The View moderator Whoopi Goldberg has had enough of conservatives crowing over Beyoncé winning Best Country Album at the Grammy Awards for her 2024 genre-hopping opus Cowboy Carter — and making history at Sunday's ceremony as the first Black artist to win the award.
via: Variety
Whoopi Goldberg passionately defended Beyoncé’s Grammy wins on “The View” (via Entertainment Weekly) after conservative figures expressed outrage over the singer winning such major categories as best country album with “Cowboy Carter,” which also took home the prize for album of the year. Conservative author Raymond Arroyo notably went on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” the night after the Grammys and ripped Beyoncé’s wins as a “ridiculous outcome.”
“The country artists are not really happy about this,” Arroyo claimed to host Laura Ingraham. “I’m gonna put this in some context Laura: Dolly Parton has 10 Grammys. Frank Sinatra had 11 Grammys. Beyoncé has 35. How is that possibly commensurate with that talent? I mean come on.”
Goldberg shut down Arroyo on “The View” the morning after, taking issue with his claim that Beyoncé won best country album and other Grammys because “Lady Gaga’s cat sitter votes for best reggae and best country albums.”
“Sir, are you aware that you have to be in the music industry to be a Grammy voter? So, the cat sitter can’t just vote,” Goldberg said. “Are you aware that when the Grammys began in 1959, there were only 28 categories, now there are 94? The year that Frank Sinatra got six nominations despite having two No. 1 albums, he only won one Grammy that night for his album cover — not even for his singing, for the album cover. Listen, man. You can’t do that. She earned it.”
Sinatra actually had four nominations at the 1959 Grammys, but Goldberg’s point remains. She criticized the author for holding “on to country music like white people didn’t also buy her country album” when “Cowboy Carter” was released last year.
“Come on, man! People voted for it. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. Same with the Oscars,” Goldberg added. “Sit down!”
In other Grammy news, music’s biggest night drew 15.4 million viewers on CBS Sunday night.
That’s down 9% from last year’s Grammys, which brought in 16.9 million viewers on CBS, per Nielsen Live + Same Day ratings. (The 2024 Grammys marked a 34% increase from the year before.)
Those figures do not include streaming and online viewership from Paramount+, CBS.com and the CBS app.
CBS claims that the music awards telecast was “the most social television program ever,” racking up 102.2 million interactions online. Still, marketing efforts for this year’s show were scaled back due to the wildfires in Los Angeles. As the ceremony focused on fundraising efforts and the resilience of the city, the Grammys raised nearly $9 million to aid wildfire relief efforts in California on Sunday night, and an additional $15 million over the weekend.
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