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Chris Brown getting nominated for (more) Grammys is earning major backlash. Well-deserved backlash.
Chris Brown has been accused of numerous wrongdoings, including beating up his own fans. He pleaded guilty to assaulting Rihanna in 2009, confirming the criminal charges against him at that time.
Which means that Chris Brown is not an “alleged” monster; he’s just a monster. It is known.
And yet … the industry does not seem to care. Neither do whichever people actually keep buying his music.
Gross! Chris Brown has been nominated for more Grammys
The Grammy Awards are tonight, and many of the nominated names are exactly who you’d expect after a solid year for music.
Obviously, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are up for Grammys. Beyonce is once again a music industry MVP, even if some awards shows have snubbed her.
Charlie XCX. Taylor Swift. Billie Eilish. All music that normal people with taste likely listened to (even if not everyone listens to all of or only this music, of course!)
But then, the Grammy nominations take a bitter twist.
For Best R&B Performance, Chris Brown has a nomination for “Residuals.” For Best R&B Album, Chris Brown has a nomination for 11:11 (Deluxe).
The Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song includes another nomination. Chris Brown was one of the people who worked on “Praise.” And for Best African Music performance, Chris Brown has a Grammy nomination for “Sensational.”
Obviously, Chris Brown getting Grammy nominations is getting well-deserved backlash
Even though Twitter is in its death spiral as a platform, tweet after tweet is calling out the Grammy Awards for nominating Chris Brown.
An admitted domestic abuser who has been accused of having other victims will very likely get to walk onto the stage at the next Grammys and hold up an award.
Some of his accusers may be in the audience. Alleged victims who’ve never come forward may be there. Future potential victims might be there, think that he must be an okay person, and find out the hard way that he is not. Whatever happened to the “cancel culture” that awful dudes are always whining about?
The grim reality, of course, is that “cancel culture” as so many people mean it never actually existed. And that’s unfortunate.
Yes, there are absolutely people who spend their free time calling out others on social media. Usually, it’s for clout, and can be for invented reasons — fandom disagreements and the like. In that sense, sure, “cancel culture” exists. But that’s not what people mean when they say it.
The “cancel culture” towards sexual predators, abusers, and other monsters? If recent political events have taught us nothing else, it’s that we don’t live in a good enough or just enough society for most of the evil in our midst to face meaningful consequences.
‘Cancel culture’ isn’t just a myth; it’s a grift
In fact, for years now, claims that someone is “silenced” or “deplatformed” or “canceled” have been nothing short of farcical.
The running joke is that these men get their own speaking tours, their own Netflix comedy specials, their own news segments, their own Grammys. All so that they can discuss just how much “cancel culture” has harmed them. There’s an entire industry that has cropped up around grifters coasting on the claim that they’ve been unjustly “canceled.”
In the case of Chris Brown, he’s up for a Grammy Award. Again. Because people keep buying his music. They keep going to his concerts. And then record companies and members of the academy keep nominating him for awards that he could never deserve.
