Land & Sea Journal

KENDRICK LAMAR Wins Song Of The Year For "NOT LIKE US" | 2025 GRAMMYs Acceptance Speech (youtube.com)
One of the lamest songs of all time for the award, ‘the first time a diss track has won best song'. The lineup for the awards show was also superweak. I mean they had Taylor, and then some people who just really are weak. ... Can we now say the Grammies are no longer part of pop culture? I mean, none of the artists are someone anyone cares about except Taylor Swift (relevant because of Kelsey and because of the scale and money success of her tour, although only popular with tween girls) and maybe Kanye (relevant only because he's remembered for past music and past fashion and because Censori is beside him wearing almost nothing). Beyonce was there to win for her country album, whatever that really is, but people didn't seem to talk much about her... that's all she's done in the past year or two, it seems like, and Jay-Z was only in the news for some sex allegations (same as most male performers in news stories that are shared on SM). People probably hear this guy won, go out and Google who he is cause they've never heard of him, listen to a minute of the song and close the tab and forget about him. ... He's doing the Superbowl, and opinion on that is divided. Some say they won't even watch it. Some say they've never heard of him. Some say they know who he is but don't care one way or the other, and some say he's talented. .. Another thing was that women made up the majority of the acts, and it was mostly solo women. Is this just part of the wider issue of the risk of masculinity? Men not doing anything these days, because it's just too dangerous socially. Also, in an era when it's socially acceptable to sell blantant sex, women probably always have more success in that. ... I saw a Facebook post on this (lots are showing how both Lauren Hill and this guy won an armful of Grammies) saying how Lauren did it with talent and against the odds of other music styles dominating at the time, and this guy did it because there's basically nothing but Hiphop in American music now, and nothing good is being released to compete with, and all he really did to get attention to this song was make a bunch of unsubstantiated ‘accusations’. (Accusations was in quotations, I assume, because you can't really ‘accuse’ someone (maybe a celebrity in particular) of having relations with fans. But since there is a political market for such an attack, it has a lot of steam behind it. ‘I accuse you of having a boyfriend.') What will come first as a response to this now-about-30-year-long thing? Will the culture just become so barren of works they realize they have to allow men to gain benefits again from successes? or will men at some point stand up and demand rights? At a tribal level, I guess this would have been solved quicker because the active men would just selectively protect whoever, but I'm not sure there's a modern version.