[Forbes] BTS Just Shined A Light On The Grammysโ Diversity Problem:
"The timing makes the statement sting. This was an act by a group at the height of its commercial power, telling the industry's most powerful institution that a new box built specifically to hold their music was not a gift."
"Consider Best African Music Performance, introduced in 2023 for the 2024 ceremony. The Recording Academy framed it as recognition of Africa's explosive global influence, from Afrobeats to amapiano. But it triggered a wave of backlash, not primarily about Tyla's win, but about the premise of the category itself."
"Recording Academy member and culture commentator Joey Akan has been the most direct critic. Akan argued African artists are not asking for a special room of their own; they are asking to be treated as equals eligible for the biggest stages, warning the category risks becoming a way to let "Africans fight themselves there" while the major categories stay out of reach. Ghanaian American singer Amaarae raised the same concern back in 2023, and OkayAfrica ran an op-ed arguing the category forces African artists to sound "ancestral, percussive, earthy" to even qualify, punishing anyone whose sound leans pop or global."
"The Academy keeps trying to engineer its way out of a problem that isn't a categorization problem. It's a trust problem, built up over decades of Album of the Year fields that skewed heavily toward white American pop and rock even in years when Black, Latin and Asian artists dominated the commercial conversation."
"Telling BTS that a genre submission does not prevent a general-category submission misses the point BTS is making. Their objection is not procedural. It's that the existence of a geography-coded lane, whatever its stated intent, signals where the Academy expects Asian pop to live. Nobody created a "Best European Pop Music Performance" category for Dua Lipa or Ed Sheeran. The absence of a mirror category for majority-white regional pop is the tell that these fields, however generously intended, are not applied evenly across the map."
#ArtHasNoAliens
#GeographyIsNotAGenre
https://t.co/CGvLUtAsP6
At BTS' SOLD-OUT MetLife Stadium concert today, ARMY showed their support for the group's decision not to submit their music for Grammy consideration during "ARMY TIME":
โ "Beyond categories, the music is ours."
@taenniexme Heโs not interested in Kai lover or her shts she must done it for her lover Kai or gd Taehyung is not her to give spoiler for anyone clown ๐คก
BTS' "ARIRANG" becomes the FASTEST album in history to have all of its songs surpass 200 MILLION streams.
โ Achieving it in just 132 days, 2x faster than any other album in history.
Bruno Mars, a Grammy darling, had his winning streak end after collabing with an Asian woman yet here are her fans sucking up to the same people who had racial bias against her, all because bts were the ones calling it out. Yall would support Hitler if it meant going against bts