Every year, the Grammy Awards celebrate the highest achievements of the biggest names in the industry. This year, audiences witnessed artists like Chappell Roan, Doechii and Lady Gaga speak about trans rights, racism and healthcare during their acceptance speeches.
There was also something less discussed, but rare for the Recording Academy to acknowledge being awarded.
Kendrick Lamar dropped a series of songs discussing fellow rapper Drake back in May 2024. The songs went into detail about the serious accusations against the artist such as pedophilia, sexual abuse and even went as far as to call him a “colonizer.” One of the songs in the series, titled “Not Like Us,” brought home five Grammys for the artist.
The song is more than just a diss track or a generic rap beef we’re subjected to every few years. It’s a cultural phenomenon that goes in-depth on topics most artists haven’t touched on.
To openly call out a man as famous and wealthy as Drake on something often swept under the rug is already rare. But to receive so much mainstream success from it is nearly unheard of. When played at the Grammys, he got a crowd of A-list stars singing the lyrics “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.”
Someone such as Kendrick using his platform to unabashedly articulate his issues with an artist’s abuse of power is meaningful. Regardless of how deeply you follow the rap beef, it feels as if someone is running in the A-list crowd that actually cares about the difficult and problematic parts of celebrity culture.
You would think that the Academy would finally be starting to validate victims of assault, right? That is until you do some research into who else won awards this year.
The Grammys, on the eve of the show, honored Joel Katz with the Trustees Award.
Terri McIntyre, the former executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Academy, alleges that Katz, their former general counsel, offered her $1 million in exchange for her silence when sexually assaulted by her boss twice two decades ago.
Katz is the one who told her it was time to “put this to bed” and sign an NDA and is notorious for being one of the main leaders in the sexual abuse coverups in the Academy.
A night where music calling out sexual assault is celebrated, but just the night before they were rewarding men for covering it up. It’s performative.
“Not Like Us” is incredible as a body of art, but what is art if not a confrontation of real-world issues?
The Academy can award music for the sake of it being music as often as it wants, but it must understand and engage with the deeper meanings of the songs they are celebrating.
The Academy is exactly like the person Kendrick antagonizes. “They not like us.”
