Outspoken rap impresario Dame Dash has a solution for the Grammy Awards’ controversial ban on Kanye West performing at this year’s show: “We make our own Grammys,” he said when he encountered some TMZ photographers recently. Dash didn’t hold back, saying, “I’m not trying to fit into somebody else’s system. So we just create our own so we ain’t gotta worry about nobody else’s rules. … It’s not for them to judge who’s hot. It’s for us. They really shouldn’t be giving us the awards. We should be giving them the awards. They gotta respect our culture.”
For what it’s worth, it isn’t so much the culture of hip-hop that the Recording Academy seems worried about. West was only banned from performing at the ceremony after he spent the first two months of the year railing against his ex-wife, her new boyfriend, and anyone who dared suggest that maybe he was doing too much. At this point, it seems the Academy simply wants to avoid a possible meltdown onstage, although Kanye is apparently still welcome to attend and is nominated Album Of The Year for Donda. Meanwhile, another hip-hop figure, Houston’s J Prince, wants to organize a separate, hip-hop-focused show opposite the Grammys with artists who have felt slighted by the Recording Academy, such as The Weeknd.
As far as “creating our own” goes, well, BET has multiple awards shows including the BET Awards, the BET Hip-Hop Awards, The Soul Train Awards, and the NAACP Image Awards — all of which artists on Kanye’s level feel like they’re too big to attend or even acknowledge. Maybe “we” should be supporting our own, and that also includes holding our own accountable for behaving like jilted middle school boys in public.
