It struck me, in the moment, that critically dissecting an album felt even smaller than it usually does. The times are urgent, and I know nothing but going back to what I love, but music still feels tiny and disposable. I think, though, that perhaps we will cling to our art and learn to truly love our artists. I am not OK, and even if I were to find the time to be OK, there are too many people I love who are not OK, and I feel that weight on top of my own. And yet, with the world still crumbling under its various political ills, and everyone covered in our respective heaviness, A Tribe Called Quest rose again, and they were also not OK. You can hear it in the album’s gentler moments, the songs where Q-Tip is largely alone, like the somber and sparse “Melatonin,” where he opens his first verse: “The understudy for the star / The show must go on.”
The show, it seems, ends here, and we didn’t even deserve for it to take us this far. Earlier that year, I didn’t think I wanted another Tribe Called Quest album. Then Phife died, and I wanted another Tribe Called Quest album more than anything. Then it arrived, and it was even greater than I could ever have asked for. The heroic and brilliant Tribe Called Quest, who almost certainly have nothing left to give us now; the greatest rap group of all time, who returned in a week when the world caught fire to give us one final everlasting gift. It’s one way to keep a beloved ghost in our ears, no matter what uncertain hell awaits.
There is another story about Leonard Cohen that I think about all the time. Toward the end of the seventies, when Cohen’s popularity was waning, he retreated to Hollywood to record the album Death of a Ladies’ Man. The album was produced by Phil Spector, who, by that point, had spiraled into a whirlwind of erratic and violent behavior, carrying guns, pointing and shooting them at random. During the recording of John Lennon’s 1975 album Rock ’N’ Roll, Spector fired off a pistol in the studio. His production had also suffered since his 1960s heyday, making Cohen and Spector kind of in need of each other, in hopes for a big hit.
When the album was released, the response was predictably lukewarm. Drowned in Spector’s bag of tricks, the album hardly had much of the traditional Cohen in it that audiences were looking for. The story I think about, though, comes from the recording session. In the depths of them, during the recording of the nine-minute title track—which took an entire day—Spector, at random, put a loaded pistol to the neck of Cohen and cocked the gun. “I love you, Leonard,” he said. Cohen, without blinking or without panic, calmly responded “I hope you love me, Phil.” Spector lowered the gun.
All of this is about mercy. I’m talking about what it is to be from a place that promises to love you while holding a gun to your neck. I’m talking about what it feels like to have the gun lowered, briefly, by the hands of some unseen grace. Sometimes, it is a protest that stretches long into a night, or sometimes it is a reading where a room hears familiar words and cries along with you as you read them out loud. But sometimes, it is a perfect album that arrives just in time to build a small community around you. To briefly hold a hand over your eyes and make a new and welcoming darkness of the world outside, even when it is on fire.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thank You 4 Your Service
The Grammy Awards aren’t supposed to be political. They pretend to be, in the ways that all award shows pretend to be: artists take to the stage during their acceptance speeches and sometimes present a half-hearted rallying cry for or against something in the political moment. The Grammy Awards, in particular, cater to this type of performance, as its audience is one that likes to pretend that music is still an untouched political force. The result at the Grammys is a special type of clumsy, though. Artists get on stage and stumble through half-thought-out opinions on issues that they perhaps haven’t had the time to fully dive into. The performers who are especially passionate and well researched often go on too long, getting awkwardly played off by a chorus of strings. Few performers actually use their performance space to make a statement, even though it is the one time when they are on stage with the entire audience looking at them and at least have a more flexible time range to make a point. It all makes for a messy bit of performative politics—the kind that sends fans running to the internet and asking why their beloved musicians don’t simply stick to music.
Despite this, the Grammy Awards also have a relationship with rap music that is tenuous, at best. Even though it has spent the most recent decade attempting to make up for it with its nominations and by affording more stage space to rappers, it cannot be ignored that on its face, it seems as if the Grammys think about rap as a lesser genre. Since 1989, when rap was first introduced to the Grammys as a category, only two rap albums have won Album of the Year. It bears mentioning that the two albums—Outkast’s Speakerboxxx / The Love Below and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—leaned aggressively into sounds that could be considered more palatable for a mainstream audience. Particularly in the era of their releases, when mainstream rap was seen as especially drowned in an obsession with either excessive materialism or a very specific hustler narrative, peppered with violence, the two releases allowed the stuffier academy to honor how “unique” and “unlike rap” the two albums were. Hill, with her conscious album, half-sung, kind of acoustic. And the always-inventive Outkast, pulling from old soul and funk tropes to reel in casual listeners. The two albums are phenomenal and certainly deserved their awards. Hill’s was a surprise, not just because it was the first, but also because in winning, Hill had to beat out Madonna, Sheryl Crow, and Shania Twain, artists who were beloved by the Academy and who had a history with the awards. In the year Outkast won, Missy Elliott was a nominee for her album Under Construction, which made the second year in a row that two rap albums were up for the award, as 2003 had both Nelly’s Nellyville and Eminem’s The Eminem Show. After 2004, two rap albums were not nominated for Album of the Year until a decade later, when Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City was nominated next to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s The Heist. Daft Punk won the award for their album Random Access Memories.
No rapper has ever won the award for Record of the Year or Song of the Year, and I say this knowing the politics behind awards shows, flimsy as they may be. And I say this knowing that a Grammy Award means nothing to a hood where Kendrick Lamar’s music plays at a protest and urges young black organizers to push against a boundary once more. And I know a Grammy Award means nothing to that shit we rap to ourselves in our cars with our homies, or the shit we play on a basketball court during an endless summer, or the shit we use to drown out our grief or turn up our joy. To say the Grammys don’t care about the culture is easy, but it’s much more difficult to define the vastness of what that culture is and the many ways it manifests itself and brings itself to life in ways that live beyond an award. It’s even harder to make peace with that, though, when the system of awards remains the only way that art is validated by an establishment.
Despite the Grammy’s flimsy political standing and its strained relationship with rap, at the inception of that relationship, it was rap music that gave the Grammy Awards a crash course in political urgency. In 1989, when the Grammy’s introduced a category for Best Rap Performance, there was a boycott. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won for their song “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” winning over other nominees Salt-N-Pepa (“Push It”), J.J. Fad (“Supersonic”), Kool Moe Dee (“Wild Wild West”), and LL Cool J (“Going Back To Cali”).
When the Grammys announced that the award would be presented in a preshow segment and not televised, this caused a rift with the nominated acts and the genre at large. The Grammys supposedly recognizing that rap was more than just a category addition. It was a statement for the still-young genre, an acknowledgment that it should be taken seriously and that it had a future beyond just a handful of bright years. The establishment was sending a message that the genre should be honored as more than just an upstart. To then say that the award wouldn’t be televised felt like a half measure, like putting a tray of food outside for someone s
tarving but not offering them any shelter from the storm. Rightfully, all of the artists nominated chose to boycott the awards—except for Kool Moe Dee, who was already slated as one of the presenters. During his presentation for Best Male R&B Vocalist, he kicked a brief rhyme in the name of his boycotting peers, also attempting to paint rap in a positive light. Because, make no mistake, that is also what this was about, and perhaps what it has been about since: the Grammys’ Recording Academy attempting to sell rap through the lens of respectability. Moe Dee’s presence was an antiboycott in some ways. Then an elder statesman of the genre, he felt it was his responsibility to put rap music on the map the best he could in his allotted time. So he took to the mic, even briefly setting aside his then-still-brewing feud with LL Cool J, though not mentioning him by name:
On the behalf of all MCs,
my co-workers and fellow nominees
Jazzy Jeff, J.J. Fad,
Salt-N-Pepa and the boy who’s bad
We personify power and a drug-free mind,
and we express ourselves through rhythm and rhyme
So I think it’s time that the whole world knows
rap is here to stay. Drummer, let’s go.
Meanwhile, in another corner of Los Angeles, then–Def Jam–heads Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen held a party, boycotting the Grammys. Yo! MTV Raps was there. All of the other nominees attended, as well as other artists seen as hip-hop royalty. The Grammys were charged with treating hip-hop like a stepchild and “ghettoizing” the genre, according to Def Jam spokesperson Bill Adler. In an era before social media, the boycott still made waves, becoming one of the biggest stories of Grammy night. The Grammys were dismissive at the moment, making a statement about the number of categories versus the time allotted to air them. (“When you have 76 Grammy categories and only time to put 12 on air, you’re going to have 64 unhappy groups of people,” a Grammy spokesperson said the night before the show aired.)
But rap won its small battle, simply by denying access. The Grammys knew that if they were to acknowledge rap music going forward, they would actually need the artists on board. It was a loud statement made by the rappers who didn’t attend—one that said, if you want the access to our culture, you actually have to honor it and honor it loudly, because we’re not going anywhere. Because rap was such a young genre at the time, and all of the rappers participating in the boycott were so young, the stakes were high. Even though it seemed that there was confidence in the outcome of the boycott, it seemed just as likely that the Grammy Awards might have decided that rap music wasn’t worth the trouble and dismissed it wholeheartedly in years going forward.
They didn’t of course. Rap categories were expanded in the following years, including Best Rap Song and Best Rap Album, with at least one of the categories being televised each year until 2015, when rap was inexplicably left out of the televised broadcast.
In some ways, rap’s relationship with the Grammys has always been tainted by its original protest of them. The Grammy Awards treat rap like it should be lucky to be there, because in the eyes of the establishment, it seems to always imagine that it is doing rap a favor. Rap was ungrateful early, so the Grammy Awards threw rap a bone, and in exchange, rap music has to be the deeply thankful subordinate, bowing at the throwing of the award and asking for scraps, even as the often-white music world around rap music gets rewarded for borrowing from its sounds, aesthetics, and tropes. When a rapper is nominated for one of the major awards now, most in the community of rap fans don’t expect a win, and yet our hearts still break when watching the sadness of someone like Kanye West, who went 0 for 3 on Album of the Year wins after being nominated three times in a row for his brilliant run of three albums, The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. The loss is expected but still mourned. This is a genre that caters directly to a people who have spent their lives mourning the loss they always knew was coming.
When the 1989 Grammy boycott took place, A Tribe Called Quest hadn’t released an album yet. They weren’t at the boycott, but it’s safe to imagine that they might have been, had it taken place a year, or two years, or five years later. A Tribe Called Quest didn’t get nominated for a Grammy Award during the run when they made their most critically successful albums: People’s Instinctive Travels, The Low End Theory, and Midnight Marauders all flew under the Grammy Awards radar. They weren’t nominated for a Grammy Award until 1997, when Beats, Rhymes and Life found itself nominated for Best Rap Album, and the album’s lead single, “1nce Again,” was nominated for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. The album lost to The Score by Fugees, and the song lost to “Crossroads” by Bone Thugs. In 1999, Tribe was nominated one more time. The Love Movement was nominated for Best Rap Album, losing to Jay-Z’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life. In all years of their nominations, Tribe chose to sit out the Grammy Awards, not attending as guests.
In February of 2017, Tribe was on stage at the Grammy Awards for the first time. The awards that night had already proven to be overwhelmed with tension and awkward moments. It was now three months after Donald Trump’s election, and almost one month since his inauguration. The Americans who first walked around in a haze of shock and misery were just now beginning to snap out of it and come to terms with the world around them being the world they were in. It must be said that for several marginalized communities, this world was all too familiar—something many of us had been living under for years, even before Trump took office. Still, there were newer fears to navigate, and newer ways to resist, and new people along for the ride, needing to be both shepherded and watched anxiously. We were all just settling into the new normal: news alerts flying at us from every direction, and almost always with bad news. Now, less than a year later, we’re used to it. We wake up, sigh, scroll through the news and imagine the various ways that our undoing might arrive. But in February 2017, the exhaustion was new.
The Grammys came at a very particular time, as well: The Dakota Access Pipeline protests came to a head in February. The protests, which began in April 2016, were finally being broken apart by police and the military, even after some moments of hope throughout. The fight ignited around the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the spring of 2016. The pipeline is 1,172 miles long, cutting through land in both North and South Dakota before ending up in Patoka, Illinois. The oil pipeline route, at the time of its proposal, was set to cut across land of spiritual and cultural significance for the Lakota Nation and other surrounding nations in the Dakotas. The pipeline was opposed not just for the impact it would have on cultural and spiritual spaces but also for the very obvious environmental risks: oil spills contaminating the water that people in these communities used to fulfill their everyday needs. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe was the most visible in the protests, and young members of the tribe were on the front lines of the protests, remaining the face of the #NoDAPL campaign that captured the attention of social media and drew the world’s eyes to the small revolution. The protest was long and arduous, with many people camping out on the land and refusing to move in the face of police violence and military threats. In September 2016, construction workers bulldozed land that the tribe had identified as sacred ground. When protesters pushed into the area to protect it, attack dogs were unleashed on them, biting some of the protesters. The incident was recorded and placed on YouTube, where it went viral. In October, police with riot gear and military soldiers used excessive force to clear an encampment in the pipeline’s path. It was a violent clearing, and was again recorded for the world to see.
It is one thing to throw your hands in the air and say “the world is burning again, oh the world is burning,” but to see a people fight for access to clean water in the face of a very particular American greed is haunting. By November, people from all over the country joined the protests, making the trek from wherever they were to North Dakota. By December, crowds of protesters from all over were fighting off the brutal cold occupying the land every day, unmoving.
But by January 24,
2017, mere days after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order to advance the construction of the pipeline. By February 7, Trump advised the army engineers to proceed with the pipeline at all costs. Less than a week later, protesters were being forcefully removed from the land. All of them would be gone by the end of the month. There was briefly power to the people, and then not. At a time when people needed to believe that they had the capacity within themselves to change things, all that was left was the hollow echo of empire, molding the land, again, into whatever it wants.
If there was a year for the Grammy Awards to be staunchly and explicitly political, it was 2017. If there was a year to write a large check and attempt to cash it on stage, it was this one, when so many people felt like the ability to entertain was a luxury, when I needed to see someone, anyone, taking a risk while the stakes were high for them, or even higher for someone they may care about. What we got, for much of the show, was a performative bore.
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