BTS on the 2022 Grammy Awards. Picture Supply: Getty Images / Amy Sussman
For 3 years, BTS have been nominated for Grammy Awards — and, in doing so, the celebrity group have made historical past a number of instances over for being the primary Korean group to snag these nominations (5 in whole) and to carry out on the award present. However on Feb. 5, for the third 12 months in a row, the Recording Academy snubbed one of many bestselling acts within the music trade.
BTS have been up for 2 awards on the sixty fifth Grammy Awards on the Crypto.com Area in Los Angeles — one for his or her “Yet to Come” music video and one for greatest pop duo/group efficiency for “My Universe,” their collaboration with Coldplay.
The snub got here as no shock to thousands and thousands of BTS followers, referred to as ARMYs. For a lot of, it highlighted how out of contact the Academy is with in style music and additional solidified the impression that the voters are older, out of contact, and largely white.
It is onerous to not ignore BTS’s remedy on the Grammys, nicknamed “The Scammys” by some followers. On Sunday, when saying the nominees for greatest music video, as an alternative of a photograph from the nominated “Yet to Come” video, Grammy producers flashed a photograph from a Hyundai advert — from BTS’s 2022 World Cup advert marketing campaign with the carmaker. To make issues worse, the picture lower off one of many members, the beloved rapper Suga.
Hey, #GRAMMYs , @RecordingAcad , how about if you current a nominee for Finest Music Video, you utilize a picture of the particular Music Video that was nominated…
That is NOT the right picture from #BTS #YetToCome nominated MV… pic.twitter.com/qtvdCwgcYO— Li 🎶 💜 – Fan Account (@LiAlerp) February 6, 2023
In the meantime, BTS’s final group live performance, “Yet to Come,” was released as a concert film in film theaters final week, and on the two screenings I attended, many of the followers weren’t conscious the Grammys have been on the identical weekend.
“The Scammys are always like this, run by ancient racist dinosaurs,” a 32-year previous TV author in Los Angeles famous after one of many screenings. “Beyoncé has won the most number of Grammys, which is historic, but has never won album of the year. If it wasn’t Beyoncé, then you’d think it would go to Bad Bunny, but he didn’t win either.”
It isn’t just like the Recording Academy is not conscious of its perceived racism. In 2022, it prolonged membership to 2,000 “diverse music creators and professionals” to strive “cultivating a community that embodies the ethnicities, genres and crafts that power the music industry.” It proudly extolled the elevated illustration of girls, nonbinary individuals, and other people of colour within the new cohort, with out giving a breakdown of the identical teams of the prevailing 12,000 different members. And but, when one really appears to be like on the figures, the 2022 cohort was nonetheless majority male (52 p.c) and largely white (33 p.c), with 24 p.c saying they’d want to not disclose their ethnicity. AAPI illustration within the cohort got here in at simply 4 p.c. These percentages apply to roughly one-seventh of your complete Academy, so their illustration is probably diluted to far lower than these figures.
It is obvious that the Academy’s future wants range in membership, awards, and media play because it struggles for relevance in a altering music panorama. It isn’t an ideal comparability, however final 12 months’s Grammys viewership — with its much-hyped BTS performance — clocked in at 8.93 million. In distinction, world viewership of BTS member Jungkook’s four-hour Weverse stay stream final week drew 16.3 million viewers globally, who tuned in to observe him sing karaoke, reply questions, and play together with his canine in his pajamas whereas drunk.
Finally, for a lot of followers, the Grammys, which have but to bestow an precise award on BTS, are more and more irrelevant; the group proceed to set information with different awards, information, and accomplishments.
Final 12 months, after a live performance in Las Vegas, the place the Grammys have been held, BTS’s RM stated as a lot. He informed the followers: “We didn’t come to Vegas for the Grammys, we came for the ARMYs. The records, the titles, the accomplishments, the trophies, they’re really important, but that wasn’t the first reason why I started all these things. These two hours: communion, energy, eye-to-eye, singing along, dancing together. This communication, this is everything. This is why we’re doing this.”
Nonetheless, the dearth of Asian illustration within the Recording Academy appears to disregard that Ok-pop, which is greater than BTS, is an more and more in style style each globally and within the US. Acts like Blackpink are headlining Coachella whereas smaller teams are promoting out live shows, so the Grammys snub simply erases what thousands and thousands of followers need — in addition to who they see themselves mirrored in and who they need talking for them.
#superstar #celeb
