Beyoncé and Taylor Swift face off at the Grammys

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

It’s been an incredible year for women in pop, and this weekend at the 67th Grammy Awards the race for the highly coveted Album of the Year award is stacked with the gals who ruled the summer. Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Charlie XCX are among the nominees. And while each of these women has a strong chance of taking home the gold, the real competition is between two titans of the industry—Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who have 157 nominations and 46 wins between them. 

This weekend promises to be a kind of referendum on the notoriously racist and old-fashioned music establishment. All eyes will be on whether Bey, with “Cowboy Carter,” can finally clinch the Album of the Year award that has eluded her her entire career—or whether Grammy darling, Swift, will add to her already record-breaking tally of four AOTY golden gramophones with “The Tortured Poets Department.”

The last time they were pitted against each other in this category was at the 2010 Grammys, for “I Am… Sasha Fierce” and “Fearless,” respectively, which Swift went on to win. This followed Kanye West’s infamous “I’mma let you finish” screed at the MTV Video Music Awards the year prior, in which he interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me,” asserting that Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time and should have won for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” (He wasn’t wrong.) Ever the consummate professional, Bey had invited a deer-in-the-headlights, 19-year-old Swift back on stage during her own acceptance for Video of the Year so she could give the speech truncated by West.

The two have been eerily linked ever since: fans noticed Beyoncé dropped her groundbreaking self-titled visual album at midnight on Swift’s birthday in 2013. The streaming debut of Swift’s The Eras Tour concert film was released on the 10th anniversary of that self-titled album. (Queen Bey showed up to the film’s red carpet premiere, quashing any lingering rumors of beef between the two.) They are the only two women to debut a single at number one on the country charts. And both dominated the cultural conversation in 2024, a year full of women taking back and transforming pop music.

Despite pretty much every other awards body and cultural arbiter giving Bey her dues, and despite a trio of standout albums in BEYONCÉ, Lemonade, and Renaissance, the Grammys routinely withholds AOTY from her (this is her fifth nomination). As writer Kathleen Newman-Bremang explained last year—after Jay-Z accepted the Dr. Dre Global Impact Awards at the Grammys and slammed the Academy in his acceptance speech— Black music is often relegated to the genre categories like R&B, rap, and dance, which Renaissance won in in 2023. Albums by Black women seldom win the general categories like Album of the Year—which was last won by a Black woman in 1999 with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

“[Calling] Black artists the greatest of all time… would require admitting the power of Black art, it would require acknowledging the history of cultural pillaging and musical theft of Black work that the industry was built on,” Newman-Bremang wrote at the time.

Cowboy Carter is a direct response to that kind of racism in the industry, featuring Linda Martell, a Black country pioneer, and her modern-day contemporaries Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts. Despite being her most critically polarizing album in over a decade, Bey will probably win for what is, in my opinion, her weakest body of work since 4. That is if Swift doesn’t best her for the similarly conflictingly reviewed and unwieldy The Tortured Poets Department.

Of course, Grammy voters might surprise us and hand the award over to one of the freshly crowned pop princesses, like Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan. But the fact that Beyoncé will actually be attending the award ceremony this year tells me she expects to be leaving with some hardware. Or perhaps everyone’s just there to have a good time and we’ll still be waiting for an AOTY award in another 15 years (you know, if society holds up in the meantime).