Why did Jay-Z call out the Grammys?
Jay-Z is one of the Grammy awards’ most successful ever artists, having taken home 25 awards throughout his career. But, even so, his relationship with its organisers has often been strained.
Hov’s first Grammy win came in 1999, with his third album Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life taking home the Best Rap Album award. But even this triumph was marked by tension, as he didn’t even attend the ceremony to pick up his gong. He boycotted it in protest against his peer DMX not also being nominated that year.
Despite his very public distaste for certain elements of the Grammys, Hov went on to win so many more. He is today considered to be the most successful rap artist in terms of Grammy wins, while few other artists in general have claimed more. Among the few to take home more than his 25 awards, in fact, is his very own wife Beyoncé.
Bey has won 35 Grammys out of 99 nominations, making her both the most-awarded and the most-nominated artist in the ceremony’s history. Her success is unparalleled, yet, even so, Jay-Z nonetheless once perceived a bias against her.
For all of Bey’s Grammy wins, none of them ever came for Best Album—that is, until the 2025 ceremony, in which she won it for Cowboy Carter.
Before that had happened, Jay-Z clearly thought it was ridiculous that she had never won Best Album before—and he let it be known. At the 2024 ceremony, Hov was onstage alongside his daughter to accept the Dr Dre Global Impact Award, but his issues with the ceremony bubbled to the surface. During his speech, he mentioned his previous boycott of the ceremony in 1999, before bringing up his wife’s lack of Best Album awards.
“We love y’all, we love y’all, we want you to get it right,” he said. “At least get it close to right. I don’t want to embarrass this young lady [addressing Beyoncé] but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won Album of the Year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work.”
It may seem rich for someone as successful as Jay-Z to moan about a perceived bias against his equally successful wife, but there was, arguably, a deeper point at play here. This was perhaps less about Beyoncé specifically, and more about a wider trend in which Black artists have been overlooked by the Grammys. Consider that Taylor Swift has won Album of the Year four times, and that point seems to bear weight.
Whether or not Hov’s speech had a direct effect is hard to say, but, at the very least, it does seem notable that the year after he delivered it, Beyoncé did, indeed, win her first Best Album award. The fact that Cowboy Carter specifically deals with the notion of Black people’s role in the creation of America’s musical culture being overlooked seems fitting.