In the 2014 pilot episode of the TV sitcom “Black-ish,” ad exec Andre Johnson was expecting a huge, historic promotion. After spending years toiling for the fictional Stevens & Lido and rising …
label that’s home to Ariana Grande, Post Malone, Taylor Swift, Drake and The Weeknd — on June 5: “Effective immediately, Republic Records will remove ‘URBAN’ from our verbiage in describing departments, employee titles and music genres.” While intended as show of solidarity with the black community following the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer, the move is long overdue for all areas of the music industry.
“Old Town Road,” the biggest song of 2019 and the longest-running No. 1 hit in chart history, was a country song performed by a black rapper featuring a country vet. It was infamously disqualified from Billboard’s country singles chart after a few weeks for “not embracing enough elements of today’s country music in its current version,” but musically speaking, it had far less in common with an “urban” artist like, say, Tyler, the Creator .
So does the racial categorization of music depend on who is producing it or on who is consuming it? Not even the Recording Academy has figured this out yet. The four major Grammy fields are supposed to be all-inclusive competitions, yet in the first decade, during the heyday of Motown, the winners were predominantly white. Beginning with 1969’s 9th Annual, the Academy added more R&B categories to the three for jazz and one for R&B, and later, rap and urban contests entered the mix.
This is just another way the industry ghettoizes music that represents the voice of black America and provides the soundtrack for both black and white America. The powers that be, who are mostly white, repeatedly dismiss the breadth of influences that go into it and the expansive tastes of the people who embrace it.
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