Washington Post Proves the Grammys Have a Problem With Hip-hop

The 58th Annual Grammy Awards aired Monday night (Feb. 15), and though Kendrick Lamar finally won a Best Rap Album statuette, he lost in the evening's bigger, multi-genre categories of Album of the Year and Song of the Year. While Taylor Swift's 1989 and Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" were worthy victors, The Washington Post has dug up some numbers that suggest the Grammys have a larger issue in recognizing and awarding hip-hop artists.

Of the Grammy's three major categories - Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year - a hip-hop act has won just once when Outkast took home Album of the Year in 2004 for Speakerboxxx/Love Below. That represents 1.2 percent of the 81 winners since 1989, when rap first received its own genre category. Of the 421 nominations in those three categories over the same span of time, only 34 (or 8.1 percent) have been for hip-hop acts. In other words, that Kendrick and To Pimp a Butterfly were nominated at all represents a rare instance of recognition.

The numbers used in the study are a bit skewed, as genre was difficult to differentiate with cross-over songs like Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again," which was classified as pop. Similarly, Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won Album of the Year in 1999, but was nominated mostly in R&B categories, and so the work is considered an R&B album. Read The Washington Post's reasoning at length and see their data in chart form to demonstrate the discrepancy between hip-hop's marketplace impact and award show recognition.

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