Grammy boss: 'I don't think there's a race problem at all'

Adele wasn't the only one who disagreed with the Recording Academy's vote awarding her the album of the year grammy over Beyoncé. Several artists and music writers (including our own) have made the case for why they feel this should have been Bey's year, given Lemonade's cultural impact.

The New York Timeswent so far as to use the phrase #GrammysSoWhite to describe the lack of inclusion when it comes to the show's top prize. Only 10 black artists have ever won album of the year, the most recent of which was Herbie Hancock in 2008. Only three of those 10 were women (Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill).

But Neil Portnow, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, doesn't agree with them.

"No, I don’t think there’s a race problem at all," he told Pitchfork on Monday. "Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity — it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry."

Asked if he was interested in taking a page from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to diversify Recording Academy voting membership in order to avoid future controversies, Portnow doesn't think his organization needs as much urgent change.

"We don't have that kind of an issue in that same fashion," he argued. "But we are always working on increase diversity in membership, whether it's ethnicity, gender, genre, or age. In order to maintain our relevance, we have to be refreshing all the time and we have to be doing that across the board."

He went on to cite Chance the Rapper's victory as a sign that they're headed in the right direction: "You don’t get Chance the Rapper as the Best New Artist of the year if you have a membership that isn’t diverse and isn’t open-minded and isn’t really listening to the music, and not really considering other elements beyond how great the music is."

Critics argue that the Recording Academy does have a problem, at least when it comes to the top prizes: Album of the year, best new artist and record and song of the year), which are voted on by the general membership. That body skews older and more conservative in terms of their musical tastes and presentation compared to specialized categories. This may have been what Carlos Santana was trying to express when he told a New Zealand paper that he thought Adele won "because she can sing-sing."

"She doesn't bring all the dancers and props, she can just stand there and she just stood there and sang the song and that's it, and this is why she wins," he argued.

Portnow continued, "We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity. When you go to vote on a piece of music — at least the way that I approach it — is you almost put a blindfold on and you listen."

But is it even possible to put a blindfold on when it came to Lemonade, a concept album whose central theme is what it's like to be a black woman, wife and mother in America?

"It’s a matter of what you react to and what in your mind as a professional really rises to the highest level of excellence in any given year," Portnow said. "And that is going to be very subjective. That’s what we ask our members to do, even in the ballots," he said, adding that "it's a democratic vote by majority. So somebody could either receive or not receive a Grammy based on one vote."