No one on stage on Sunday night mentioned Dugan’s allegations, although Tyler, the Creator – winner of the best hip-hop album award for Igor and responsible for the night’s best live performance, complete with burning suburban houses and a giant fake sink hole in the stage – let them have it with both barrels in the press room afterwards. Tyler, the Creator performs at the Grammys. ‘It’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word’. “Y’all got 365 days to sort this shit out,” he declared.
Not just hip-hop artists but black artists generally had “never been respected” at the awards, and it had to stop.
His central message, however, was clear: the Grammys are inherently racist. If you’d ever looked at glamorous red-carpet photos of that event and wished you were there, here was a reason to be profoundly grateful you weren’t. His speech at Clive Davis’s pre-Grammys party apparently went on for 50 minutes. One unconfirmed rumour had Taylor Swift pulling out of a surprise performance at the 2020 awards in solidarity with Dugan. The whole thing is so rigged, her lawsuit suggested, that an artist managed by a member of the Academy’s board was allowed to sit on the nomination committee of 2019’s song of the year award, a category they were both eligible for, and subsequently nominated in. Just days prior to the event, Deborah Dugan, the former CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences filed a lawsuit against the organising body, alleging sexual harassment and racial discrimination, accusing her predecessor as CEO of rape, and referring to “irregularities and conflicts” in the Grammys’ nomination and review process. A lmost all awards ceremonies tend to come with a side order of controversy, but whatever took place at this year’s Grammys was clearly going to be overshadowed by what had happened before it.
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