At the 1999 Grammy Awards, Lauryn Hill made history when “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” captured the Album of the Year award. As Hill, then 23, stepped up to the stage, she was met with cries of support from the star-studded audience. In her acceptance speech, Hill declared her surprise at winning the highly coveted trophy, saying, “This is crazy because this is hip-hop.”

Since its inception, the Grammy Awards have given 65 albums the widely-respected Album of the Year award. Out of these, two were categorized as hip-hop.

This disparity is no anomaly, according to Palo Alto High School Choir and Audio Music Production teacher Michael Najar. In fact, the Grammy Awards introduced the Best Rap Performance category in 1989 — three decades after the first awards ceremony — which is emblematic of the larger lack of recognition of hip-hop in the music industry.

“For the longest time, there was no rap album [category], even though rap albums were dominating the music industry,” Najar said.

Additionally, the Grammy Awards had a category titled “Best Urban Contemporary Album” — a name describing music of Black origin that was dropped as a category in 2020. After claiming “Best Rap Album,” hip-hop and neo soul artist Tyler, the Creator denounced the Grammy Awards “urban” label, citing its racist origins.

“I don’t like that ‘urban’ word — it’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word to me,” the artist said. “Why can’t we just be in pop?”

In response to the urban category’s existence, Vivian Medithi, a rap columnist at the music magazine The FADER, explained how the Grammy Awards often has a skewed categorization system.

Voting mechanisms further complicate the recognition of artists, as there is often a disconnect between what the general public thinks and the Recording Academy’s voting since record companies and members of the Recording Academy are the only ones with a say. Public campaigns, like publicity and strategic song releases can be helpful, but often lead to contentious results.

“Artists have to campaign themselves to the recording academy and encourage people to vote for them,” Medithi said. “Kendrick Lamar [might] lose rap album of the year to Macklemore, even though his record has more streams or more acclaim, but the Academy has the final vote.”

Senior and Paly’s Black Student Union president Alec Bonnard believes that these differing opinions may be due to racial prejudice within the voting groups.

According to Medithi, mainstream music recognition has been tainted with racial bias, although it may not be intentional. This stems from the lack of Black representation in the music industry, as evident by a 2021 study from the University of Southern California concluding that 86% of top music executives in the industry were white men.

Due to this skew, subtle racial judgment toward music can be detrimental to the artists as a whole and is visible beyond the consumer perspective. Race frequently shapes how certain artists are acknowledged.

“There’s a lot of implicit racial bias in how people talk about rap and Black artists in general,” Medithi said. “Of course [this bias] comes into award ceremonies and the voting process. Separating things by genre as a proxy for race has been fraught and problematic.”

The Recording Academy, according to Medithi, has had a history of undermining the artistic merits of rap and hip-hop music.

“When the Best Rap Performance category was created, some of the nominees were trying to organize a boycott because the award wasn’t going to be televised,” Medithi said. “Even at the first instances of rap awards, rap was already being marginalized or sidelined.”

In addition to award shows, hip-hop has faced these hurdles since the beginning of its introduction to major studios. Consequently, major record label executives often do not reflect the identity of the artists they represent.

“Record labels essentially [group] and push [all] music to be part of the mainstream,” Medithi said.

This may also affect how genres like hip-hop are discussed and evaluated. Hip hop is often compartmentalized or stereotyped into being a substanceless genre.

“Hip hop can seem really unserious or light but also have implications of heavier stuff,” Medithi said. “Rappers like Dave Blunts, for example, embody a lot about both the good and bad in hip-hop culture.”

Beyond the industry’s structural issues, there may be a deeper complexity in how hip-hop is interpreted in mainstream culture. In the past, hip-hop has been deemed by some as a lighthearted or unintelligent art form, but the political and social response to the genre has changed today.

Yet, despite these visible signs of progress in increasing respect and representation, prestigious awards often neglect rap and hip-hop as meaningful forms of music. According to Medithi, conservations and debates about diversity have yet to make a tangible difference.

“Even though the Grammys have made an effort for diversity at the nomination level and at the broadcast level, I don’t think that’s really reflected in major categories like Song of the Year or Album of the Year,” Medithi said.

Dr. Daphne A. Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University and author of multiple books on Black women in the music industry, believes that the Grammys are an example of a system flawed with structural inequity.

“The fact that [Beyoncé] is only the third Black woman to ever win Album of the Year in the 66 year history of the Grammys is an indicator of how extraordinarily disproportionate the institution is with regards to valuing the art of white artists versus that of Black artists,” Brooks said.

Institutions like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Pulitzer and the Grammys have the power to define what is important, in both an artistic and academic context.

When these institutions historically fail to recognize the art of certain groups, particularly that of African Americans, they must invent their own metrics of cultural importance.

“All marginalized people, not just African Americans but people of color and women, historically, in this country, have had to create their own meaning,” Brooks said.

Music is inherently political and culturally important, providing different meanings to different groups. For many Black Americans, music has served as a way to preserve the past.

“For African Americans in particular, music has been a powerful way to create counter-narratives about themselves,” Brooks said. “The ways music can operate as historical archives, to store the memories and hopes and desires of communities who are locked out of power is incredibly important.”

Yet, while marginalized communities have used music as a powerful tool for documentation and expression, the authority to criticize popular music has historically been delegated to predominantly white groups.

“White men were the ones who created Rolling Stone at Berkeley,” Brooks said. “They created this bar of excellence in evaluating popular music and rock and roll in particular and really pushed an effort to define music that was important in the 60s and 70s.”

The impact of this early gatekeeping became even more pronounced as genres evolved into the modern era, leading to significant shifts in how Black artists could navigate the industry.

“Something happened in the 21st century in regards to hip-hop’s extraordinary global dominance and pop becoming a racially segregated space,” Brooks said. “Although we know that there are crossovers, the kind of gray area and liminal genres [between pop and hip-hop] that existed and offered different opportunities for different kinds of artists to emerge [went away].”

This transformation of the musical landscape has especially affected the career trajectories of Black female artists.

While previous generations saw the emergence of these superstars who could move between genres, that path has become increasingly rare, reflecting a larger shift in how Black artistry is defined.

“Hip-hop, as powerful as it is, closed ranks around our definitions of what Blackness can and should sound like,” Brooks said.

Dr. John Rickford, a Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University’s Department of Linguistics, was shocked at the Grammy Awards’ historic ignorance toward hip-hop and rap music.

In fact, he says that hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. According to Rickford, hip-hop was created by both African and Caribbean Americans in the Bronx. In August, 1973, DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell hosted the first hip-hop party in an apartment, he says.

Hip hop’s Black origins have led ethnicity to play an integral role in hip-hop culture. However, this comes with consequences; hip-hop is often less praised than other genres due to its reputation as a way to instigate violence or perpetuate gang conflict.

“There is a racial undertone that it [hip-hop] is not seen as gloriously as pop music, even by some people in the Black community, because they [think hip-hop] is setting us back,” Bonnard said. “It perpetuates those harmful connotations of gangster life.”

In actuality, the history of bias toward the music of Black artists stretches back decades before the 1970s and hip-hop’s emergence. The migration of Black Americans to rural, Southern cities beginning in 1916 was when Black music initially gained more popularity, according to the Music Forward Foundation. Despite the surge in popularity with artists such as Duke Ellington and Ma Rainey, during this time, terms such as “race music” and “race records” categorized the music of Black artists, delegating Black tracks and albums to separate catalogs and even separate radio stations altogether.

Soul artist Richard Wayne Penniman, known as “Little Richard,” referenced these divisions in a 1991 televised interview documented by Reeling in the Years Archive.

“When my music came out, white people didn’t hear Black records,” Penniman said. “They had race stations, they had Black stations and they had stations for white people and stations for Black people.”

The segregated broadcasting of music impacted the careers of Black artists of the time period, including Penniman. Pat Boone, a white artist, covered Penniman’s 1956 song “Tutti Frutti” and achieved great success — in fact, Boone succeeded more than Penniman himself.

“[Boone] outsold me,” Penniman said. “He sold more records because the stations would play him and wouldn’t play me.”

In 1942, the “Harlem Hit Parade” — a Billboard magazine chart ranking the most voguish African-American records of the time — was released to the public. This chart marked Billboard’s first acknowledgement of Black music. Seven years later, Black albums would begin to be called “rhythm and blues” on Billboard’s chart, today more frequently referred to as “R&B.”

Eventually, in the 1970s, Billboard’s chart began categorizing Black music as “urban contemporary.”

It was around this time, according to Rickford, that hip hop’s popularity began to slowly increase.

“It [hip hop’s growth] fits into the larger tradition of Black music and culture, evolving from what came before it,” Rickford said.

In the 1980s, there was a shift to Black artists being a part of mainstream music. Artists were able to transition from the gospel or the R&B genre to pop music.

“There was a Black pop renaissance in the 1980s, Whitney Houston, who was very much groomed to become a global pop superstar and came out of the Church and Lionel Richie, who crossed over from an R&B funk band [to the mainstream],” Brooks said.

In response to these giant Black musicians in popular music, hip-hop began to evolve as a counterculture, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. In the 90s, hip-hop shaped the experience of many Black communities, it would prevail as the dominant music form for Black Americans for decades.

Despite this categorization of Black artists, the impact of hip-hop — especially in cities — was undeniable.

“[In the 90s], you had the rise of hip-hop culture with real names like Tupac, Biggie and Snoop Dogg,” Najar said. “The LA and New York [rap scenes] were just rising.”

For Paly junior Nalani Walsh, the rap music created during the 1990s is her favorite era of the genre due to its artistic integrity.

“The 90s rap sound is definitely still around in rap music today.” Walsh said. “90s rap music was really significant because there was a lot of art in it then, especially with the ways that DJs would mix beats with actual records live,”

Similarly, Paly sophomore and Black Student Union secretary Kendall Butler has seen 1990s hip-hop’s tangible impact on her life, as she listens to rap on a daily basis.

“The rap genre is very good for creativity and lyrical play,” Butler said. “To me, it [hip-hop] is a way of self expression and poetry.”

Despite widespread admiration for the decade’s music, hip-hop’s rise to the top came with controversies. Due to the hedonistic themes and graphic content of more mainstream rap music, the genre has been used as a form of subtle oppression against African American communities.

“Rap music is being misused in order to bring communities down,” Butler said. “[Rap music] is usually associated with the words ghetto, thuggish or aggressive, and oftentimes those associations are pushed on to me as a person of color.”

University of California Los Angeles graduate student Chanel Cox believes Black artists have been molded to fit into the distinct spaces the music industry sets aside for them.

For her research on African American Studies, Cox analyzed the transformation of iconic figures like Tupac Shakur, whose image was changed to become more palatable to a mainstream audience.

“Tupac was not always this gangster,” Cox said. “He was in prison, and then when he came out, he [had] a whole different persona that really was commercialized and commodified for the white viewer.”

Racial stereotyping has often been a business model within the music industry, where Black artists are reduced to one-dimensional caricatures that align with audience expectations.

“The industry makes money off of the Black male stereotype of being a gangster, of being a criminal,” Cox said.

Today, many artists still adhere to this image, while others navigate these expectations by paving their own path.

“There are still those artists, hip-hop artists, who are getting arrested and going to jail and then coming back out, and it does play into their street credibility as an artist,” Cox said. “But, there’s the other side of hip-hop and rap, where some of the artists, like Tyler The Creator, [are] not trying to play into those stereotypes at all.”

Gender dynamics add another layer of complexity to the experiences of Black rap and hip-hop artists. Female artists must simultaneously deal with racial stereotypes and gender role expectations.

“Hip hop is such a virtuosic aesthetic form; it’s not an easy space for women across the board,” Brooks said.

The expectations to adhere to a certain stereotype in hip-hop sometimes keeps Black women from expressing femininity or their full identity.

“Gender and economic status intersect in the experiences of hip-hop artists,” Cox said. “Megan Thee Stallion and Doechii are Black female artists but they come off as more masculine sometimes, and they have to because of the industry [standards] which play into that stereotype of Black woman independence.”

According to Cox, the predetermined portrayals of Black artists can limit how much of their work is shown to the public.

“There is a box that [industry executives] try to put [Black artists] into as they’re creating music,” Cox said. “Some of their music might not be released because it’s not marketable or sellable.”

Many of these deep-rooted societal biases stem from misogynistic or violent lyrical content, especially prevalent in late twentieth-century hip-hop.

“The 90s did not help the problem,” Najar said. “You still had a ton of misogyny; you still had a ton of violence in the lyrics towards women.”

While the 90s may have shaped problematic trends in rap music, others point to how the modern industry continues to promote certain styles of rap over others.

“Upbeat rap gets more recognition because it’s way more comfortable to listen to, while spoken word rap does not because it usually includes topics of society, life and deep emotion, rather than money, gambling and fast life,” Butler said. “Many people fail to realize that not all rap is the same. The rap music pushed to the top of the platform is badly representing the point of what rap is supposed to be.”

These concerns about representation in rap music reflect broader issues that have faced the music industry. During the Feb. 2 Grammy Awards in 2025, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. delivered a speech addressing past issues regarding the Recording Academy’s staff diversity and lack of transparency.

Mason Jr. mentioned the Grammy Awards’ recent addition — the Black Music Collective — designed to increase the diversity amongst Academy members and create a staff that “reflects the entire music community,” as he put it.

As of today, 40% of the Grammy electorates are people of color: a 90% growth for Black artists, specifically, according to The Hollywood Report.

“The current president Harvey Mason Jr spoke about [the lack of diversity] last night, and I am aware that they have tried to make institutional changes, especially at the level of transforming the voting body,” Brooks said. “Other sites of cultural recognition, like the Oscars for instance, have tried to reform at the level of evaluation.”

While striving for change, it is important to recognize the efforts and contributions of African American artists to the evolution of modern music.

“The Black Music Collective does a fair amount of programming and historical work, so that people will understand, for instance, the story of how African Americans were architects of the blues, which then became the DNA for popular music culture,” Brooks said.

As the music industry and awards ceremonies have begun to recognize Black artists more and more, many like-minded listeners hold aspirations as to what rap music could be in the future.

Bonnard has seen significant progress in hip-hop becoming more respected by the public and obtaining a more diverse audience.

“More people of all races are enjoying hip-hop — all races, backgrounds and socioeconomic classes,” Bonnard said. “Hip hop has grown in that way.”

Despite increased attention to rap, Bonnard believes that there is still progress to be made in terms of hip-hop’s respect as a genre.

This vision of hip-hop achieving equal recognition aligns with a broader hope for expansion in Black artistry.

“I hope that we’ll continue to see these younger Black artists experiment with new genres,” Brooks said. “It doesn’t mean the death of hip-hop, as Kendrick [Lamar] said. Hip-hop will never die, but hopefully, it will expand the [boundary] of what is possible for Black musicians.”

Brooks emphasizes the importance of allowing Black artists to fully express their creativity beyond the bounds of genre expectations and cultural stereotypes.

“We want to see more innovation from Black artists,” Brooks said. “[We want] for them to be seen as truly multi-faceted human beings by the industry.”