Latin Jazz Musicians Lead Protest Against Grammy’s for Cutting 31 Musical Categories from Awards

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8. I thought this was a good take on it, "the McDonaldization of music"

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yesterday we mourned and celebrated the life of Whitney Houston, who got her start as a seven-year-old gospel singer, which is now one of the categories that’s been eliminated, for example. And so, the death of Whitney Houston, the deaths of Don Cornelius, of Etta James, and the elimination of these three categories provide an opportunity right now, I think, to remind ourselves about what matters. People or profits? Musical virtuosity or money? A scholar at the University of Texas, Ben Agger, called this the—this decision to abolish the categories "the McDonaldization of music" and the cultural banality that will result. So, the larger context for this is, this has to do, I think, with a global crisis that the community that Whitney Houston came out of is affected by, that the community that Oscar and Latin jazz musicians came out of is affected by, and the community that a lot of these different Zydeco and Native American musics are—all came out of, where all these communities are affected.

I mean, it’s no coincidence, for example, that when you hear Russell—when you hear Neil Portnow, the head of the Grammys, say that, you know, this is just hard decision, that, you know, it’s evolutionary, we’re going in a certain direction—it’s the same things that people like Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio say when they’re abolishing ethnic studies in Arizona or when they’re banning books or uprooting culture. I mean, you know, history has taught us anything, it’s that the uprooting of culture is a servant to, I’d say, the control and domination of communities that belong to those cultures. And so, we shouldn’t take these kinds of decisions by Grammy and other cultural institutions lightly. They matter in a profound way for the little girl today that wants to be a gospel singer but is not going to recognized anymore, because that music is not worthy of being—or the Latin jazz singer—I mean, musician, that wants to, you know, be virtuous and make beauty, rather than make money.