The 68th annual Grammy Awards took place on Feb. 1, announcing winners across 95 categories. The full list of winners is available at grammy.com/awards. The ceremony featured several performances from the nominees, building up to the reveals of the winners of the Big Four:
Album of the Year: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS – Bad Bunny
Record of the Year: “luther” – Kendrick Lamar & SZA
Song of the Year: “WILDFLOWER” – Billie Eilish
Best New Artist: Olivia Dean
Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is the first all-Spanish album to ever win the Grammy for Album of the Year, an enormous milestone in the history of Latin music, marking the genre’s emergence into the mainstream. Bad Bunny also used the win to speak out about the issues facing Latino communities in America due to ICE, saying “we’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.”
Kendrick Lamar retained his chokehold on the Grammys with the most nominations at nine. Following up his seven nominations and five wins last year, Lamar once again won five awards, bringing his total to 27. With this, Lamar has passed Jay-Z as the rapper with the most Grammy wins and is now tied fifth overall in total Grammys, further cementing his legacy as a critically acclaimed hip-hop legend.
“Hip-hop has been my music of choice for a long time,” said English teacher Shem Malone, “but it’s been a fraught thing at the Grammys. Hip-hoppers in the ‘80s just got ignored. In the early ‘90s, they actually added a category for rap, but they didn’t show that award on TV. At least it’s better now.”
The growing acceptance of hip-hop is evident today, as the genre has taken over the mainstream; Kendrick Lamar, alongside Tyler the Creator and Clipse, made this the first Grammys where three rap albums were nominated for Album of the Year.
Another noticeable culture shift at this year’s Grammys was the rise in popularity of K-pop, with “APT.” and “Golden” both being the first K-pop songs ever nominated for Song of the Year, and “APT.” being the first for Record of the Year. However, this isn’t the first year K-pop has received major attention from the public. K-pop groups BTS and BLACKPINK consistently made the Billboard Hot 100 from 2017 to 2022, with BTS reaching #1 multiple times. Despite their cultural prominence, BTS has only received five Grammy nominations (none of which they won), and BLACKPINK hasn’t been nominated a single time.
“I’ve found that [the Grammys] frequently has not reflected the culture, but you could feel them course correcting over time,” Malone shared. “When Lauryn Hill won in 1999, that was a big deal. She was the first hip-hop artist to win Album of the Year, and she held the award up and went, ‘This is hip-hop,’ which was this awesome moment. It was like an official recognition for a form of music I love. As much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes you need an authority like the Grammys to canonize these things.”
