of cultural diversity. While the success of artists due to streaming platforms are largely debated today, the impact of non-Western artists cannot be ignored. People called out the Grammys for not nominating South Korean boy band BTS for any of the categories despite their sweeping success and worldwide impact.
BTS has made it big this year with many sold out stadium concerts and their album 'Map of the Soul: Persona' debuting at No.1 on the Billboard 200—a first since the Beatles in 1996 to score three chart-toppers in less than a year. Other artists and the BTS fanbase, ARMY, came out in protest to BTS’s shutout in the Grammy nomination. Halsey, who collaborated with them on the hit song ‘Boy With Luv’ took to Twitter and said, “BTS deserved many nominations. I am however, unsurprised that they weren’t acknowledged. The US is so far behind on the movement. The time will come”
Artists like Eminem have called out the partiality and problematic process of the Grammys, and now more and more artists have started sharing their concern. BTS’s exclusion from the Grammys is yet another proof of the Recording Academy’s perennial disregard for cultural diversity.
