Rapper Cardi B — Cardi B is nominated in the 2018 Grammys for best rap song and best rap performance for her song, Bodak Yellow. Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Not a rock guitar solo to be heard as Grammys embrace women and hip-hop

This article is more than 6 years old

More inclusive voting means a woman could win best rap album for only the second time since Lauryn Hill won with the Fugees in 1997

For years, the Grammys have been criticised for being out of touch but the music industry’s pre-eminent music awards will attempt a culturally relevant reset tonight in New York.

Many of these hopes rest on the shoulders of three women. One is the Bronx-born, Trinidadian-Dominican former stripper Cardi B, whose hit Bodak Yellow (Money Moves) is nominated for best rap song and best rap performance. The other two are Rapsody, a lyrically and melodically adept 34-year-old North Carolina native who is up for best rap song for Sassy and best album for Laila’s Wisdom, and Missouri born Solána Imani Rowe, aka SZA, who is up for best new artist.

If either Cardi B or Rapsody win best rap album they will be the first woman to do so since Lauryn Hill won with the Fugees in 1997. This would be doubly impressive since Cardi B and Rapsody are going up against seven-time winner Kendrick Lamar and 21-time winner Jay-Z in their respective categories.

The music industry, with the notable exception of Russell Simmons, has been largely spared the torrent of sexual harassment accusations levelled at film business performers and executives, yet it is not without enduring biases, says cultural critic and former music industry executive Carol Cooper.

“The Grammys have gone back and forth on both the race and gender issue for many years. It was slow to validate rap and hip-hop, and you can’t just relegate young female rap or hip-hop artists to one category of best new artist.”

Part of the change comes from the fracturing and reformulation of the music business. In the past, the mainstream business was obliged to support mainstream artists. Now that there is no mainstream, categorisations have begun to open up.

In the past, women were more highly categorised from year to year – singer-songwriters, girl groups, Lilith Fair-type acts. That conformity has now been challenged, Cooper says, in part as a response to the sexism of the Trump presidency and partly a response to the 2013 lawsuit pop superstar Kesha filed against her former producer, Dr Luke, accusing him of physical, sexual and emotional abuse and employment discrimination against her. Dr Luke is currently suing Kesha for defamation over an alleged text Kesha sent to Lady Gaga stating that Dr Luke had raped another woman.

Rapper Rapsody — Rapsody has Grammy nominations for best album and best rap song. Photograph: Johnny Nunez/Getty Images for Essence

This year’s hip-hop resurgence comes not a moment too soon, stated the industry trade journal Billboard in November, after nominees were announced. It said “the show finds itself on precarious footing with the artists most closely defining popular music in 2017” and warned of a “full-scale rebellion from the hip‑hop and R&B worlds brewing against the Grammys”.

In 2005, rap music was all-but left out of the awards, prompting anxiety that rap had run out of ideas. Eleven years later, and R&B star and critic’s favourite Frank Ocean refused even to enter his 2016 hit Blonde for consideration, claiming the awards didn’t seem to represent “people who come from where I come from, and hold down what I hold down”.

“You have to realihe Grammys were the establishment organisational award,” says Cooper, “and a lot of people accepted it was dedicated to preserving heritage acts and an old idea of what pop music should be. There was always a form of economic protectionism going on when the music industry was more economically robust.”

Like the Golden Globes three weeks ago and the Oscars to follow in March, this year’s Grammys are likely to become a showcase for expressions of gender and racial equality. Instead of the all-black outfits worn by actors at the Golden Globes in support of the Time’s Up initiative against workplace sexual harassment, nominees and presenters will wear white roses.

But, in many respects, the music industry, which may never have been so ham-fisted or inarticulate as film in areas of overt sexism, preceded the film industry in efforts to reform. Rule changes and the formation of new committees purposed to “override the popular vote to focus on what is really the best”, were made effective last year after Beck beat Beyoncé to album of the year in 2015, which at the time prompted Kanye West to call on Beck to give his award to Beyoncé.

Equally striking is an almost total absence of rock music from the major categories. This year Jay-Z leads all nominees with eight nods, followed by Kendrick Lamar with seven, Bruno Mars with six and Childish Gambino, No I.D, Khalid and SZA all with five – and barely a guitar solo between them.

There may be no better representative of the new spirit than livewire Cardi B, who describes herself as a “regular, degular, shmegular girl from the Bronx” who escaped a life of domestic violence and supported herself working at a strip club. Barely a year since bursting on to the scene, Cardi B (real name Belcalis Almanzar) has become the first woman with five simultaneous Top 10 hits on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. She’s a live wire and currently engaged to rapper Offset from hip-hop act Migos, though that plan has run into complications due to her allegation he was unfaithful to her.

However, she told Rolling Stone magazine: “I used to tell myself I will always be myself. Little by little, I’m feeling like I’m getting trapped and muted.”

Better for everyone Cardi’s wild spirit remains uncontained. Given this force of nature, perhaps the Grammys had little option but to modernise. “Institutions have to reflect the fact that people are not consuming music in the same way,” says Cooper. “They’re not making it in the same way, and they’re not making the same money they used to make.” So now we’re seeing greater diversity. It’s not sudden or mysterious – and you can’t pretend you’re not going to participate.”