Alicia Keys Champions DEI as a “Gift,” “Not a Threat” From Grammys 2025 Stage

A concentrate on restoration after Los Angeles’s harmful wildfires meant that the Grammys 2025 gave little consideration to the bedlam unfolding in Washington, DC. Even Beyoncé, one among Kamala Harris’s highest-profile marketing campaign surrogates, stored her feedback to the politics of the nation style. However when Alicia Keys took the stage to just accept the Dr. Dre International Affect Award, she made a pointed reference to the rising backlash to DEI packages that culminated in President Donald Trump’s government order concentrating on them final month.

“This isn’t the time to close down the range of voices. We’ve seen, on this stage, proficient, hard-working folks, from totally different backgrounds with totally different factors of view, and it modifications the sport,” she mentioned. “DEI is just not a risk. It’s a present.”

She urged the music trade to maintain offering alternatives to underrepresented artists. “The extra voices, the extra highly effective the sound. When harmful forces attempt to burn us down, we rise from the ashes like a phoenix,” she mentioned. “Music is the unstoppable language that connects us all. It’s so lovely. So let’s maintain exhibiting up with compassion, with empathy—what I name soul care.”

Keys was honored for opening up entry to ladies in music manufacturing. In her speech, she talked about a lot of visionary feminine producers that included musician (and Elon Musk’s ex-partner) Grimes. “I at all times needed to battle for a sure stage of respect as a songwriter, a composer, and particularly a producer,” she mentioned. “It’s unusual that we don’t consider ladies as producers like Quincy or Dre or Swizzy [her husband Swizz Beatz], however feminine producers have at all times powered the trade. Patrice Rushen, Missy Elliott, Linda Perry, Grimes, Solange, and so many extra.”

Keys’s remark got here shortly after the Recording Academy’s CEO Harvey Mason Jr. highlighted the group’s Black Music Collective, a range initiative launched in 2020, crediting it with serving to restore the Grammys relationships with artists, together with The Weeknd, who later carried out.

Although discuss in regards to the nationwide political local weather was scarce on Sunday, a couple of extra artists used their acceptance speeches to speak about points near their hearts. After successful greatest Latin pop album for 2024’s Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Shakira devoted her award to her “immigrant brothers and sisters,” including, “You might be beloved. You might be value it, and I’ll at all times battle with you.”

When she accepted the award for greatest new artist, Chappell Roan introduced a pocket book on stage and skim a speech criticizing the frequent report trade observe of asking newly signed artists to work for little pay and no advantages.

“I acquired signed so younger—I acquired signed as a minor—and once I acquired dropped, I had zero job expertise beneath my belt. Like most individuals, I had a tough time discovering a job within the pandemic and couldn’t afford medical health insurance. It was so devastating to really feel so dedicated to my artwork and really feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized,” she mentioned. “Document labels must deal with their artists as helpful staff with a livable wage and medical health insurance and safety.”