You may also revisit our interview with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
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.
