Just because your favourite singer didn’t win the Grammy you thought they deserved doesn’t mean that Beyoncé didn’t deserve her’s.
On Feb. 2, the Recording Academy hosted the 67th annual Grammy Awards ceremony, celebrating the achievements of dozens of musicians, lyricists, producers and sound engineers from all around the world. Many awards were given out to many deserving artists, but not every win sat right with audiences at home.
More than anything else, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter being awarded “Album of the Year” and “Best Country Album” seemed to be a point of contention for many.
After the ceremony concluded, all kinds of people posted on social media voicing their displeasure. Nick Adams, an American author, took to X to say: “No, Beyoncé does not deserve to win a Grammy for Best Country Album. Cowboy Carter is not an authentic Country Music Album. The Grammys are a complete and total joke.”
Another X user with a small following wrote: “We all know that Cowboy Carter doesn’t deserve its win for Album of the Year. It only won because the producers of the Grammys knew if Beyoncé didn’t get it, someone would lose their life.”
These are only a few examples of the hateful comments that have spread across a variety of social media platforms in the past two weeks.
On top of that, people began to compare the number of streams each nominated album had acquired before the ceremony to prove that Beyoncé didn’t deserve Album of the Year. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has been streamed nearly 7 billion times, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet has over 5.5 billion streams and Cowboy Carter was only streamed 1.7 billion times.
Furthermore, others have implied that Beyoncé and Jay-Z bought the award in the same way a child with rich parents who donate money to the school might make the varsity sports team even if they aren’t any good at the sport.
While I’ll be the first to admit that Cowboy Carter was not my pick for Album of the Year, I find it easy to acknowledge that Beyoncé deserved the award. First of all, considering the Grammys is about musical technicality and flair, the number of streams an album has isn’t considered when choosing the winner. Secondly, why are we so quick to assume that Beyoncé could not have won this award on her merit alone?
Cowboy Carter is a musically interesting and sonically cohesive body of work. While Beyoncé might not traditionally be a country singer, her album was released as a country record, therefore resulting in it being just as worthy of Best Country Album as anything else in that category. On top of that, the Album of the Year category was jam-packed with a variety of impressive records this year; I think any of the eight artists nominated in that category could have easily taken the award home.
When it comes to award shows like the Grammys, it is easy to get so caught up in who you want to win that you forget to give the final winner — whether they are who you had hoped for or not — the credit they deserve.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is a good album. It’s not my favourite record, but I can acknowledge that it deserved all the awards that it got.
It’s time for you to do the same.