Another year, Another Grammys where Travis Scott gets snubbed for album of the year. Although not as egregious as the 2019 Grammys where Cardi B won for Invasion of Privacy over Travis Scott’s Astroworld, the 2024 Grammys was yet another snub for the Houston-born rap superstar. Killer Mike won Best Rap Album for his 2023 project Michael over Travis’ Utopia, an absolute snub.
Music can never be objective. That is the ironic part about the Grammys, which attempts to give objective awards to music that is definitely not objective. However, one of the only objective categories we do have to judge music is commercial success, of which Utopia dwarfed Michael. Utopia sold 500,000 copies in its first week, with Michael failing to reach 100,000. Utopia has reached well over a Billion streams on streaming platforms, while Michael has barely over 50 million, and that’s including its post-Grammy win bump in streams. Music is absolutely subjective, but Utopia has objectively captivated the subjective preferences of much more people than Michael ever did. Travis Scott left for 5 years after releasing Astroworld, only to come back to drop an innovative project with excellent production from Mike Dean, that simultaneously captured popular music as well as critical reception, something Michael failed to do in its run before the Grammys. Michael doesn’t even beat Utopia all that much in a critical sense either. Famed internet reviewer Anthony Fantano of Theneedledrop gave Michael a light 6 out of 10 while giving Utopia a strong 7. On music review aggregator website Metacritic, Michael had a weighted average of 77 out of 100 while Utopia had a 67. Michael and Utopia are similar albums from a critical standpoint, but Utopia dwarfs it from a commercial perspective. The worst part about this Grammys was the fact that by all accounts, Michael wasn’t even the most critically acclaimed rap album of the year. That award would go to Scaring the Hoes by JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown, a lauded album from two of hip-hops best underground artists. The metacritic weighted score for that album was an 86, while also receiving a light 9 from Theneedledrop. Simply put, Michael was not the most critically acclaimed album nor was it the most commercially successful, and did not have enough blend of the two to even remotely deserve the award for Best Rap Album. If the argument was being made that Scaring the Hoes deserved Best Rap Album, I could see that argument, mainly because the idea of what should be “best” is different, depending on if you see commercial success or critical success as more important. However, when the Grammy went to neither Utopia nor Scaring the Hoes, the snub conversation had to be had, and it is completely deserved.
The Grammys tried to pander to the “underground” hip-hop fans without knowing what underground hip-hop fans actually like, and ended up giving the award for Best Rap Album to an album that was not the best, nor the most popular.
