The illusion of inclusion: why the Grammys keep failing global music

This year, every artist nominated in the Grammys’ African Performance category came from just one nation: Nigeria. That is, except for the US’ Chris Brown, who was somehow deemed eligible as an ‘African’ artist. Last year was similarly exclusionary, with all the inaugural African Performance nominees hailing from Nigeria and South Africa, nations that together constitute 23% of total nominations in the Grammys’ Global categories.

After being set up in 1992, the first two decades of the Global Music category – which from 2004–2011 expanded to two categories, Traditional and Contemporary – were often won by well-established, white, US males. Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead), Béla Fleck and Ry Cooder all won twice for cross-cultural collaborations in this period. The focus otherwise tended towards international artists with strong associative ties to famous Western superstars, such as Ravi Shankar (The Beatles) and Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Paul Simon). Those two alone have won nine Grammys and been nominated an additional 27 times – this is not a comment on their artistry but the Grammys’ narrow vision internationally.

Only 14 African nations have ever seen an artist nominated for a Grammy, with just three nations being added to that list over the past 15 years – Ghana (2022), Niger (2019) and Malawi (2016). Further, a mere 15 out of 206 nations on Earth have ever had an artist win a Grammy in the Global fields’ 34 years of existence, with just eight of those countries having had that occur more than once, and the US leading the pack by far. This is despite the Grammys adding a second global category in 2022 (Global Performance) and yet another last year (African Performance).

Contrastingly, the gifted Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab has been nominated all four years (and counting) for the Global Performance category. Similarly, Burna Boy and Angélique Kidjo have both been nominated three times in the category’s four years.

Befuddlingly, this year’s Global and African nominees include international collaborations by the aforementioned Chris Brown, another US artist, Matt B, and the UK’s Jacob Collier, the latter being such a massive commercial artist that he was also nominated for Best Album overall, alongside Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. All three of the above nods are for English-language records. And, in fact, of the three Global winners this year, two were from the US (Matt B and Sheila E) and the third from Nigeria (Tems).

Prior to establishing a 'World Music' category in the early nineties, the Grammys very rarely recognised non-classical, international artists except for isolated cases such as crooner Domenico Modugno winning for the Italian-language tune 'Volare' during the Grammys inaugural year of 1959, South Africa’s Miriam Makeba scoring a Grammy in 1966 for a collaboration with superstar Harry Belafonte or scattered instances in Folk categories where musicians from India (1971, 1984), Japan (1972), Nigeria (1984), South Africa (1988) and Bulgaria (1989) were nominated.

Fundamentally, much of the issue with the Grammys’ voting can be traced to a single core flaw: too many people voting on too many things. In comparison, members of the Academy Awards (Oscars) nominate only in their area of speciality – actors vote on actors, costume designers on costume designers. The lack of such focus at the Grammys reveals itself perennially through voters favouring known names over the more street-level music consistently regarded by experts as the strongest. Niger’s Mdou Moctar regularly tops critics’ polls and has been featured at major festivals such as Pitchfork and Newport Folk but has yet to be nominated. Similarly, Bolivia’s legendary singer, Luzmila Carpio, has never been nominated.

An additional plague of the voting process has been hobbyist interlopers gaining nominations with increasing frequency, and even winning. This began over a decade ago with the inauguration of the short-lived social media site Grammy365.com, a platform which led to suspected vote trading. The first in a long series of conspicuous nominations came in 2011 with a self-released Americana album that reportedly had not registered one sale on SoundScan (the industry’s primary sales tracking body at the time), but nonetheless was honored beside the likes of roots legends Emmylou Harris, Levon Helm (The Band), Lucinda Williams and Ry Cooder.

Many of the musicians securing head-scratching nods are self-funded through fortunes gained elsewhere. This allows them over-indulgences, such as taking out $10,000+ full-page ads in special voter editions of music trade magazines such as Billboard or hiring symphonic orchestras for their projects. This season, both Anoushka Shankar and one of the most internationally renowned Japanese musicians of all time, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, lost to a collaboration between a billionaire-adjacent businesswoman and a retired electrical engineer.

Meanwhile, far from the Grammys’ Hollywood base, nearly half of the world’s population continues to live rurally. Often, these citizens subsist without indoor plumbing, electricity or easy access to clean water. Musicians from these communities are the ones routinely shunned. They reside not just on the other side of the digital divide, but across a gaping chasm. Their exclusion is all the more glaring since, historically, the roots of almost all popular music have risen from just such remote, under-served communities, be it gospel, blues, tango, fado or folk.

Rather than celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion, the Grammys’ ongoing practices reinforce existing inequities, silencing the world’s most vulnerable. In the words of the Malawi Mouse Boys’ Joseph Nekwankwa, “We are here in the countryside starving and unable to feed our families. We struggle to be granted visas and are often denied to travel anywhere outside of our country even when we do have the opportunity. It seems crazy that American artists are awarded nominations in the few categories for music from Africa. It feels like the rich stealing from the poor. And when I hear of the amount of money that those people spend promoting themselves, I can’t even imagine it. It’s more than we make in a lifetime. Instead, we are forced to build our own instruments from scraps just to play music.”

Ian Brennan is a Grammy-winning producer, musician and author who has recorded in five continents including countries such as Rwanda, Suriname, Kosovo, Cambodia and South Sudan, and worked with artists as diverse as Ustad Saami, Fugazi, Merle Haggard and Tinariwen.