Excellence over race
Protests, in a variety of forms, took over the Grammys. Thank God it was Bruno Mars who swept all the major awards. Now I am not a fan of Bruno Mars even if I acknowledge his great talent and numerous achievements. And I will not be his fan just because his mother was Filipino. But by scooping up all six biggies, Mars held the fort against those who would hijack industry awards meant to reward excellence in craft and convert them into platforms of protest.
America is imploding. Its social and political environment has become too polluted with hypocrisy and bigotry even sports and the arts are now gasping for breath. Athletes are "taking the knee" as if euphemism can cushion the insult to a flag under whose fluttering command U.S, servicemen are giving up their lives for a country that is no longer the same.
There was a time when America held the moral beacon for the rest of the world. And no stronger sinew kept that beacon so high and for so long than American movies. It was American movies that taught the world what a great country the United States was. It was the American film industry that best promoted what a beautiful dream the American dream was.
It was small wonder then that every time the Oscars swung around each year, the world was riveted to who or what excelled in such a lofty and noble craft. But that was before some black artists began questioning why the Oscars were so white. All of a sudden, an award that was supposed to reward excellence became a matter of skin color. The poison of politics has invaded the arts.
And if the Oscars readily fell, why should the Grammys be any exception? Prior to the actual awards, much has been made about skin color being about to take center stage on the biggest night of the American recording industry. There was a lot of expectant hype about how, as the Associated Press would report it, hip-hop was to have a historic night.
What a night of long faces it was then when it was the R&B-rooted Bruno Mars, while definitely not white was not exactly black either, who came away with the apples. Jay-Z, who was to be the black messiah meant to deliver the awards away from white hands, came away with empty hands. And while Kendrick Lamar, the night's other big bet, came away with five, he never got to where, in the new outlook, race mattered. Rap just cannot rise above what it takes to excel overall.
But still the damage has been done. Even if Bruno Mars saved the day for the Grammys, there is no assurance the awards can turn away from the path they are now headed. The fact that the idea has been planted at all, that the color of one's skin should determine any reward for excellence, spells the beginning of a demise that is irreversible. As with America as a whole, and the Oscars as a consequence, so will the Gramnmys in the end.
Gone are the days when protest, as a matter of right, was the subject of poem or song. In the '60s and '70s, the world saw flourish a new genre of protest songs that were as beautiful as they were meaningful, driving even the venerable Nobel Prize to reinvent itself and belatedly give Bob Dylan the recognition it can no longer postpone and ignore. True artists protest if they have to in their art, finding neither honor nor joy in recognition outside the rarefied air of art's excellence.
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