Like with Nicki Minaj, the Grammys weren't sure what genre to put Beyoncé in

As an organization, the Grammy Awards is an outdated and complicated machine, the sort of thing that can’t really ever change but must be constantly maintained with tiny little tweaks that don’t necessarily mean anything in the big picture… like a really old tractor that a struggling family farm depends on. Or the federal government. That means that sometimes new issues pop up that scrape against existing systems, and now the same issue has popped up (at least) twice this year: Earlier this month, Nicki Minaj was frustrated that her song “Super Freaky Girl” was dumped from the Grammys’ rap categories and moved to pop instead (feeding into longstanding arguments about what constitutes “rap”), and today, The Hollywood Reporter says that a similar thing almost happened to Beyoncé.

The issue this time is that Beyoncé submitted Renaissance as a dance/electronica album, but the Recording Academy’s “dance committee” reportedly didn’t think it was necessarily a dance album. They argued that it should be moved to pop, so the discussion moved to the Recording Academy’s National Screening Committee (which THR says is a panel of music industry experts from various fields), who all “listened to Renaissance several times to determine where it should compete”—which sounds like agonizing, back-breaking work. They decided that, yes, Beyoncé is right, and it should be treated as a dance album.

The thing at the center of these two cases, other than The Grammys being The Grammys, is that having overly restrictive definitions of specific musical genres is silly. It encourages artists to stay in a particular lane rather than freely create what they want to create, which leads to less interesting music and an overcrowded field of “pop” acts who aren’t necessarily even trying to do the same thing. Surely the better approach would be to just do what Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj or whoever wants and accept their music in whichever genre they choose to submit it as, right? If you submit an album as dance and it’s actually an audiobook, it simply won’t win the Grammy for a dance album. Right?

And this is all before the nominations have even been announced, with those sometimes leading to controversies of their own. Such is the weird paradox of the Grammys: They’re increasingly irrelevant in today’s world and with the way people listen to music now, but also musical artists still really care about them and make an effort to win them.