Rapper, songwriter and producer, four number-one songs reaching the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, over 74 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and multiple Black Entertainment Television Network (BET) awards received. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, clue yourself in. Travis Scott is one of the generation’s greatest Hip-Hop artists to date, accumulating all of the achievements listed prior. But there seems to be one major award you’d think an artist of Scott’s legendary reputation would have under his belt, a Grammy Award. This year at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards of 2024, fans thought he’d finally get it, with rap album of the year. Yet Scott was robbed of this highly renowned award and the artist Killer Mike took it home.
Every year the Grammy Awards are held to recognize and name the winners of a wide array of musical achievements. One of those awards is the Rap Album of the Year. It is one of the most highly anticipated awards reveals due to the exponential size of the Hip-Hop genre fan base. In this year’s Grammys, there were five nominees for the award. These included ¨Her Loss¨ by Drake, ¨Kings Disease III¨ by Nas, ¨Heroes and Villains¨ by Metro Boomin, ¨Michael¨ by Killer Mike and of course ¨Utopia¨ by Travis Scott. The favorite to win was Scott’s ¨Utopia¨ and rightfully so. The album had over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone, selling over 1 million units, and became double platinum within the first month of being released. Compared to Killer Mike’s album ¨Michael,¨ which only had a little over 55 million streams, not even half as many units sold, and didn’t go platinum once. As the winning name was about to be announced, everyone watching thought it was inevitable for Scott’s name to be called. Yet Scott was robbed of what he deserved again. “Michael by Killer Mike,” the announcer said. Few were pleased.
Fans around the globe expressed their disappointment, and lots of conflict arose. Many claimed they had never heard of Killer Mike and that he was undeserving of the award. It became a running joke across social platforms to not know who he was. Among all of the conflicts surrounding the two artists’ names, Scott did not stay quiet for long. It had already been planned that he would be performing his hit song, ”FE!N” after the ceremony, and during his performance, he took it as an opportunity to let everyone know how he was feeling. In the middle of the song during the chorus, Scott said, “They slept on me 10 times!” for this was the 10th time he had been nominated to win a Grammy but lost. In years prior, similar situations had occurred. In 2019 he was nominated to win the same award and was beaten by Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy”. In 2021, his song “Highest In the Room” was nominated for best melodic rap performance and that beat out by Kanye West’s “Hurricane”. So Scott is unfortunately used to this treatment from the Grammys.
Basically, the whole hip-hop community was against the decision of naming “Michael” as the winner, so how did it even happen? Nobody knows, which makes the situation even more outrageous. Some may argue the Grammys don’t decide on who wins the awards based on numbers, but rather based on how good the actual album is and ignore whether it’s mainstream or not. This argument could be true about other situations, but in Scott’s circumstance, not only did it sell more and do better statistically, but practically everyone shared the same opinion about “Utopia”. It was the best of 2023, one of Scott’s best albums and just overall a fantastic album. So obviously there must be a change in how the decision is made, maybe they should actually judge the albums on the likeness and quality while considering the statistical performance into consideration.
