“We play an opinion based sport, not a factual based sport,” said rapper Drake at the 2019 Grammys after his Grammy win for “God’s Plan”.
In case you missed the point, Drake’s Grammy speech was referencing the biased structure behind the Grammys voting process.
He continued, “All my peers that make music from their heart that do things pure and tell the truth, I wanna let you know we’re playing in an opinion-based sport not a factual-based sport. So it’s not the NBA where at the end of the year you’re holding a trophy because you made the right decisions or won the games.”
You may have remembered the stint when Adele won Album of The Year over Beyonce’s “Lemonade” which for a bountiful of music critics was musical, cultural, political, and creative masterpiece.
“We play an opinion based sport, not a factual based sport.” – Drake #GRAMMYs pic.twitter.com/L4HJZxssGO
— Word On Road (@WordOnRd) February 11, 2019
“Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ made a lot of people uncomfortable, because it is so political, so spiritual, so unapologetically black, and so brutally honest about love, self-love, trust, betrayal,” Kevin Powell, author of the memoir The Education of Kevin Powell and a forthcoming biography on rapper Tupac Shakur, told CNN.
By cutting Drake’s poignant speech, the Grammys helped him make his point before he was able to: that diverse viewpoints like his do NOT matter.
According to sources at the press room at the Grammys, producers invited Drake to go back into the auditorium and finish his speech to which he declined.
Drake correct in saying that one does not need an award such as a Grammy to measure their success or their works worth. Plenty of platinum selling artists, most notably POC artists who are platinum selling artists, are yet to receive even a Grammy nomination.
Through tonight’s disrespectful cutaway from Drake’s speech, clearly, silencing diverse viewpoints is still a trend at large.
Photo Credit: @ChampagnePapi
