While the 2025 Grammys Awards ran nearly four hours and seemed freakishly redundant at times, it ultimately offered a successful chronicling of last year’s leading trends in music, setting a high bar for future ceremonies.
In previous years, the Grammys have failed to characterize the success of a musical season. In 2023, it awarded Album of the Year to Harry Styles, despite dynamic albums from artists like Beyoncé and Adele that arguably garnered more attention and acclaim.
The ceremony this year seemed hyper-aware of its previous faults, making a dedicated effort to rectify previous mistakes. The past year was among the busiest years for music in recent memory, with blockbuster albums from giants like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, seminal diss tracks from Kendrick Lamar and a summer painted “Brat”-green by Charli XCX. The season also witnessed a meteoric rise from artists like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Shaboozey.
Powerhouse performances made the award show soar. In a showstopper for the ages, Sabrina Carpenter performed a genre-bending jazz rendition of “Espresso” flanked by backup dancers clad in blue bodysuits. The track aptly interluded well with “Please Please Please,” showcasing Carpenter’s unique artistry and stage presence. Though the transitions between the songs felt slightly disjointed, her charisma onstage outshined these flaws.
In another standout performance, Chappell Roan brought the celebrity-studded audience to its feet in a triumphant chant of “Pink Pony Club,” her anthemic synth-pop song about moving to Southern California from the Midwest and unlocking her queer identity.
Shaboozey’s later performance of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” also elicited high audience participation, an homage to its 19-week presence atop the Billboard Hot 100s chart last year. In a crowded field of contenders, Shaboozey’s emerging presence in country music has been a boon for pop culture and Black representation in the genre.
This year, there was also mounting pressure on the Recording Academy to diversify their voting panel as discourse around the whitewashing of mainstream categories galvanized online discussions about the Grammys.
The Recording Academy has long been under scrutiny for snubbing Black artists. Last year, Jay Z’s viral speech about Beyoncé losing Album of the Year four times unleashed an avalanche of pushback against the organization, abounding accusations of racism and whitewashing.
This year, The Grammys appeared to have taken note, signaling an implicit shift in the award show’s trajectory.
The ceremony subverted expectations by awarding Beyoncé Best Country Album, crowning her as the first Black woman to ever receive the award. In a monumental upset, Beyoncé broke a longstanding and notorious streak of losses for the coveted Album of the Year for her genre-defying “Cowboy Carter,” becoming only the fourth Black woman to win the category.
The Grammys also awarded Kendrick Lamar both Song and Record of the Year for his notorious “Not Like Us,” effectively awarding three out of four of the ceremony’s leading categories to Black musicians. Doechii also became the third woman to win Best Rap Album since the category’s inception in 1996, besting a crowded field of male contenders.
The Recording Academy’s decision to award Beyoncé Album of the Year was a bold one, though. In a year where albums like Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” Charli XCX’s “Brat” and Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” dominated music charts, Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” was relatively outshone.
When it comes to awarding the highest quality album from that category, “Cowboy Carter” is the only viable choice. Beyoncé’s interdisciplinary album is a masterful take on the country genre and an instructive history lesson on some of the Black artists who have shaped its trajectory but have been erased from its history.
Though the Recording Academy awarded artists from a broader range of backgrounds than in previous seasons, it is unclear whether the organization was merely attempting to eschew controversy. That said, the artists awarded were highly deserving of their flowers.
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