'Category fraud' has become a flashpoint at the Grammys

Artists are using the blurred lines between genres to their advantage by submitting work into favorable races, even when it seems like a stretch

- Mikael Wood Columnist

LEAVE IT TO BEYONCÉ TO SHAPE THE GRAMMY Awards in a year when she's not even on the ballot. With 35 trophies to her name, the pop superstar is the winningest artist in the nearly seven-decade history of music’s most prestigious awards show; with 99 nods, she’s the most-nominated act of all time too. Yet despite her steady presence over the last quarter-century at pop’s creative vanguard, it took the singer until this last February to finally win the Recording Academy's top prize, album of the year, with “Cowboy Carter” — a long-overdue victory that prompted countless think pieces about the academy's fraught relationship with race, gender and genre. In addition to taking the album award, “Cowboy Carter” — Beyoncé’s thorny and audacious exploration of the Black roots of country music — also won for country album at the 67th Grammys, which made her the first Black woman ever to win in that category. The first — and now the last. In June, the academy announced that, starting with the 68th Grammys, it would split the country album award into two: one prize for contemporary country album and another for traditional country album.

Some observers wondered whether the organization was bowing to complaints from Nashville insiders — complaints I've heard firsthand — that Beyoncé’s openly experimental work had no business beating LPs by industry standard-bearers such as Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson. (Beyoncé’s instantly memed surprise-face when her name was called suggested she could envision the griping to come.)

The more generous read of the academy’s move is that the expansion allows it to recognize more great music, particularly by making room for country traditionalists who might otherwise be crowded out by higher-profile, more popleaning acts. Indeed, the Grammys ballot has long featured separate categories for traditional blues and contemporary blues and for R&B of the traditional and progressive persuasions.