Last night, fans were stunned when the Grammys announced the Album Of The Year winner. While many expected that the win would go to Beyoncé for her groundbreaking album Renaissance, the award was instead given to Harry Styles for Harry’s House. Twitter erupted with fury, with many calling it an outright robbery, but there’s one person who’s not sweating it — arguably the second most invested party, Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z.
In an interview with Tidal (a friendly outlet if there ever was one) ahead of the ceremony, Jay explained that he takes a different perspective on the importance of the award show, rather than getting his hopes up. “I remove myself from the process and hope they just get it right,” he said. “It got to the point where I was like, it’s just a marketing thing. You go, you got an album out and it could help the sales go up.”
Jay also explained why he thought Renaissance deserved the award, while admitting his bias. “Look what it’s done to the culture,” he observed. “Look how the energy of the world moved. They play her whole album in the club. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that. The whole entire joint — like, everything?! Every remix is amazing. Everyone’s inspired. It has inspired the world. Every remix is better than the other one. From anybody, we’re just finding these joints out in the street… It’s inspiring creativity. You know how The Black Album had The Grey Album [Danger Mouse’s 2004 mashup project]? And the one with Radiohead? It was called Jaydiohead [Minty Fresh Beats’ 2009 mashup]. When it just inspires creativity, that’s an album. That has to be Album Of The Year. It has to be.”
Unfortunately, it seems the Recording Academy, by and large, disagreed (for what it’s worth, most of them are way too old for “the club” by now, right?). We’ll see how it does affect Beyoncé’s (and Styles’) sales in the future or their award show strategies, but with her world tour in front of her, Beyoncé has bigger fish to fry.
