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Jay-Z was awarded the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award at the 2024 Grammy Awards Ceremony held at the Crypto Arena in Los Angeles on February 4, 2024. With this, the rapper joins Dr Dre, the founder and first recipient of the award in the winner's list.
During his acceptance speech, the singer called out the Grammy Awards for refusing his wife an Album of the Year Award, saying:
"I don’t want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won album of the year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work. Think about that. The most Grammys, never won album of the year. That doesn’t work. When I get nervous, I tell the truth."
The singer's comments have since then gone viral and drawn comparisons with Kanye West, who in 2009, interrupted Taylor Swift's Best Video by a Female Artist acceptance speech at the MTV VMAs and argued that Beyonce should have won the award.
Netizens react to Jay-Z's criticism of Grammy Awards on behalf of Beyonce
Netizens were quick to react to Jay-Z's acceptance speech, where he criticized the 2024 Grammy Awards for not awarding Beyonce Album of the Year.
While some reacted with memes, others seemed supportive of the rapper's criticism of the award and joined in on it. Some also commented on Beyonce's reaction to her partner's comments.
Jay -Z's comments regarding the Grammy Awards joins a long line of criticism earned by the ceremony and its organizing body, The Recording Academy, over the years. The major criticism of the award include the lack of transparency and its allegedly BIPOC exclusionary nominations.
Other criticisms include the discriminatory comments by major Academy members such as Neil Patrow and the failure of subsequent attempts to reform the processes behind the award ceremony, as exemplified by the firing of Deborah Duggan, which led to a lawsuit under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2020. The lawsuit was closed with an undisclosed settlement.
Aside from Jay-Z, other major artists such as Adele, Zayn Malik, Harry Styles, and Nicki Minaj, as well as the BTS fandom, have all levied criticism at the award.
As mentioned before, Jay-Z was awarded the Dr Dre Global Impact award for his lifetime achievement in music and recording. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, Beyonce had not yet clinched a Grammy Award this year. She won three awards last year for her Renaissance album.
