Why Drake Could Actually Win Album of the Year at the Grammys
This year’s marquee Grammy Awards contest (Album of the Year) is Beyoncé vs. Adele. Last year it was Taylor vs. Kendrick. The year before it was Beck vs. Beyoncé, better remembered as, “Who is Beck?” Despite the coveted Album of the Year Grammy nominations being split five ways, the conversation tends to converge on two artists and what those artists do or do not represent for the future of music.
Beyonce, like Kendrick in 2016 and Kanye in all years, is thought to embody audacity and novelty. Lemonade, her dazzling sixth solo album and second visual album, is a shapeshifting tour de force, effortlessly weaving R&B, hip-hop, country, rock, and electronica into a feverish exploration of black womanhood. To top it off, the album was revealed during a mysterious, attention-capturing HBO special. Beyonce is innovation.
Adele, musically more of a stalwart than an upstart, is thought to embody comfort and resilience. 25, her slow-burning third album, is a familiar yet moving soul record, unchallenging but deeply felt. Her album was announced via a press release. Adele is tradition.
We’ve seen this matchup before, and it’s boring. Not only is it too defined by the optics of the awards, which are absurdly skewed (in her 2016 album of the year acceptance speech Taylor Swift somehow positioned herself as the underdog of the night, and people bought it), but there are no real stakes. If Adele wins, the Grammys are the out-of-touch rockist bastion we’ve always suspected it to be. If Beyoncé wins, the out-of-touch rockist bastion makes its first bold decision in eighteen years, when The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below doesn’t really count due to a solid chunk of the album being a reproduction of the funk and soul the Grammys had by then assimilated into its canon). But it does nothing structural or substantial to prevent another drought, like change its problematic membership criteria, or publicize its voting processes and the makeup of its members.
A more entertaining horse race is Drake vs. everybody else. Drake had an absurd 2016. Views, his clunky fifth album, was a streaming juggernaut, tallying 1 billion streams on Apple Music, a first, and topping the Billboard charts for multiple weeks despite not being the top-selling album for most of those weeks. This can’t be overstated. Through equivalent album units (1500 streams or 10 digital track sales), Drake managed to hold down the top spot even as he continually lost it in terms of albums sold. In other words, Drake found a way to turn fandom into ruthlessly quantifiable sales, a feat that has eluded the music industry since the first Napster download. And he did it by tethering himself to a technology company rather than to a label or advertiser.
To put it differently, if Beyoncé is innovation and Adele is tradition, then Drake is efficiency.
Efficiency sounds more suited to describing energy-saving home appliances than artistry, but it’s arguably the Grammys’ fundamental value. Year after year, the Grammys compel us to have the same conversations with different surrogates. This year it’s Beyonce vs. Adele. Next year it could be Migos vs. Arctic Monkeys, a conversation I find exhausting even as a joke.
Views transforms the Album of the Year category from a bland title fight to a battle for the soul of the industry. Drake and Apple Music are the most direct winners if Views takes home the top prize, but if they pull it off, the upset would have tremendous ripples. Even though Drake is obviously an industry titan, compared to Beyonce and Adele, whose album rollouts were very old-guard (driven by singles and TV spots), Drake’s multi-platform streaming dominance is a severe disruption, for better and for worse. Views would be the third rap album to ever win Album of the Year despite being the third worst rap album to ever be nominated (first is The Heist and second is Recovery). Equally ambivalent, its victory would enshrine the stability of streaming, which pays half-pennies to artists and even less to songwriters, is subject to catalog culls, and prioritizes annoying exclusive releases to boost subscriptions, but which also has increased access to music. And unequivocally horrifying, it would confirm to Drake that he doesn’t need songwriter Hush, forever damning him, and us, to “Chaining Tatum” level bars. A victory for Views would be an existential L, a travesty of the highest order, but also a clear signal that the Grammys knows the real future of the industry.
Excitement doesn’t come cheap.
