When Beyoncé won Best Country Album at this year’s Grammys, she looked surprised. So surprised, there are already memes circulating of her wide-eyed reaction. She is the first Black artist to take home the award, but there is nothing else remotely unusual about her win. Beyoncé always gets the genre prizes, even when she’s dabbling in other spaces, like with her last genre record, 2022’s Renaissance, which won Best Dance/Electronic Album. But when Cowboy Carter was also announced as 2025’s best album winner – the grand prize for which Beyoncé has been snubbed so many times – she merely smiled.
Many fans scanning the list of winners this morning will be asking: why has she won this? And why now? Cowboy Carter was fuelled by a brilliant concept – a sonic ride through contributions of Black pioneers to country music – but compared to her other albums, all of which created seismic shifts in culture, the same could not quite be said for this record. Not only was this album part of a wider country trend in music, but the songs also feel too modest, too small for Beyoncé’s enormous vocals. Given how the Grammys voting works – with a tendency to reward established artists due to their big fanbases, and established network of relationships within the music industry – her win makes sense. Brat, meanwhile, may have been the culturally dominant album in that category this year, but it would never have been Charli XCX’s first Grammy Album of the Year win. Beyoncé is absolutely a deserving winner in this category. But still, why now?
The reason, to quote the song title of this year’s Best Metal Performance by Gojira, is that the 2025 Grammys were a major mea culpa for artists who have historically been snubbed. The overarching theme was one of apologies and rectifications; tensions had built to such a degree that this was the year it had to happen. The Recording Academy CEO, Harvey Mason Jr, even used his opening speech to address past snubs and a lack of diversity. “There’s still work to be done, but I firmly believe we’re on the right path,” he said, as he introduced a surprise performance from The Weeknd, who has famously boycotted the awards since 2021, when he was due to play but pulled out after discovering he didn’t get a single nomination.
Of all the major award shows across entertainment, the Grammys (along with the Oscars for film) face the most backlash for a lack of representation for marginalised groups. Black artists and genres like hip-hop, R&B and Latin music have not always been fully acknowledged in the major categories like Album of the Year or Record of the Year, where pop and white mainstream artists dominate the wins. Beyoncé, a prime example of this wonky inflection in voting standards, was – and is –the most nominated artist in Grammys history. She always loses out on the greatest honours, typically receiving genre nods instead (aka the booby prizes for an artist of her towering mainstream stature). Along with The Weeknd, other high-profile artists like Kendrick Lamar and Drake have directly spoken out about this diversity problem, in some cases refusing to submit work for consideration.
Never was this dissension louder than last year, when Jay-Z called out the Recording Academy while picking up a prize of his own, Dr Dre’s Global Impact Award. Poor Blue Ivy stood on stage next to her father, as he pointed to his wife Beyoncé’s past snubs. “I don’t want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won Album of the Year,” Jay-Z said of Beyoncé. “So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work. Think about that. The most Grammys, never won Album of the Year. That doesn’t work.” Down on the floor, a cowboy-hat-clad Beyoncé was caught on camera giving a stoney reaction.
Of all the Beyoncé snubs, the greatest came in 2023, the year before Jay-Z’s challenge to the Grammys. Renaissance – an undeniably exquisite album for its front-to-back bangers, textured celebration of club music, and total reinvention of Beyoncé – failed to win the artist the best album prize. She lost out to Harry Styles for Harry’s House, which, sure. It was stylish and we all love Styles in Gucci, but it lacked any major substance.
The litany of rebuffs Beyoncé has faced started way back when she was in Destiny’s Child, who were lumped into the R&B category. When Beyoncé revolutionised the way artists release music with a surprise drop, began the trend of visual albums and offered a fresh mainstream feminist perspective and representation of Black womanhood, all with her self-titled 2013 album, she didn’t even get a best album nomination. To underline the horror of it all, the winners that year were Mumford and Sons. When Beyoncé made Lemonade, the most culturally relevant project of 2016 with its assessment of Black identity and trauma in America, she lost out to Adele’s 25, which was only embarrassing for both artists. That Lemonade won Best Urban Contemporary Album instead felt almost ironic. At best, it was flinchingly awkward.
Similarly, at this year’s Grammys, it was finally time for Kendrick Lamar’s moment in the sun. The godfathers of popular music were turning in their graves in 2018 when Lamar lost out on Album of the Year for his seminal record DAMN to Grammys favourite, Bruno Mars, for the latter’s vibeless 24K Magic (no, it’s not got “Uptown Funk” on it). To make up for what should have been a freak accident rather than a typical run of events, this year Lamar won best record for “Not Like Us”. Once again: sure, a good song, Lamar is deserving. But it’s too funny that he was finally properly recognised by the Academy for a diss track that accuses Drake of being a paedophile. (Thanks to this decision, the Academy is a footnote in this tedious lore that involves Drake bringing legal action against the track and denying said charges.)
The Grammys need the participation of artists to remain relevant or even to function
Ultimately, positive systemic change almost always happens with objection from the ground up, and this applies to award shows as much as it does to culture at large. The Grammys need the participation of artists to remain relevant or even to function. If Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Kendrick all chose to withdraw their support from the awards in the vein of Drake and The Weeknd – a highly likely reality – not only would it be shameful for the Academy, but it would trigger a chain reaction from sympathetic artists across the board.
This redressing of past mistakes could well continue to be a trend for the Grammys now that they’ve started to turn a corner. If so, why not give Lana Del Rey, one of the greatest songwriters of the 21st century, her first Grammy? How about following up Miley Cyrus’s one meagre Grammy with another? And when it comes time for Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar’s next best work to be considered, let’s slide some more awards in their direction, and give Queen Bey something to truly smile about – not just a commiseration prize.
