On Black excellence and white mediocrity in music

For years, the Beyhive and Swifties have been at each other’s throats. It’s been noted that we shouldn’t pit Beyoncé and Taylor Swift against each other, and maybe they’re right. Not only because it’s damaging for women to be in career competition but also because it’s damaging to extraordinary Black artists everywhere to be put in the same bracket as their mediocre white counterparts.

To equate Black excellence with white mediocrity — to suggest there is even a competition — is to confine Black art within a framework that was never built to measure its brilliance. White metrics cannot and will not account for the superiority of Black art. Swift is the locus of this metric, and like many Black musicians, Beyoncé is off the scale.

It took Beyoncé 25 years after her first Grammy nomination to receive the most prestigious Grammy Album of the Year (AOTY) award for Cowboy Carter. On the other hand, Swift received the same award only two years after her first nomination. I respect Swift for the middling artist she is; she’s not an impressive vocalist or dancer, her sound is boringly consistent, and I find her lyricism repetitive.

However, I can’t name a single white artist who touches Beyoncé’s vocal range, performance stamina, innovative sound, and rhythm on stage. Of course, art is subjective, and awards are losing significance for Black artists who recognize their industry’s biases against them.

Take Beyoncé; after four AOTY losses despite deserving it at least twice in my opinion, her long-overdue win for Cowboy Carter felt hollow. Beyoncé herself even seemed more surprised and affected by her Best Country Album win. She’s the most Grammy-awarded artist in history, and the moment seemed more embarrassing for the Academy than celebratory. But if even Queen B can’t avoid being overlooked, how powerful are the discriminatory structures at play?

After her historic win for Cowboy Carter as Best Country Album, Beyoncé said in her acceptance speech, “Sometimes genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists.” That “us” doesn’t apply to Swift, who the country community embraced with open arms. Despite Swift being born in Pennsylvania, moving to Tennessee to launch her country career, and blending pop into her sound, Swift was never booed at the Country Music Association. Beyoncé was.

Beyoncé, who was born and raised in Houston, with a country accent so strong that the intolerant public used to call her ‘stupid,’ faced rejection instead of acceptance. That “us” includes every Black artist denied awards recognition because they did not fit the whitewashed image of musical genius in a white-dominated genre.

The industry uses terms — sometimes ill-fitting — like R&B, Hip-Hop, Urban, and Rap to exclude Black artists from the main categories historically reserved for white winners. Beyoncé lost AOTY for Lemonade, but rest assured, it won “Best Urban Contemporary Album” — whatever that means. These deliberately racialized genres separate Black musicians from the mainstream and send a clear message: Black musicians are defined by their Blackness— or rather, their subjectivity as musical artists is confined to their Blackness— while white musicians remain the default, needing no label to qualify their achievements.

As Black country icon Linda Martell aptly put it on Cowboy Carter, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?”

There is a contradiction in the fact that Beyoncé holds the most Grammy wins of any artist yet only recently won the coveted AOTY. It’s the same contradiction seen in music legends like Bob Marley, Diana Ross, and Jimi Hendrix, who never won a single Grammy during their careers — only to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award once they were either out of their prime or posthumously. The industry is often late in acknowledging and celebrating Black art in its present tense.

Black artists don’t exist in a meritocracy. Beyoncé’s achievements are often preceded by “first Black woman” — the first to win Best Country Album, top the Billboard Country Albums chart, headline a stadium tour, and headline Coachella. Yet, the inequities in the music industry have never diminished Black artistry.

Lyrically dissed in “Spaghetti,” Beyoncé still excelled artistically beyond the “No sauce” having “Plain Jane(s)” of the music industry, breaking barriers along the way. So, why frame Beyoncé and Swift as rivals simply because white metrics deem them equivalent? Why push a hegemonic narrative that reduces Black excellence to competition with white mediocrity?

Despite the efforts, the tired white comparison will never defile Black stardom.