After being snubbed by the Grammys for the better part of two decades, Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year for “Cowboy Carter.” Despite having won more Grammys than anyone (Bey had won 32 times before Sunday night and had won 35 by the end of it) and having been previously nominated by the Recording Academy for album of the year four times, she repeatedly lost to other artists. Academy members’ refusal to vote for her in this category was emblematic of the academy’s systemic racism and misogyny, detractors argued — and it’s an argument I agreed with.
Academy members’ refusal to vote for her in this category was emblematic of the academy’s systemic racism and misogyny.
The Nation explored this phenomenon of the most decorated artist in Grammy history not winning the Grammy’s highest honor in a 2023 article, in which Kali Holloway interviewed voting members of the Recording Academy, some of whom explained why they hadn’t voted for Beyoncé. “[E]very time [Beyoncé] does something new, it’s a big event and everyone’s supposed to quake in their shoes — it’s a little too portentous,” one septuagenarian voter said.
Holloway explained there is a “counterintuitive idea on repeat here, which seems to be that Beyoncé is in danger of becoming too decorated.” Adding, “That her cultural impact has been too outsize, too disruptive. In short, that she should be penalized for taking up too much rarefied space. Once again, it’s misogynoir — the intertwined anti-Blackness and misogyny that pathologizes and stigmatizes Black women. Same refrain, different song.”
A Time magazine article entitled “Beyoncé’s Album of the Year Snub Fits Into the Grammys’ Long History of Overlooking Black Women,” also published in 2023, made a similar argument. “Among those emotions were anger, frustration, and resignation at the Recording Academy’s history of overlooking Black artists, and specifically Black women, in this major category,” Moises Mendez II wrote. “In Beyoncé’s case, each of the four times she has been nominated for album of the year, she has lost to a white artist whose album many argued was less culturally significant than hers.”
If you still have your doubts, take note of this: Beyoncé is only the fourth Black woman in history to win in this category, and the first since Lauryn Hill won for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999.
After Beyoncé lost the album of the year category for a fourth time in 2023, she released “Cowboy Carter,” a country album, in 2024. It was a shrewd move to disrupt an industry and awards show which perpetuates racial inequities with its rigid categories/genres and excludes certain artists (namely women and people of color) from certain genres and spaces. Beyoncé was famously booed at the 2016 Country Music Awards, when she made an appearance with The Chicks. Audience members screamed racial epithets at her. These sentiments were echoed in online spheres, too.
Beyoncé is only the fourth black woman in history to win in this category, and the first since Lauryn Hill won in 1999.
In an Instagram post on March 19, 2024, Beyoncé described the process of making “Cowboy Carter.” “This album has been over five years in the making,” she wrote. “It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.”
She infiltrated the country music space, which despite its original Black influence, has been mostly white, mostly male and historically anti-Black/racist and she rejected the industry’s imposed limitations, undergirded as it is by misogynoir. It was a deeply sophisticated and deliberate choice to use her music to make this point.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the undeniable commercial and creative success of “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé did not receive one Country Music Awards nomination.
She made a nod to these structural inequities in her acceptance speech for country album of the year during the Grammys: “I think sometimes ‘genre’ is a code word to keep us in our place as artists. And I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about. And to stay persistent.”
This theme became the throughline of her messaging for the night, in which she implicitly wove her resistance to the industry’s constraining standards. In her acceptance speech for Album of the Year, Beyoncé said, “I dedicate this to Miss Martell,” referring to Linda Martell, the first Black woman to break through in country music, with notable and surprising success in the 1960s. “I hope we just keep pushing forward, opening doors.”
Beyoncé broke the rules of the industry to defy its racialized and gendered constraints. The outrageous success of her country album — in a genre historically steeped in white supremacy and anti-Black violence (innumerable country music stars have publicly used the N-word, for example) — produced discomfort for some, but it also demanded attention in its disruptiveness and ingenuity. She is a potent reminder for us all, that, when the game is rigged, sometimes you need to break the rules to win.
