So Macklemore wasn’t supposed to defeat Kendrick—not on this day, not ever. But he did, walking away with the Grammys for Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap Album for his 2012 project, The Heist. Compared with the confessional good kid, m.A.A.d city, The Heist was destined for mainstream acceptance, its broad synthesis of pop and 1980s rap tailored for wider appeal. People of color were still fighting to be seen beyond hip-hop culture, and Macklemore’s skin tone allowed him to navigate black music while giving older white listeners the freedom to enjoy rap in the open. Macklemore was considered safe, discussing topics of which they could relate; by and large, those same people couldn’t fathom a young black male driving his mom’s Dodge Caravan across town to have sex, only to rob a house with his friends and witness a friend get murdered. Despite that, many fans—including Macklemore—believed Kendrick should’ve won at least one Grammy. So much so that Macklemore texted Kendrick and posted a screenshot of the private interaction on Instagram. “You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have,” Macklemore wrote. “It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you. I was gonna say that during the speech. Then the music started playing during my speech and I froze. Anyway, you know what it is. Congrats on this year and your music. Appreciate you as an artist and as a friend.” Macklemore wrote in the Instagram post’s caption that Kendrick deserved to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and that he was “blown away to win anything much less 4 Grammys.”
The rap community reacted sharply: in the days and weeks following the Grammys and that now-infamous screenshot, Macklemore was roundly criticized. It was one thing to text Kendrick privately, but letting the world know about it felt disingenuous. “I think it was uncalled for,” Kendrick told New York radio station Hot 97 in November 2014. “When he sent it to me, I was like, ‘Okay.’ I could see him feeling that type of way because he’s a good dude, but I think for confirmation from the world, he probably felt like he had to put it out there, which he didn’t need to do.” Drake felt the same way, telling Rolling Stone that Macklemore’s text was “wack as fuck.” “It felt cheap. It didn’t feel genuine.… He made a brand of music that appealed to more people than me, Hov [Jay-Z], Kanye [West] and Kendrick. Whether people wanna say it’s racial, or whether it’s just the fact that he tapped into something we can’t tap into. That’s just how the cards fall. Own your shit.” Macklemore had gone to Hot 97 before the Grammys and predicted he’d probably win the award for Best Rap Album, even though he didn’t think he deserved it. “Then he came back on afterwards and said the same thing again,” cohost Ebro Darden told Kendrick at the time. “I think everybody knows the politics of it, where it’s kinda like, ‘Here’s this white kid who had Top 40 success,’ so he was… on the radar of all these old people who vote in the Grammy academy.” In his own Hot 97 interview following the 56th Annual Grammy Awards show, Macklemore said racism was to blame for his receiving the statue. He also chastised the voting process, which supposedly allowed members to elect potential winners even if they weren’t familiar with the music at all. “Knowing how the Grammys usually go, I knew that there would be a great chance that we’d win that award and in essence rob Kendrick,” Macklemore said. “I think we made a great album, I think Kendrick made a better rap album. In terms of people who are voting on those ballots that are filling out those bubbles, we have an unfair advantage due to race, due to the fact that we had huge radio success.” In subsequent interviews, Macklemore took it a step further, admitting that he could have worded his text differently. “The language that I used was a bad call,” he told Hot 97 in December 2014. “White people have been robbing black people for a long time—of culture, of music, of freedom, of their lives.”
But while the Kendrick-Macklemore exchange was the most dramatic example of a good deed gone wrong at the Grammys, it certainly wasn’t the last time something like that would happen. In 2017, UK singer Adele won Album of the Year for her record 25, beating Beyoncé’s Lemonade in the process. Powered by “Hello,” a soaring piano ballad steeped in romantic heartbreak, 25 had shot quickly up the charts, selling more than 10 million albums to mark Adele’s grand return after five years away from the music industry. In her speech, a tearful, almost frantic Adele gave Beyoncé all the praise, even saying she couldn’t accept it. “My artist of my life is Beyoncé and the Lemonade album was just so monumental,” she proclaimed, her voice audibly shaken. “We all got to see another side to you that you don’t always let us see, and we appreciate that. And all us artists here, we fucking adore you. You are our light.… The way that you make my black friends feel is empowering and you make them stand up for themselves.” Some criticized Adele—a white artist—for using the term “black friends,” and the Recording Academy for once again shunning a black artist for the Grammys’ top honor. Beyoncé was the biggest pop star in the world and this was her third time being denied. In a New York Times article published shortly after the awards show, critics predicted that black musicians would soon start boycotting the ceremony altogether. “They absolutely, positively got it wrong,” said popular radio personality Charlamagne Tha God, according to the Times. “The Grammy committee should all feel foolish this morning, because even Adele acknowledged that she should not have won album of the year.” Frank Ocean, one of music’s
