viz.

Image Credit: Huffington Post/Getty Images

The Grammys provided plenty of viz bait: Beyoncé twerking with Jay-Z, unlikely performing duos like Robin Thicke and the band Chicago, Pharrell’s be-memed hat, and Taylor Swift’s GIF-able dancing. However, what I want to discuss is something that occurred after the Grammys: Macklemore, who won awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album, acknowledged another victor after the fact. On his Instagram, Macklemore not only tweeted a picture of a text he sent to his fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, whose album good kid, m.A.A.d. city was also nominated for Best Rap Album, but also explained the image to his readers:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Instagram

It seems like Macklemore may have anticipated some haters here, who would agree with his assessment. But to privately send Kendrick Lamar his sympathy is one thing; to show it to others on the Internet is quite a different act. If rap is a genre known for battling, here Macklemore displays how “honored” and “completely blown away to win anything much less 4 Grammys” he is. Instead of asserting his talent, he gives his thanks to his fans and bluntly tells Lamar, “You got robbed.” Saying “That’s what this is about. Progress and art,” Macklemore plays the part of a liberal do-gooder, conscious of his humility. If he failed to show respect in his acceptance speech, he does so here. How does this rhetoric also work alongside the Grammys’ performance of his hit “Same Love”?

The enormous spectacle—the song is taken over by Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” and Queen Latifah marrying 33 couples, many of whom were gay/lesbian—moves Macklemore away from center stage, literally. This may be necessarily, considering that Macklemore has been critiqued as a straight white man for speaking on behalf of GLBT rights in “Same Love” in place of queer black performers, as well as directing critiques to a largely African-American hip-hop community without acknowledging his cultural privilege. Writing about this particular Instagram, the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica frames it as “a cleansing and an admission of guilt” for succeeding in rap without proper street cred:

So when Macklemore bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z, Drake and Kanye West — for a rap award, he makes sure that he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist’s muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. In a nutshell, this is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate.

It’s interesting to read this moment against other award acceptance speeches, as the genre requires artists to show gratitude and humility in their moment of triumph. Witness, for example, Sally Field’s tearful declaration that “you like me, right now, you like me” for the 1985 Best Actress Oscar:

Yet if Sally Field musters this earnest thanks for her second Oscar win, the extremely talented and frequently-nominated Meryl Streep playfully mocks the genre in such moments as when she stated at the 2004 Emmys, “There are some days when I myself think I’m overrated … but not today.” As The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman says, “The Meryl Streep acceptance speech is an art unto itself: elegant, loopy, cunningly self-aware, and impeccably delivered—in short, everything you expect from a Meryl Streep performance, condensed to three minutes. Where else can you see fake humility, fake gratitude, and fake spontaneity delivered with such aplomb?”

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

Though, perhaps the most infamous awards speech came at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech to praise Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” Considering that Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z and West are close friends, it makes sense he’d speak up for her. It’s also interesting that West wasn’t advocating for his own excellence—he interrupted the speech to praise another—but hijacking Swift’s speech got him called a “jackass” by the President. The moment turned into a major meme that even Jay-Z had to imitate, interrupting Kanye at a different awards ceremony. In fact, after that outburst, Kanye himself had to perform humility by publicly apologizing:

Image Credit: The Los Angeles Times

In fact, part of Kanye’s explanation involves an assertion of his character, he’s “a fan of real pop culture!!!” so much so that “I gave my awards to OutKast when they deserved it over me ... that’s what it is.” If not humble for Beyoncé on the stage, he later insists that he bows to the greats too.

Kind of like how Macklemore did, too.  It might be interesting to consider what kinds of humility can be possible within moments of triumph. How can you be authentically humble or a gracious winner, especially depending on your position within the community?  For many of his fans, Macklemore’s text was him showing he was a good sport. For others like Jon Caramanica, Macklemore’s appeal failed:

In his effort to be gracious, Macklemore was uncomfortably splitting hairs. As has so often happened in the year or so since he emerged as a pop force, an act that was presumably meant to be selfless and open-minded instead came off as one of self-congratulatory magnanimity.

In such large venues as nationally televised programming, it may be hard to win over all audiences. But perhaps #respect never hurts.