Over her decades-long music career, Beyonce has received 1,349 nominations and won 737 awards, but when she won album of the year at the 2025 Grammy’s for “COWBOY CARTER,” criticism erupted. People questioned if the award was merely compensating for her earlier, overlooked albums; fans of Billie Eilish fumed at the perceived snub; and other musicians attacked the album for not being “country” at all. Similarly, Kendrick Lamar, who headlined this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, also faced criticism for his lyrics and symbolism of the experience of Black Americans in the U.S. Dr. Julie Keiffer-Lewis, head of the African American Studies department at De Anza College, explains that critics overlooked Lamar’s commentary on America and how it spoke to his experience.
“Unfortunately, racism plays a role in how folks receive music,” Keiffer-Lewis said. “Music is universal, and when we look historically, we can see the roots of music. So it’s always really fascinating when folks are trying to deny Black people in particular the ability to be in certain musical spaces, when in fact we created those musical spaces to begin with.”
Many features of modern music, such as blue notes and call-and-response, originated from west and central Africa before traveling across the Middle Passage. For example, rock, a genre generally associated with groups like Led Zeppelin and Queen, evolved from rhythm and blues, which originated from African Americans during a time of racial prejudice. However, this history is almost never recognized in the music industry. Junior Jivika Gulrajani points out that these assumptions are detrimental to the understanding of Black culture and music.
“I feel like a lot of people even at our school, but beyond that as well, take rap as something that’s cool,” Gulrajani said. “They’ll post stories to Kendrick’s new song or to J. Cole’s new album, but in the same breath, reinforce a lot of stereotypes about the Black community. Not only that, it’s almost like they think listening to music dominated by Black culture makes them understand Black adversity.”
Gulrajani brings up an experience she had with a half-Indian, half-white peer who was singing along to “Hot” by Young Thug and Gunna. She recalls that he was clearly using a Blaccent — an exaggerated mimicry of African American Vernacular English performed by non-Black people — and, after being scrutinized, claimed that “It’s just how I talk” and it’s not fair that people say I’m not ‘like that.’”
“By ‘like that,’ he meant acting like he was ‘from the hood’ when he’s not — he lives in a gated community,” Gulrajani said. “I thought it was kind of interesting, because it’s like he felt like he hadn’t struggled enough if he didn’t ‘act Black,’ and I feel like that’s a lot of what we have today. That’s what using a Blaccent is: it’s grabbing attention. It’s basically claiming adversity from a community that isn’t yours, and I think that’s in part due to the fact that trauma is framed as something that needs to be bought and sold.”
Keiffer-Lewis explains that more nuanced messages about Black people’s experiences get overlooked because of Black music’s popularity, especially because many listeners are not Black themselves. When there’s a profit motive, production companies focus on seizing the elements that sound good instead of paying attention to the history of the music.
“I don’t listen to a lot of hip hop, and yet, when I hear hip hop around, it is rare that the person listening to it looks like me — often they look like some other ethnicity, predominantly white,” Keiffer-Lewis said. “I think that one of the issues that we see is that it is popular. People like it, and so you’re going to find lots of people who are gravitating towards it, and from a corporate mindset, that’s more money. That often gets in the way of the art — many artists get left behind who are trying to really convey a message.”
An example Gulrajani brings up is Nicki Minaj, who she claims addressed social issues much more in the past — like in the 2016 song “Black Barbies,” where she calls out Donald Trump’s immigration policies. In particular, Gulrajani discusses Minaj’s character Roman Zolanski, whom Gulrajani interprets as mocking the idea that Minaj’s self-expression will only be accepted when spoken by a white man. But as Minaj faced backlash for her performances as Zolanski — even as white artists performed similar stunts — she gradually moved on from making that type of commentary.
Gulrajani sees a lot of double standards that are applied to Black artists, particularly Black women, with critics painting them as overly promiscuous compared to white artists. For example, Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Juno” was commended by critics for its raunchiness, praise that is rarely afforded to Black artists. While Pitchfork described Carpenter’s use of sexual topics as “casually goofy sex positivity,” they used “flavor and filth” to refer to Doechii’s song “NISSAN ALTIMA.” Keiffer-Lewis notes that this racial hypocrisy extends to all aspects of a Black artist’s career, preventing them from being acknowledged for their achievements.
“Who gets to tell the stories of these artists? Who gets to decide who or what is worthy of championing in the genre?” Keiffer-Lewis said. “I think it’s really easy for us to, for example, say that ‘Beyonce deserves to be in R&B, but her doing country, we don’t know about that.’ But for Taylor Swift, who went from country to pop back to country to whatever, everything’s okay. Our biases impact our ability to allow Black folks to be way more than the assumptions we’ve placed on them.”
Black artists being pigeonholed into specific genres — commonly R&B, hip hop and rap — often segues into deeper racial biases, as Gulrajani points out. She recalls her friends praising SZA for being “sophisticated,” which she found odd because of the underlying implications that other Black artists weren’t, suggesting that Black music is only good when it conforms to white cultural expectations.
Keiffer-Lewis says countering these issues starts with learning more about the history of Black people by listening to and understanding their music. At MVHS, English teacher Doug Leresche teaches rap icon Tupac Shakur’s poetry book “The Rose that Grew From Concrete” alongside texts by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes and August Wilson in his American Literature classes. He also teaches Shakur’s “Changes” in conjunction with the track it samples, Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is.” Students connect the pieces to the modern day through “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. By integrating music by Black artists into his curricula, Leresche hopes students can understand “the stories that are so common throughout the country but rare in our area.”
“Hip hop is poetry,” Leresche said. “It’s a form of storytelling of history. Most of the Wu Tang Clan songs are in iambic pentameter the whole way through and mention all kinds of wild concepts that the average person wouldn’t even understand, but we don’t think of that. We just listen to the sound and go, ‘Oh, those are idiots,’ without giving the words a chance and understanding that there’s so much meaning behind the words. I am not defending Drake or mumble rappers, but there are some really, really cool songs and messages that I wish people could see.”
Leresche says that students enjoy learning through music since the lyrics are engaging and relevant to the present day. Keiffer-Lewis also advocates for educating students and adults, whether it’s in a classroom or personal learning, which is key to recognizing the influence of Black culture on music and dismantling the negative stereotypes that come with a lack of exposure.
“I’m a teacher, and I will always advocate for learning,” Keiffer-Lewis said. “Take a class, check out a book or find some information online — I think there’s a lot there. There are enough tools to find the information. It’s just the desire of folks.”
