Harvey Mason Jr. is the first black man to head the Recording Academy, the organization responsible for the Annual Grammy Awards. He took over in 2019 after a slew of racial controversies threatened the integrity of the Awards. Since the inception of the Grammys in 1957, only eleven black artists have won the Album of the Year Award plus, black artists received only 26.7% of nominations for the awards show while they represented over 38% of all artists on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Since Harvey’s tenure as CEO, The Academy has been on the receiving end of criticisms from Influential artists like P.Diddy and The Weeknd who lamented that there is a racial divide in both the nominations and the awards. Still, Harvey, 54, believes he could turn things around with a new, more inclusive approach.
The 6 times Grammy winner who says he too had criticisms for the organization before becoming the Academy’s front man, understands the many sides of the music and entertainment industry. Coming from a musical background he produced and wrote songs for some of the greatest musical acts of all time. He shies away from naming names but under his belt is a catalogue of hits from the Queen Of Soul Aretha Franklin, King of Pop Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Chris Brown, Kim Jong-hyun, 50 Cent and more. He also produced music for a string of hit movies. In addition to the Recording Academy, Harvey runs a media company that bears his name Harvey Mason Media. The media entrepreneur also runs the record label Hundredup, which has a music publishing and marketing component.
“I am from LA, I was actually born in Boston, but I grew up in LA since I was 8 months old, I grew up in a musical household, my mom and dad were both musicians,” he told WMV.
His father is the jazz drummer Harvey Mason Sr., who along with his mother Sally Mason, attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston Massachusetts.
“I was taking Piano lessons my whole life so I became a song writer and a producer,” Mason explains.
Having returned from his trip to Ghana , where he attended the Global Citizens Festival in Accra last month, the well accomplished music executive spoke with WMV in this his first Caribbean media interview, about what needs to be done to improve the prospects for reggae and dancehall artists at the Grammys and other Recording Academy events.
Harvey also told World Music Views in this exclusive interview about his upbringing in a musical household and says his daily task as CEO is to make the Grammys more global, more inclusive and show greater representation for artists and genres in different parts of the world who are making an artistic impact on the industry.
“The organization has been around 65 years now and there has been so much change, not just in the last two years but from the beginning of the organization. Since I took over there has been an effort to really make sure we are diversifying what we are doing, doing a lot more listening, we are doing a lot more including, there is equity among genres, genders, races, and geographies.”
Harvey says under his leadership he plans to make the organization more global which will include music released outside of the US in the future.
“There is just a lot of effort and attention paid to making sure that we are pulling back the curtain and looking under every rock, are there things we can do better, how can we iterate, innovate, and be of service, how can we be the best organization we can be,” he professes on behalf of The Academy.
How does Jamaica, reggae-dancehall fit into these changes mentioned by Harvey? To start, one of the rule changes implemented last year under Mason’s regime was that all credited contributors for Album Of The Year are eligible for the nomination. Where as before, persons would need to contribute more than 33.3% to the project to be eligible. This helped Jamaican artists Shenseea and Buju Banton who has songs on Ye’s (Kanye) Donda album thereby scored their first Album Of The Year nomination for their contribution.
Jamaican music makers and creators share a similar but more complex struggle as the black musicians in America and the islanders have been just as vocal. Freddy McGregor, whose Anything For You Album lost to Lee Scratch Perry’s Jamaican E.T at the 45th Annual Grammy Awards, expressed that those who select the Reggae Grammy are biased and have been out of touch with whats going on in the genre. The Jamaica Gleaner reported Freddie as saying in 2016 that the “reggae arm” of the Grammys is “an embarrassment of indescribable magnitude to reggae music”.
The Marley Family has won more “Best Reggae Album” Grammy awards than any other reggae-dancehall artists. Ziggy Marley has won best album in the Reggae category seven times, the most for any artist —he did it 1989, 1990, 1998, 2007, 2014, 2015, and 2017. Sean Paul’s 2004 ‘Dutty Rock’ album is the most commercially successful Grammy winning reggae album, and he claims that his ‘Live N Livin’ album was snubbed at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in favor of Virginia based reggae band SOJA’s Beauty In The Silence.
The Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album is presented at a pre-show award ceremony for a body of work deemed worthy as elected by registered voters and it could be a ska, reggae or a dancehall album.
I asked Harvey if the voters select nominees and awards based on familiarity with an artist’s brand or based on the objective impact of their music that year. He says the key to a better Grammys is more integration and diversity which he admits is an area the Academy could improve upon as far as reggae is concerned.
“We haven’t done a good enough job to go into genres and bringing people in, so to me I would like to see more reggae-dancehall music makers and creators being a part of our organization, that would have a direct impact and co-relate exactly to what nominations were made and who would ultimately win,” he responded.
“To your point, if I don’t know reggae extremely well I would look for a name I recognize. If I work in reggae and I am around dancehall music I am gonna be more educated about that genre of music.”- Harvey Mason Jr.
He plans to facilitate greater dialogue among the reggae stakeholders with direct and indirect engagement.
“The Academy needs to ensure that there are people from each genre involved in membership, we need to ensure we are talking to the dancehall and reggae community, we need to ensure we are inviting them to be a part of our community ,” he continued on the point.
Harvey says as far as the Academy is concerned they intent to be more inviting to reggae and dancehall creators who wish to be part of the Academy’s many projects, not just the Grammys.
“We used to sit kinda like in the back and say ‘well we are the Academy, if you’d like to join’, but now we are going about it another way into the areas where we think we need improvement and say; Dancehall community, reggae community, listen to what it is we do, listen to the value of being a member, understand what we are doing the rest of the year besides just the Grammys, if that resonates with you please join us and please make our voting membership more reflective of the genre.”
Over the years there has been reports in Jamaican media from US based Grammy voting members, that the reggae category has been under threat and could be removed from the awards, and that it makes no sense to even consider asking The Academy to include a separate Dancehall category at the Grammys. I asked him about the truth of those assertions and Harvey says that is far from the truth and indeed reggae has had many good submissions over the years.
“No, we’ve had really good submissions in the reggae category, I think over the last 5 years we’ve had almost 700 submissions. Last year we had I believe 70 or 75, so it’s down a little bit this year, for the most part we’ve had really good numbers in that category and we don’t arbitrarily decide which categories to implement or to remove, its all based on submissions and if you get good submissions in the category there will be no purpose for us to remove it,” Harvey confirmed.
As for whether there will ever be a dancehall category, Harvey says,
“We have worked really hard over the last two years to include more music not less…we want more people from more genres, from more regions and make sure we are honoring them properly. It’s possible only because anything is possible.” He added that the way to do it is to propose it properly to the Recording Academy through a voting process.
“When it comes to categories it just depends on who submits. If the dancehall community wanted its own category and they felt so strongly about it- and the stakeholders in that category felt like ‘we want to have our own category’, and they submit it and they have the right language in the proposal, the right rationale as to why its important and they get the right signers and the right language and justification, you will have a new category.”
Although the Grammys are a US based awards show, it’s one music organization that has a global impact. I asked Harvey if he would ever consider bringing the Grammy Awards outside of the US to which he said ‘Yes’.
“I think we would consider that, there is a lot of opportunities, borders are coming down. With music you are seeing people come together and people from all different parts of the world loving other genres. Jamaica having Taylor(Swift) with the number 1 record is an amazing example of that, so where we have our show could change, where we honor music might widen. There might be a chance to do more work in serving music people around the world. There is a saying that talent is distributed evenly around the world but opportunity is not so, that would say to us we might need to take a look at other parts of the world, where we could have events,” he predicts.
Watch the exclusive conversation with Harvey Mason Jr. on World Music Views YouTube below:
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