The Shady Side Of The Grammys

The Grammy Awards market themselves as "music's biggest night," and they might be right. Held annually early in the year by the Recording Academy, they're a celebration of the best and brightest of the previous year's music, with awards handed out in virtually every genre of music with the biggest ones of the night going to Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. The show itself features some trophy presentations along with lots of music performances and collaborations, so it's certainly something to see for big music fans.

However, the Grammys are also very much an extension of the rich and powerful American music industry, and they're as much about putting on a show and advancing the careers of certain singers and bands as they are about rewarding artistic achievement. There's a lot of politics, marketing, and PR machinations involved with presenting music's biggest night each year, as has been done since the late 1950s. Here are some of the seedier, scandalous, and embarrassing elements of the Grammy Awards, past, present, and future.

The Grammy Awards tend to bestow honors on popular artists, but not necessarily the most progressive or important ones. Case in point: huge-voiced torch singer and songwriter Adele has won 15 Grammys. Adele's winning ballads like "Rolling in the Deep" and "Hello," and the LPs 21 and 25 earned a lot of radio play and moved millions of copies, respectively, but Adele isn't widely heralded as a game-changing artist or the voice of a generation in the way that Beyoncé is.

During her acceptance speech when 25 won Album of the Year, Adele voiced confusion over losing to Beyoncé's Lemonade, which Rolling Stone had just named the second best album of 2016. "My artist of my life is Beyoncé ... the Lemonade album was just so monumental," the singer said. 

The reason Adele beat Beyoncé, suggested by CNN, was racially motivated. Lemonade was an album about Black identity, and older Grammy voters didn't care for it or relate to it. CNN also mentioned that only a few African-American artists had taken home the Album of the Year award in the past two decades — Lauryn Hill, Outkast, Ray Charles, and Herbie Hancock. Slate music journalist Chris Molanphy (among others) figured that Grammy organizers elevated the Urban Contemporary category, which Beyoncé was expected to win and did, as a PR move. "I'm convinced the Urban Contemporary award was televised this year cuz this is the last Grammy Bey's taking tonight, sadly," Molanphy tweeted.

The Grammy Awards operate under a slew of eligibility rules and requirements, ensuring that the plaudits artists receive are as credible and industry-approved as possible. According to Stereogum, only once has an awarded Grammy been revoked, and it was one of the major ones, the end result of one of the biggest scandals in pop music history. 

At the 1990 Grammy Awards, European dance-pop duo Milli Vanilli won in the Best New Artist category, defeating Neneh Cherry, Soul II Soul, Tone Loc, and Indigo Girls. That was a logical pick, as Milli Vanilli had enjoyed an extremely successful 1989 and was looking good in 1990, too — three of its first four singles ("Blame it on the Rain," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You," and "Baby Don't Forget My Number") all hit #1 on the pop chart, and the week they won Best New Artist, "All or Nothing" was in the Billboard top 5. 

Within a few months, it was all over. According to the Grammys website, Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian revealed that singers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus were fronts, handsome guys hired to be the face of the group but who hadn't actually sung a note of their recordings. Morvan and Pilatus subsequently returned their Grammys.

One would think that with hundreds of important people in attendance, the Grammy Awards would have a sophisticated security system in place, thus preventing interlopers from getting too close to the talent. And maybe they do, especially after the strange madness that somehow went down at the 1998 ceremony. 

Twice that night, people somehow rushed the stage, got right next to stars, and made it onto the TV broadcast before being whisked away by security. Bob Dylan, who'd win three Grammys that night, including Album of the Year for Time Out of Mind, gave an intimate performance of his song "Love Sick," surrounded by a small group of young people paid $200 each to sit there and look on adoringly. Per The Hollywood Reporter, suddenly, one of those extras, performance artist Michael Portnoy, jumped up and started flailing and gyrating next to a nonplussed Dylan, his shirt off and the words "Soy Bomb" painted on his chest until a show employee escorted him off the stage and kicked him out of the venue.

Securing a Grammy nomination is a milestone achievement for any artist. But they can also be engineered, suggesting that the Grammys aren't as pure and artistically-driven as its organizers would like the world to believe. In December 2012, nominations for the 55th annual Grammy Awards were announced, and the Best Dance Recording category was particularly stacked, featuring entries from Skrillex, Avicii, Calvin Harris, and Al Walser (via NPR). Not familiar with Walser or his nominated song, "I Can't Live Without You"? Few were.

Per Spin, at the time of his nomination, his Facebook page had just over 1,400 likes, and his YouTube videos had been viewed about 7,000 times. Walser is a producer and DJ from Liechtenstein as well as the author of Musicians Make it Big. The book is full of tips and tricks to exploit the music industry's back channels, which is how he gamed himself a Grammy nom. He used Grammy365, a private social network for Grammy voters, and sent out about 7,000 messages asking people to listen to (and vote for) "I Can't Live Without You," and it worked. (He still lost to Skrillex, however.)

In 2012, folk singer Linda Chorney also used Grammy365 to get herself a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album for Emotional Jukebox. She paid the $100 fee to join the site, and, like Walser, campaigned to voters, simply asking them to listen to her music. They did, and subsequently nominated her, however media reports that she'd never actually sold any of her music put a damper on her big moment. In reality, Chorney is said to have sold some "10,000 albums" (via The Hollywood Reporter), albeit independently, which means those sales didn't register on certain industry watchlists. Public outcry aside, perhaps the Grammys would do well to clarify exactly how the nomination process works, in an effort to avoid such unnecessary controversy. 

In January 2020, the Recording Academy, the music industry organization that awards the Grammys, placed its chief executive, Deborah Dugan, on administrative leave just five months after she took the job, and mere days before the 2020 Grammy Awards show (via NBC News). According to Rolling Stone, it was after a senior member of the Academy lodged "a formal allegation of misconduct" against Dugan. Per NBC News, Dugan had also allegedly fostered a "toxic" workplace with a management style characterized as "abusive and bullying." After her suspension, Dugan filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, citing discrimination and claiming that she was punished because she'd registered concerns about other Academy employees to its Human Resources department in December 2019. 

Along with allegations of gender discrimination and sexual harassment, Dugan took issue with the Grammy nominating process, citing "egregious conflicts of interest, improper self-dealing by board members, and voting irregularities." In other words, Dugan claimed, the Grammys were rigged. "If there are certain artists that the producer would like [to perform] on the [televised Grammy Awards] show, there are strong hints, influence, that might affect a select few in the nominating process," she said. Dugan said that Ariana Grande and Ed Sheeran were denied Song of the Year nominations in 2020 because powerful Grammy selectors had their own preferred artists in mind.

The Recording Academy denied everything, citing "rigorous and well-publicized protocols in place to ensure that voting is absolutely fair."