The Popular Vote Dominates the 2025 Grammys

Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce are the big winners of music's biggest night

The 2025 Grammys proved that the music industry is keeping in step with what the people want. Well, everybody except Drake.

Kendrick Lamar was the night’s big winner with a clean sweep—winning five awards—for “Not Like Us”. The diss song took home two of the biggest awards—song of the year and record of the year— along with best rap song, best rap performance and best music video.

This is despite the fact that Drake is currently suing Universal Music Group, in his own “stop the steal” moment, claiming that the song’s popularity was artificially inflated.

Kendrick accepted his awards by continuing to throw salt on his enemy, shouting out LA as his city and wearing a denim-on-denim look, otherwise known as a Canadian Tuxedo. The hits just keep coming.

With the Super Bowl around the corner, don’t expect the song’s momentum to stop any time soon. Drake might want to stay in Australia for a while.

The other big story was that Beyonce took home album of the year and best country album for her Cowboy Carter. The former award has been a point of contention for the singer. Remember, Jay-Z’s drunk in love rant?

Many critics (including myself) thought that Beyonce deserved to win for Lemonade in 2016. After being snubbed throughout her career for this accolade, this is a long time coming for the singer.

One of the continuing traditions of the Grammys is the perennial question: Do awards like this even matter?

Every year, artists, critics and fans complain about the relevance of this award.

At the end of the day, the Grammys are a music industry award. And like everything in the music business, there’s an entangled web of celebrity, record label politics, marketing dollars and various forms of politicking around it.

Winning a Grammy doesn’t make you a great artist. Not winning a Grammy doesn’t make you a great artist either.

The system has been plagued with longstanding issues of lack of diversity and out-of-touch decision makers. I still don’t think rappers get enough screen time on the main stage.

I’ve also long campaigned that journalists should be able to vote, which we currently aren’t able to. The Grammy voters are made up of Recording Academy members who are credited on commercial works as an artist, producer, engineer, etc. That disqualifies many people who are genre experts.

Is any of this fair? Depends on who you ask. Similar to the electoral college, that’s the system that we have for now.

Artists have long boycotted the Grammys, disrespected the awards and gone on rants more times than I can remember. It’s always short-lived. The Weeknd ended his “boycott” last night with a performance…right in time for his latest album release.

Like the Presidential election, the Grammys are a contest that everybody hates— until they win one.