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    What Black Art Representation Gets Wrong About Black Women Artists

    By 7 Mins Read
    Image credit: Recording Academy / GRAMMYs Youtube

    Last night at the Grammy’s, Jay-Z gave an impassioned yet comical speech about what representation looks like while being the second recipient of an all-Black award named after a Black man: the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award.

    Honestly, the particular award feels more like a public relations stunt by the academy in an attempt to right the wrongs of past which has notoriously lacked Black representation for an awards ceremony. In a country where Black music has been so much of the zeitgeist of the 20th and 21st centuries, Black artists still struggle for recognition and equal opportunity, even at the highest levels. I guess naming an award after a Black male rapper whose greatest contribution to the art form is discovering a white male rapper is supposed to model restitution.

    I’m not speaking of the financial restitution he had to pay Dee Barnes, either.

    During his speech, Jay-Z paid homage to the first winners of the Best Rap Album Award, Will Smith and D.J. Jazzy Jeff, who famously boycotted but still watched after making light of the futility of that action; he also joked about how he did the same thing. Carter remarked on how DMX had two amazing albums the year Jay-Z won but was not nominated at all, and to that point, he is not wrong. Jay’s impassioned plea was for Black artists to continue showing up at award shows “until they give you all the accolades you think you deserve, until they call you a chairman, until they call you a genius until they call you the greatest of all time.”

    I think it is fair to oscillate between the necessity of Black representation at large award shows while also questioning why white validation is considered the best validation, but I digress. Jay-Z is undeniably a genius, but it is hard to decipher if he is pointing out that Beyoncé’s slights are because she is Black or because she is a Black woman. The last Black woman to win Album of the Year was Lauryn Hill for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999. Even though still underrepresented, Black men/groups have won four Album of the Year Awards since. Jay-Z pointed out that even by the Recording Academy’s own metrics, his wife being the most rewarded artist without receiving the most prestigious award is non-sensical and a totally fair point but how much is his ire based on it being his wife, who is Black rather than how Black women are treated in the industry, as a whole. 

    I like Jay-Z. Without my criticisms of Black capitalism, I think he is a virtuoso and his cultural impact is indelible, but it is a bit ironic to watch him receive an award named after a man who has made millions from misogyny and who notoriously beat Black women, while alerting a nervous yet starstruck audience of not-as-big-stars of how a Black woman is being slighted, whether calling out misogynoir directly or not. If we are going talk about a Black woman not winning the Album of the Year who has such amazing global impact, who is the most winningest Grammy-nominated artist of all time, why have we settled with the award being named for Dr. Dre and not her? Is Beyoncé not a business? Has she, too, not produced a hit movie? Her deals with many brands, including having her performances on Netflix, should solidify her as having just as much business acumen as someone selling overpriced headphones.

    Are we willing to accept that Black misogyny can go first just because it is Black?

    I will not deny that Dr. Dre has had a significant impact on Black music and its global distribution. When many record labels were shunning Black artists, he created his own label, discovering Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, the Game, and, of course, Eminem, but he also has had multiple suits of copyright infringement against him for songs on the albums of these very artists he “produced.” No human is infallible, and we are all deserving of grace but Dr. Dre being the namesake of an award that honors Black ingenuity and cultural impact while having a long history of abusing women, including multiple exes and copyright infringement, feels like adding wrong to the wrong it was attempting to correct. The move to name the award after Dr. Dre clearly stems from rap music being associated with Black artistry more than any other genre, including R&B, even though the number #1 selling rap artist of all time is, in fact, Eminem, but was there not another Black mogul available? 

    Black women have always been just as important in the formation of Black artistry but even further from receiving the credit than their male counterparts, whether singing lead, background vocals, or hitting the record button; we have always been part of the journey.  When the opportunity to talk about the global impact of a Black artist arose, the academy, so familiar with her contribution that she is dictated as one of the five most important female rap artists, per their website, did not name the award after Sylvia Robinson, whose impact paved the way for Dr. Dre.

    Sylvia Robinson, sometimes known just as “Sylvia,” was responsible for making rap mainstream. She and her husband founded Sugar Hill Records record label and she produced the Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s 1982 hit song “The Message,” which was chosen as the number 1 song of the “The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time,” in 2012. Not only was she a guitarist on Ike and Tina Turner’s first Grammy-nominated song, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” she was also a songwriter and the inspiration for the character Cookie Lyons in Empire. While being the founder of multiple record labels, she also discovered acts such as Angie Stone and Naughty By Nature. While I agree that Dr. Dre’s name and record sales are much bigger, Sylvia’s impact predated his and she is responsible for what is credited as the first mainstream rap song, “Rapper’s Delight,” which she produced.

    A Black woman was an extremely integral part of bringing rap to a mainstream audience but a Black man who abused Black women gets the award named after him instead, someone cue the band. 

    Kyla Jenée Lacey is an accomplished third-person bio composer. Her spoken word has garnered tens of millions of views, and has been showcased on Pop Sugar, Write About Now, Buzzfeed, Harper’s Bizarre, Diet Prada, featured on the Tamron Hall show, and Laura Ingraham from Fox News called her work, “Anti-racist propaganda.”. She has performed spoken word at over 300 colleges in over 40 states. Kyla has been a finalist in the largest regional poetry slam in the country, no less than five times, and was nominated as Campus Activities Magazine Female Performer of the Year. Her work has been acknowledged by several Grammy-winning artists. Her poetry has been viewed over 50 million times and even used on protest billboards in multiple countries. She has written for large publications such as The Huffington Post, BET.com, and the Root Magazine and is the author of "Hickory Dickory Dock, I Do Not Want Your C*ck!!!," a book of tongue-in-cheek poems, about patriarchy....for manchildren.

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