You can probably blame the most boring reason ever: vote-splitting.
The Grammys televised just nine awards this year. Those nine included the big four prizes — Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year — which are the only four awards that every branch (rock, country, rap, etc.) of the Recording Academy is eligible for. (Record, Song, and Album are the only three prizes every musician in the Academy is eligible for.)
And the other handful of awards (out of 75 others handed out) the Grammys choose to broadcast each year speak volumes about what the Academy fears can happen in those top categories. In 2016, the Academy pushed Cast Album Recording into the main program, in hopes of getting a little Hamilton buzz going. And in 2017, it promoted categories like Rock Song and Country Solo Performance to the main show, because rock artists weren’t represented in the top four categories, and because country artists were unlikely to win those top prizes.
But the promotion of the otherwise little known “Urban Contemporary Album” category to the main show for the 2017 awards suggests the Academy was afraid of a very real possibility: Beyoncé, the biggest star in the music industry, might lose every one of the three top awards she was nominated for, and not get the chance to give a televised speech. She was considered a lock for the Urban Contemporary prize, and that meant she got to speak on TV, where she delivered a very nice speech about the importance of diverse voices having representation in media.
Music journalist Chris Molanphy suggested this very idea early in the show, and it hung over the proceedings:
Indeed, as Beyoncé’s album Lemonadeand song “Formation” lost Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year to Adele’s album 25 and song “Hello,” Adele seemed a little embarrassed to keep winning.
The Grammys tend to honor albums that have sold well and earned critical respect, which applies to both Lemonade and 25. To be sure, 25 has dwarfed Lemonade’s sales, crossing the 20 million mark worldwide since its release in late 2015. However, it’s not as if Lemonade has been a slouch on the charts. It was the third best-selling album of 2016 in the US. The second best-selling? You guessed it — 25. (It’s also a bit unfair to compare Adele’s worldwide sales to Beyoncé’s US sales, but Adele has outsold Beyoncé in the US as well — albeit by not nearly as wide a margin.)
And when it comes to critical acclaim, Lemonade was a year-end list mainstay and notched a Metacritic score of 92. While 25 notched a respectable performance in both measures, with a 75 on Metacritic, it didn’t measure up to Lemonade at all. Omo tjis gist too long, to get the full gist check
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