{"id":36715,"date":"2025-02-24T14:12:24","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T14:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new365.azontree.com\/?p=36715"},"modified":"2025-02-24T14:12:24","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T14:12:24","slug":"why-must-beyonce-compete-when-taylor-swift-doesnt-compare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new365.azontree.com\/?p=36715","title":{"rendered":"Why must Beyonc\u00e9 compete when Taylor Swift doesn\u2019t compare?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/p>\n

On Black excellence and white mediocrity in music<\/p>\n

For years, the Beyhive and Swifties have been at each other\u2019s throats.\u00a0It\u2019s been noted\u00a0that we shouldn\u2019t pit Beyonc\u00e9 and Taylor Swift against each other, and maybe they\u2019re right. Not only because it\u2019s damaging for women to be in career competition but also because it\u2019s damaging to extraordinary Black artists everywhere to be put in the same bracket as their mediocre white counterparts.<\/p>\n

To equate Black excellence with white mediocrity \u2014 to suggest there is even a competition \u2014 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, Beyonc\u00e9 is off the scale.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0took Beyonc\u00e9 25 years\u00a0after her first Grammy nomination to receive the most prestigious Grammy Album of the Year (AOTY) award for\u00a0Cowboy Carter<\/i>. On the other hand, Swift received the same award only\u00a0two years after her first nomination. I respect Swift for the middling artist she is; she\u2019s not an impressive vocalist or dancer, her sound is boringly consistent, and I find her lyricism repetitive.<\/p>\n

However, I can\u2019t name a single white artist who touches Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s 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\u2019s biases against them.<\/p>\n

Take Beyonc\u00e9; after four AOTY losses despite deserving it at least twice in my opinion, her long-overdue win for\u00a0Cowboy Carter<\/i>\u00a0felt hollow. Beyonc\u00e9 herself even seemed more surprised and affected by her Best Country Album win. She\u2019s the most Grammy-awarded artist in history, and the moment seemed more embarrassing for the Academy than celebratory. But if even Queen B can\u2019t avoid being overlooked, how powerful are the discriminatory structures at play?<\/p>\n

After her historic win for\u00a0Cowboy Carter<\/i>\u00a0as Best Country Album, Beyonc\u00e9 said in her acceptance speech,\u00a0\u201cSometimes genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists.\u201d\u00a0That \u201cus\u201d doesn\u2019t apply to Swift, who the country community embraced with open arms. Despite Swift being\u00a0born 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.\u00a0Beyonc\u00e9\u00a0was.<\/p>\n

Beyonc\u00e9, who was\u00a0born and raised in Houston, with a country accent so strong that the intolerant public used to\u00a0call her\u00a0\u2018stupid,\u2019 faced rejection instead of acceptance. That \u201cus\u201d includes every Black artist denied awards recognition because they did not fit the whitewashed image of musical genius in a white-dominated genre.<\/p>\n

The industry uses terms \u2014 sometimes ill-fitting \u2014 like R&B, Hip-Hop, Urban, and Rap to exclude Black artists from the main categories historically reserved for white winners. Beyonc\u00e9 lost AOTY for\u00a0Lemonade,<\/i>\u00a0but rest assured, it\u00a0won \u201cBest Urban Contemporary Album\u201d\u00a0\u2014 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\u2014 or rather, their subjectivity as musical artists is confined to their Blackness\u2014 while white musicians remain the default, needing no label to qualify their achievements.<\/p>\n

As Black country icon Linda Martell aptly put it on\u00a0Cowboy Carter<\/i>,\u00a0\u201cGenres are a funny little concept, aren\u2019t they?\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a contradiction in the fact that Beyonc\u00e9\u00a0holds the most Grammy wins\u00a0of any artist yet only recently won the coveted AOTY. It\u2019s the same contradiction seen in music legends like\u00a0Bob Marley,\u00a0Diana Ross, and\u00a0Jimi Hendrix, who never won a single Grammy during their careers \u2014 only to receive the\u00a0Lifetime Achievement Award\u00a0once they were either out of their prime or posthumously. The industry is often late in acknowledging and celebrating Black art in its present tense.<\/p>\n

Black artists don\u2019t exist in a meritocracy. Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s achievements are often preceded by \u201cfirst Black woman\u201d \u2014 the first to win\u00a0Best Country Album,\u00a0top the Billboard Country Albums chart,\u00a0headline a stadium tour, and\u00a0headline Coachella. Yet, the inequities in the music industry have never diminished Black artistry.<\/p>\n

Lyrically dissed in \u201cSpaghetti,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9 still excelled artistically beyond the\u00a0\u201cNo sauce\u201d\u00a0having\u00a0\u201cPlain Jane(s)\u201d\u00a0of the music industry, breaking barriers along the way. So, why frame Beyonc\u00e9 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?<\/p>\n

Despite the efforts, the tired white comparison will never defile Black stardom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Black excellence and white mediocrity in music For years, the Beyhive and Swifties have been at each other\u2019s throats.\u00a0It\u2019s been noted\u00a0that we shouldn\u2019t pit Beyonc\u00e9 and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":36716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-taylor-swifts"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy must Beyonc\u00e9 compete when Taylor Swift doesn\u2019t compare? - News 365<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/new365.azontree.com\/?p=36715\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why must Beyonc\u00e9 compete when Taylor Swift doesn\u2019t compare? 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