The Grammys Were Sexist, Stupid, and Insulting

Even though two-time Grammy winner Hillary Clinton (seriously) was not up for any awards for the audiobook of What Happened, the Grammys, unlike the rest of America, still really like her. And so, Clinton made a surprise appearance at the Grammy awards Sunday night, where she read from Michael Wolff’s dubiously sourced and highly critical book on the Trump administration, Fire and Fury. Most recently, Wolff has been promoting his controversial book by running around publicly highlighting an especially nasty and demeaning bit in the book insinuating that Nikki Haley was having an affair with the President Trump.

Coincidentally, Clinton’s appearance also came just a few days after it was revealed she refused to fire Burns Strider, a “faith adviser” on her 2008 campaign, when he was accused of sexual harassment. Patti Solis Doyle, her campaign manager, has subsequently said she did “due diligence” investigating the matter and came to the conclusion Strider should be fired from the campaign and was “overruled” by Clinton herself.

Haley, who is otherwise occupied with securing rights for women in Afghanistan and standing up for the citizens of Iran, was rightfully annoyed by the Grammys’ decision to tout her smear merchant:

Note that Haley was not complaining about music or art as political expression, but about an awards telecast that muddied its purpose. But there was a widespread and willful misreading of her comment.

Billboard, the venerable music industry trade publication, wrote: “Nikki Haley Gets Roasted By Twitter Users After Criticism of Hillary Clinton’s ‘Fire And Fury’ Grammys Cameo.” The argument was that the Trump administration hates the First Amendment because they don’t want artists to be political.

Here’s up and coming actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani:

This is all true, but is that really what’s going on here? Or is the problem that what the Grammys did was gratuitously insulting and divisive, never mind that it lent what’s left of its diminishing cultural cache to Clinton and Wolff on a night when they were otherwise trying to send a message they were all about protecting and empowering women?

Never mind, either, that the politics of the Grammys and America’s arts industries are oppressively monolithic. There are plenty of pointed and intelligent critiques one could launch at Trump and his behavior or, God forbid, positive celebrations of liberal values worth doing that don’t explicitly involve bashing half the country.

Instead, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, by way of the Huffington Post, informs us that Nikki Haley is the real hypocrite here:

Intelligent and sharply critical artistic commentary of Donald Trump, and any president for that matter, is desperately needed and should be welcome. America’s once mighty arts industrial complex has lost all perspective. Zealously enforced institutional conformity is not a recipe for producing intelligent or genuinely provocative art. It produces the kind of partisan, onanistic self-congratulation that tries rehabilitate a two-time presidential.

Indeed, it’s a real mystery why the ratings for the Grammy awards hit an all-time low. Personally, I’m already looking forward to not watching the Oscars.