Singing in Non-English -- A Grammys Commentary

Is it worth bothering with the Recording Academy when they do stuff like this?

Feb 06, 2023

Hello — Long time no post! I’m going to get right to it because I don’t want to spend more time saying what needs to be said than I have to.

So. The 2023 Grammy awards happened! And a lot of exciting wins happened as well. There was also a tribute to 50 years of Hip-Hop that I really would like to watch and analyze when I get the chance. I’d love to discuss those in detail, but I’m (still) in grad school these days and unless someone pays me a substantial amount of money, I will not be doing that. I will, however, highlight a few things that absolutely floored me and the public (aka Twitter users) particularly focusing on Bad Bunny.

Last semester, I spent a lot of time doing research on Bad Bunny— This included collecting TikToks, looking at comments, and reading articles (there are truly not nearly enough people in musicology/ethnomusicology talking about him or reggaeton/Latin trap in general!) and listening to Un Verano Sin Ti many, many, MANY times. This was for a course I was taking on music and nation-building and a presentation and paper that I wrote. It’s because of this that I was really looking forward to seeing who won the coveted Album Of The Year (AOTY) category this year — Un Verano Sin Ti was up, and it was the first all Spanish language album to be nominated in this category.

It was up against some absolute heavy hitters — The most prominent of these being Beyoncé’s Renaissance. This, of course, is an album that I believe to be wholly and utterly excellent sonically and objectively one of the best releases of the whole year, and a really notable release in her career. However, please let me point out my Beyoncé Bias…. I’m a huge fan. Like… I like her more than a normal amount, okay? Still, I think Renaissance was just great music. And many others do! Also in that category were some other strong contenders like Adele, Kendrick Lamar, and Lizzo.

Harry Styles’ Harry’s House was also nominated for Album of the year.

What do I know about Harry Styles? I know that he used to be in One Direction, I know he’s English, I know he has a divisive fashion sense, I know people on twitter fight day and night about his sexual orientation, and I know that he did not spit on Chris Pine during the Don’t Worry Darling press tour.

I know some of his music. Many of us recall how “Watermelon Sugar” was inescapable for about a year, and that if you spent any time online “As It Was” is pretty spreading like a communicable disease to this day. Another contender would be “Music For A Sushi Restaurant” or as I call it in my head, “Music For An Early 2000’s Apple Commercial.” (It will never hold a candle to “Bruises” by Chairlift, “New Soul” by Yael Naim, or “Shut Up and Let Me Go” by the Ting Tings, but whatever.)

What I and many of us did not know, was that Styles’ album would WIN Album of the year.

That is correct— I actually fell asleep before this was announced and had no idea until I woke up this morning. I don’t tend to watch the actual show, but I just watch my Twitter timeline to see what everyone is saying and…. oh wow.

BEYTHOVEN is HEATED | non-affiliated fan account @beyonceparkwood

Beyoncé deserves better.

richie reseda @RichieReseda

How many times does Beyoncé have to make the Album of the Year to win Album of the Year?

♡ @vulnicuravirgo

the possibility of Renaissance losing to harry’s active crack house increasing…

Not Harry’s Active Crack House..?????

Styles’ acceptance speech seemed to add insult to injury for many when he said, “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often.”

HUGE bts fan⁷ @JIHYYH

this is just such a crazy thing to say during black history month 😭

I will say, I truly have no idea what he’s referring to here. If anyone knows, please do let me know. Here’s an interpretation that says that this alludes to Styles’ queerness(?):

may²⁸ @stylinarts

no because i thought the queer community would be the first to catch on the "it doesn’t happen very often to people like me" but apparently not

Again, what do y’all think? I really do not know enough about him to say anything for sure.

Either way, Twitter has been alight with many takes, opinions, and also with outrage, celebration, and more. I do take sort of sick satisfaction in days like this sometimes as this is extremely entertaining for me personally. I’m just as annoyed at Beyoncé’s snub as everyone else! This is especially poignant when you consider the previous and seemingly deliberate snubs against Lemonade and Beyoncé in previous years.

I will say— It’s not like she’s lacking in Grammys. Like. She quite literally is now the artist with the most Grammy wins out of anyone ever with now 32 Grammys. This is an astonishing accomplishment, and we should absolutely celebrate that. I think that people can’t help but feel miffed, though, when this is the case:

Ashley K. @AshleyKSmalls

Saying “this doesn’t happen to people like me very often” when a Black woman hasn't won that award since 1999 is crazy lol

Yes, you heard that right. The last time was in 1999 when Lauryn Hill won for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” This is an absolutely phenomenal and once-in-a-lifetime album, if you’re not familiar.

The next thing that upset me about this awards show came during Bad Bunny’s phenomenal performance.

This image is from @keatingssixth on Twitter, shows the captions from his performance.

[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]

[SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH]

Are we being absolutely for real right now? Now I’m no award show or captioning expert, but if you know that he’s going to perform a certain song, why not… you know… look up the freaking lyrics on Genius.com? Or have a translator? Like you do realize there are millions of people whose job it is to caption and transcribe media? What of people who need captions for accessibility reasons? What about the fact that after English, Spanish is the most spoken language in the United States? Also, the GRAMMY’s — Held in LOS ANGELES (SPANISH NAME!!!) in CALIFORNIA sharing a border with MEXICO?

The point I’m trying to make here is that this treatment of both Bad Bunny as an artist and the Spanish language here is ABYSMAL. These tweets say it best:

Mel Smith @iamMelsmith

Please stop with the “he had a big year” bullshit. I hate when NIGGAS play center like that. Bad Bunny literally had the longest running #1 of the entire year. A LATIN ALBUM ON AMERICAN CHARTS. 13 WEEKS. If there was any album beating Renaissance, it was UN VERANO SIN TI.

Nelson Flores @nelsonlflores

This really is a great metaphor for neoliberal multiculturalism. It doesn’t really matter what language he is using since diversity is just a vibe that is completely interchangeable in the service of capitalist expansion.

Get Her, Jade! @keatingssixth

This is— https://t.co/5B0M3LZOeC

Jonathan Rosa @DrJonathanRosa

“…the coloniality of language… capture[s] the colonizer’s imagination of the colonized as having no Language, that is, no Eurocentrically valorized expressivity]” —Veronelli

Broadcast of Bad Bunny’s 2023 Grammy Awards performance with closed captions that read, “[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH] [SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH]”

With the latter tweet linking the article on the Coloniality of Language

Jonathan Rosa @DrJonathanRosa

Here’s Veronelli’s article on The Coloniality of Language for those who might be interested:

dropbox.comVeronelli.pdfShared with Dropbox

Here are a few parts of my paper/presentation on Bad Bunny and his popularity and importance in the present day.

(The Musicology Now article I quoted)

My presentation focused on TikTok and Puerto Rican nationalism, but I believe my points still stand!

Basically, this whole thing was disappointing to me not just as a music student, a fan of popular music, and a fan of both Bad Bunny and Beyoncé, but as someone who believes that artists deserve to be respected on the most basic human level. Even something that appears to be as “small” as lazy captioning has huge implications. On top of the other snubs, on top of the weird montage they showed that contained imagery of protestors hugging police mere days after Tyre Nichols was brutally murdered by police, and the fact that many artists like The Weeknd, Silk Sonic, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean and…. Styles’ former bandmate Zayn Malik, have all criticized and even completely denounced the Grammys and the Recording Academy.

zayn @zaynmalik

Fuck the grammys and everyone associated. Unless you shake hands and send gifts, there’s no nomination considerations. Next year I’ll send you a basket of confectionary.

I say all of this to say that as we continue to discuss topics like decolonization and institutions perpetuating racism, colonialism, and white supremacy… Why not take a long hard look at the recording academy? Why not question the deciding factors of the Grammy awards? Why not actually stop feeling bad and mumbling and grumbling about this every single year and then move on instead of placing artist value and quality on these wins and accolades?

Rhetorical questions, of course. And I don’t mean to imply that we should pull up to their HQ and burn it down, but rather maybe not taking these people as seriously as we do, knowing the fraught and deeply problematic history of the music industry as a whole.

When all is said and done, I think we can agree that America…? America has a problem.

All of this was written on pure fumes and is not particularly scholarly, but what matters is that I had fun and got it out of my system!

Thanks for reading! Here are some TikToks about Bad Bunny —

El Apagon Explained

Bad Bunny criticizes the Puerto Rican Government:

Bad Bunny at the VMA’s

major music moments

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