TheQuartering [1/5/2020]
The clown world is in full swing. I can’t imagine what actual musicians from the 70’s and 80’s would think about these people nowadays.
Three of the five acts nominated for the 2021 Best Children’s Album Grammy Award are saying “no thanks.” They’re upset that the contenders in their category are all white.
One of them is Alastair Moock, whose nominated album, Be A Pain, is about American heroes who stood up for their principles: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, Rosa Parks, the Parkland shooting student protestors and others.
Upon hearing the news that he was nominated along with three other white male acts and one white woman, Moock smacked his head. “After this year, to have an all-white slate of nominees seemed really tone deaf,” he says.
The Boston-based singer-songwriter says he’d love to get a Grammy, “but I don’t want it like this, where the playing field’s not even.”
Moock is protesting by turning down his nomination. So are fellow acts Dog on Fleas and the Okee Dokee Brothers.
“We thought that it was the strongest thing we could do, to stand with people of color whose albums are too often left out of the Grammy nominations,” says Joe Mailander, one of the Okee Dokee Brothers. He hopes to expand notions of what children’s music is. “This is not just white guys with guitars playing for kids. We want to welcome all different types of music to this community.”
The Okee Dokee Brothers, Moock and Dog on Fleas — all “white guys with guitars” — sent a letter to the Recording Academy asking that their names be removed from the final Grammy ballots. They wrote they “couldn’t in good conscience benefit from a process that has historically overlooked women and artists of color.”