Another Beyoncé vs. Taylor Swift Showdown Looms at the 2025 Grammy Awards – Twin Cities

LOS ANGELES – A decade and a half ago, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift competed for Album of the Year at the 52nd Grammy Awards in January 2010.

It was the first time each woman had competed for the Grammy’s most prestigious award—one that embodies the Recording Academy’s cherished ideas of excellence and tradition—and as they waited for Carlos Santana to announce the winner, there was nervous anticipation on both their faces . .

That night, Swift, then 20, won album of the year for her second record, the 10-times platinum “Fearless” – and in the process became the youngest person in Grammy history to win the category. (Billie Eilish set a new record with her 2020 win at age 18.) Since then, Swift has won the academy’s top award three more times, including earlier this year, when her win with “Midnight” broke a tie with Frank Sinatra. Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder made her the first female artist to win four album of the year awards.

Meanwhile, Beyoncé lost out on Album of the Year three more times, a disappointing result for music’s most intellectually ambitious superstar.

Now, for the first time since 2010, these era-defining giants will once again compete for album of the year: Swift with The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter when the nominees are announced at the 67th Grammy Awards. November 8. Not only that, but Swift’s “Fortnight” and Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” — each No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify — will likely face off over both records. year and song of the year.

The prospect of an epic rematch between the two would certainly please academy officials, who are always looking for ways to entice viewers to tune into a televised awards show in the age of social media. After all, Bey and Tay moments have been a reliable magnet for attention since the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye West famously interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech by declaring that Beyoncé deserved the prize for best female video.

Last year, the women posed for photos that instantly went viral when they each appeared at the premiere of each other’s concert film. And who can forget the hysteria that resulted from (eventually debunked) rumors that the two had agreed to join forces under Vice President Kamala Harris at August’s Democratic National Convention?

However, the clash will also highlight certain shortcomings within the Recording Academy and the music business in general related to race, genre and authenticity—and not for the first time. Grammy fans will remember the earlier battle between Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” and Adele’s “30” in 2023, which followed Adele’s tearful announcement at the 2017 Grammys that she couldn’t rightfully award album of the year for her blockbuster “25” knowing , that her Victory was achieved at the expense of Beyoncé’s epochal “Lemonade”.

Adele’s idea was that by denying Beyoncé the equivalent of a best picture Oscar in the recording industry, the academy failed to properly reward more important work, as it did when Beck’s “Morning Phase” surpassed Beyoncé’s self-titled album in awards. album of the year in 2015—and, indeed, just as happened at the 2023 ceremony, when Renaissance (and 30) lost to Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House” during a show in which Beyoncé otherwise won best artist -winner in Grammy History.

Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, acknowledged this paradox at the show last February in a speech in which he noted that his wife “has more Grammys than everyone else and has never won album of the year.” So even by your own metrics it doesn’t work. Think about it: the Grammy itself is Album of the Year, which has never won. It doesn’t work.”

Jay-Z didn’t mention Swift in his acceptance speech, but on the night she accepted the award for her fourth album of the year, it was easy to wonder why her music consistently receives such high-level recognition while Beyoncé deserves lesser recognition. awards in various genre categories. This discrepancy reflects the academy’s long-standing preference for a singer-songwriter approach (like the one Swift uses) over the more collaborative process that Beyoncé uses to create records that can include the work of dozens of musicians; it also suggests that Grammy voters view Swift as more of an auteur than Beyoncé, which, if true, may help explain why only three black women—Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, and Lauryn Hill—won album of the year at the sixtieth Grammy Awards. one and a half decades.