Music

What Happened to Your Grammy Consideration?

BYYassine Hariss

February 3, 2026

It was another evening like so many. I was scrolling on Instagram, trying to make sense of the final chapters of the Jeffrey Epstein saga while replaying clips of Bad Bunny’s historic win at the 2026 Grammy Awards on Monday night. Between all the memes and email screenshots I wish I had never seen, I toggled over to my messages, ready to send a few thoughts into the group chat. That’s when a small status bubble caught my attention. It was my good friend Spek0, who used his 15-character limit to ask his peers a simple question: What happened to their Grammy considerations?

For context, a few weeks ago, the region got swept up in a small wave of excitement. Why? Because a handful of artists, projects, and songs were announced as eligible for consideration at the 68th annual Grammy Awards. Not nominated, not shortlisted, just admitted into the general pool of submissions. In football terms, (if that can help anyone understand the point I’m trying to make) it’s like celebrating being allowed to play a World Cup qualification game. You’ve earned the right to maybe compete, but no certainty that you will or even win anything if you did.

Celebrating a chance to win is not a winner’s mentality. And this week’s ceremony proved our point: not a single artist from the so-called “regional contenders” won anything, nor were they mentioned, acknowledged, or even given an ounce of real visibility to begin with, minus a few Instagram stories. For all the noise and congratulatory messages, you’d think we had made history, except we didn’t.

A few months back, Egyptian star-in-the-making Tul8te was treated as a quasi-victor, his third studio album Narein having been accepted into the eligibility pool, yet spoken about as though it had conquered the hearts of the Recording Academy already. Another name that was praised was Mohamed Ramadan’s, whose inclusion, more than anyone else’s, came as a sobering reminder of just how low the bar can be in music sometimes, even on the grandest of stages.

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To us, the situation at hand begs a simple, yet important, question: what exactly is it that we’re trying to celebrate? Is it the fact that a few regional names momentarily appeared under the light of the world’s biggest theatre? Or is it the old, sadly familiar pursuit of Western validation.

In our opinion, it reads more like the latter. Let’s take a look at the facts: Tul8te is already regarded — almost consensually— as one of the most talented, if not the most talented, artist of his generation in the region. The numbers play in his favor. Narein, the project accepted for consideration, pulled first-week figures usually reserved for legacy acts, drawing numbers that traditionally famous singers only reach and somehow manage to maintain long after initial release, even when momentum should have faded. On the awards front, the recognition he’s received so far, even if its mostly accolades, should be enough to satisfy anyone’s ego.

So what is it that the Grammy Awards offers that he hasn’t already earned here? What is the added value being chased? Because if we strip away the sentimentality, the Grammys shouldn’t necessarily mean more than any other title he’s claimed on this side of the world, or elsewhere as a matter of fact.

To play devil’s advocate, it is true that the Grammys are the most widely watched ceremony in the world, respected by millions, whether we like it or not. And it’s equally true that we have yet to build an equivalent of that calibre within our own ecosystems. That gap exists, and there’s no point turning a blind eye to it.

But that’s beside the point. The real issue is the fixation on institutions that never really wanted us, never saw us, and now — at the slightest glance — send us spiraling into self-congratulation. They didn’t acknowledge us then, why would they do now? And even if they did all of a sudden, lest not forget that whenever the U.S has started paying too much attention on what’s happening on this side of the globe, it never ended well. Jokes aside, look at the history of Black musicians in the U.S.: despite shaping a consequential part of contemporary American music, it took 15-years after the inaugural Grammy Awards for a Black artist to win Album of the Year. That honor went to Stevie Wonder in 1974 and since then, only a handful of Black artists have won that category (nine in total, over 66-years). In our books, that’s a statistical embarrassment for an institution that now tangibly proves that it ignores those who had a large part in building it.

Examples from the past should teach us something else: just as African-Americans once turned away from the Grammys, so should we. That logic on their side produced the BET Awards, and it is now our turn to build institutions capable of operating at a high scale, level and prestige so artists like Tul8te aren’t waiting for a nod to come from abroad to feel content with their output. And if history should teach us anything else, it’s that institutions built elsewhere will never recognize you in proportion to what you do because they were not designed to, regardless of how much you give.

Persisting to become the exception to the rule is like shooting yourself in the foot, so rather than beg for a seat at a table that was never set for you (you being us) make your own table, or better, open your own restaurant altogether and do things on your own terms.

What Happened to Your Grammy Consideration?

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What Happened to Your Grammy Consideration?

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