Kendrick Lamar is back after a long hiatus. He finally announced a release date for his upcoming new studio album “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers.” It drops on May 13. It’s probably going to top the charts and earn myriad plaudits, assuming it’s on par with his previous work, but will it get him the one thing that has eluded him: the Grammy for Album of the Year?
Who knows at this point whether he even cares that much about the Grammys. In the five years since his last studio album, “Damn,” artists like Drake and The Weeknd have criticized and/or boycotted the awards due to sketchy voting practices and Recording Academy biases against Black artists, especially in hip-hop. But it’s nevertheless the most widely recognized award voted on by industry peers, and Lamar’s continued snubs in the all-genre general field categories have been emblematic of the industry’s stubborn resistance to take hip-hop as seriously as the (usually white) singer-songwriters they tend to gravitate towards. Lamar even won a damn Pulitzer Prize for “Damn,” but couldn’t win any Grammys outside the rap field.
To date, Lamar has been nominated five times for Album of the Year: three times for his studio albums (“Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and “Damn”), once as a featured artist (on Beyonce‘s “Lemonade”), and once as the leading contributor to the “Black Panther” soundtrack. “Good Kid” lost to Daft Punk‘s “Random Access Memories.” “Butterfly” lost to Taylor Swift‘s “1989.” “Lemonade” lost to Adele‘s “25.” “Damn” lost to Bruno Mars‘s “24K Magic.” And “Black Panther” lost to Kacey Musgraves‘s “Golden Hour.”
As you might have noticed from that list, though, in this year’s Grammy race he would face two of the artists who bested him before: Adele for her latest album “30” and Mars for “An Evening with Silk Sonic,” his collaboration with Anderson .Paak. Neither Adele nor Mars has lost a single Grammy from their last 13 nominations. And both still have the old-school flavor the Grammys have shown to prefer. If “Mr. Morale” doesn’t do the trick,, maybe Lamar’s next album should be a collection of 1950s blues covers.
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