By In 2020, when Tyler, the Creator won his first Grammy for 2019’s IGOR for Best Rap Album, the artist stated in the Grammy Awards Press Room that whenever people that look like him put out anything genre-bending, it gets put in an “urban” category.
“I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. That’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me,” he said immediately following his win.
Five years later, we have a Black woman taking home the award for Best Rap Album despite also making a genre-bending piece of work.
Doechii is now the third woman to ever win the category since its introduction to the ceremony in 1995, which is a huge milestone considering that Alligator Bites Never Heal was described as a mixtape, where Doechii explores various sounds that are not just limited to rap.
The difference is this time, the body of work that took the category, calls out this hypocrisy in one of its lead singles.
In BOOM BAP by Doechii, she challenges those at her label questioning whether or not her sound is hip-hop.
“Say it’s real and it’s rap. And it boom and it bap. And it bounce and it clap. And it’s house and it’s trap. It’s everything!” she exclaims on the track.
On my first listen, this song was a clear standout on the album because it encapsulates a pattern that I’ve been witnessing in pop culture in recent years, which is artists reclaiming genres that originated from Black culture, but Black artists are now excluded from.
When Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter, she made it clear that her heritage as a Southern woman has always made her “country enough” despite her being a Black woman who has made pop, dance and R&B for a majority of her career. The roots of her country upbringing were always present regardless of what genres she was experimenting with in the past.
She also used this album as an opportunity to highlight Black country artists like Linda Martell and Tanner Adell, who were often overlooked in conversations about the genre.
The music industry in the United States has a long history of profiting off of Black culture while simultaneously boxing artists into categories that are kept separate from their white and non-black counterparts.
Throughout the 1920’s and 1940’s, rock, jazz, blues, soul and funk records made by Black artists were sold as “race records” and only played on stations with a predominantly Black listenership. When these records gained enough popularity to reach white audiences, record labels would re-record the tracks with white performers as a means to avoid white and Black audiences intermixing.
This led to countless musicians receiving no royalties and no way to be compensated or credited for their music.
Attempts to keep music made for and by Black people at this time were made, with the founding of Black Swan Records, the first Black-owned record company to sell popular music and exceptions like George W. Johnson, whose recordings were broadcasted to all audiences.
These early examples prove that Black musicians have been recording everything from classical, to vaudeville, to jazz, to country for over a century, contributing to what the general public recognizes as pop music today.
This emphasizes why Beyoncé’s Country Album and Album of the Year wins are not only long overdue, but a sign that the mainstream is finally willing to except that Black culture’s stamp on music as a whole exists in nearly every genre and we can make any and every type of art we desire beyond the boundaries of genres.
