Beyoncé’s long road to album of the year

LOS ANGELES — “As selected by the 13,000 voting members of the Recording Academy…”

Did you notice that bit of verbiage at the 67th Grammy Awards on Sunday night? Every time someone presented one of the show’s major prizes — album of the year, record of the year, song of the year, best new artist — he or she rattled off the line before revealing the winner.

It was a small but telling detail that demonstrated how the academy wants to be perceived after years of being portrayed as a shadowy record-industry cabal. Dogged by criticism that it routinely undervalues the work of women and people of color, the group lately has sought to convey the message that decisions about the Grammys aren’t made in a smoky back room but by the thousands of music professionals who belong to the organization.

Not only that, but the academy has repeatedly emphasized — including on Sunday’s show, where Chief Executive Harvey Mason Jr. hammered the point in a speech — that its electorate has evolved by welcoming younger and more diverse members (and, by extension, by booting older and whiter ones).

Maybe it’s working.

On Sunday, Beyoncé finally won album of the year, the Grammys’ most prestigious award, with “Cowboy Carter,” her scholarly yet intrepid exploration of the Black roots of country music. It was the pop superstar’s fifth try in a decade and a half for a prize that Taylor Swift won an unprecedented four times in that same stretch — and the first time a Black woman has taken the award since Lauryn Hill in 1999.

“It’s been many, many years,” Beyoncé said with a knowing little laugh as she accepted the trophy, which she dedicated to Linda Martell, the pioneering Black female country singer who makes a guest appearance on “Cowboy Carter.” “I hope we just keep pushing forward, opening doors,” she added, taking her place as only the fourth Black woman to win album of the year (after Hill, Whitney Houston and Natalie Cole) in the Grammys’ 67-year history.

Other signs of systemic change Sunday night: Kendrick Lamar’s wins for record and song of the year with “Not Like Us,” the climactic volley from the Compton rapper’s epic beef with Drake. The festive diss track, which led Drake to file a federal lawsuit last month accusing both men’s record company of defamation, is just the second hip-hop track to carry each of those categories (after Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” won record and song in 2019).

And then there was the academy’s highly theatrical reconciliation with the Weeknd, who’d vowed in 2021 to boycott the Grammys after his smash single “Blinding Lights” was denied even a single nomination. The Canadian pop-soul star, who’d said he was protesting a corrupt voting process, performed without advance notice Sunday right after Mason’s spiel, in which the CEO described the Weeknd as “someone who has seen the work the academy has put in.” (He’s also someone with a brand-new album to promote).

Yet the story with the night’s big winner is more complicated than a feel-good tale of institutional overhaul. As much as the Recording Academy has adapted to Beyoncé, the singer in many ways adapted to the academy in making “Cowboy Carter.”

Full of hand-played acoustic instruments and gestures toward various historical traditions, it’s a Grammy album that has far more in common than Beyoncé’s earlier work with previous album of the year winners by the likes of Norah Jones, Herbie Hancock, the Dixie Chicks, Beck — even, dare I say it, Mumford & Sons.

Granted, Beyoncé is using those sounds in service of a distinct narrative; “Cowboy Carter” is about family and lineage and who’s entitled to a sense of American belonging. (If I remember correctly, Mumford & Sons sang mostly about haberdashery.) But by taking up an explicitly roots-oriented approach, she was looking to make a point about the Grammys’ value system — daring voters, essentially, not to give her the prize so we could see the hierarchies in place.

That’s not to say she didn’t want to take home album of the year. “A-O-T-Y, I ain’t win,” she sings on “Cowboy Carter,” referring to her loss at the Grammys with 2022’s clubby “Renaissance,” “Take that s— on the chin / Come back and f— up the pen.” And nobody plans a concert as detailed as the one Beyoncé gave during halftime of a Christmas Day NFL game — just as academy members were filling out their ballots — without hoping for some kind of return on her investment. (Early Monday, the singer announced that she’ll take “Cowboy Carter” on the road, starting with four shows at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in late April.)

So who precisely secured Beyoncé’s path to victory? Was it the new voters that Mason says he’s brought into the fold or was it old-timers for whom Beyoncé’s music finally made sense? I’m inclined to think it was a little of both. In addition to album of the year, “Cowboy Carter” won the country album prize Sunday — Beyoncé’s priceless surprise-face became an instant meme — which meant she had plenty of Nashville support. According to academy rules, a member can vote in only three genres, so this likely wasn’t a case of pop outsiders flooding the zone to lift Beyoncé above established country stars like Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson.

But I also suspect that among those 13,000 were many musicians who’ve grown up in Beyoncé’s shadow and simply felt that it was her time — that she’d been denied the flagship Grammy on too many occasions and that the historical record needed to be set straight.

Which indeed it did. “Cowboy Carter” is not Beyoncé’s finest album; it’s not my favorite of her albums, either, although it does get wonderfully weird near the end in songs like “II Hands II Heaven” and “Sweet Honey Buckiin’” that imagine country music as a kind of celestial trance experience. But it is an album, as Beyoncé suggested in her acceptance speech, that opens doors. I’d bet Martell, who’s 83, took some pleasure in the shout-out.