The Grammys Controversy Is Bigger Than Any One CEO

Although this story is not about AA, it is about a “good ole boys ” club. The National Academy of Recording Arts are similar to AA and its history in that they are both still very sexist, no big #metoo moment in either the music biz or in AA yet. I say yet because I have a feeling the train is coming in the station – so to speak.

I feel it is important that this story gets some following. The #metoo movement has still yet to out both the Music biz and AA “alcoholics anonymous” – and yet with all the coverage of the Trump Impeachment Trial will see if mainstream News will cover this story. We hope it does.  I would love to speak with her.

The picture of the Recording Academy that the former head Deborah Dugan paints is of an organization encrusted by years of self-dealing and mismanagement.

Spencer Kornhaber

January 23, 2020

According to one Recording Academy official, the reason that the CEO of the Grammys was fired after just five months on the job is this: “What we expected was change without chaos.” Following years of public criticism, with its president stepping down after more than a decade and a half in the position, the academy hired Deborah Dugan—previously the head of Bono’s HIV/AIDS charity—with an implied mandate to make music’s top awards-giving body more inclusive, fair, and relevant. Dugan says her attempt to break up the Grammys’ “boys’ club” led to her retaliatory ousting. Grammys defenders say she was a bully, and one employee accused her of abusive management. One way or another, the “chaos” now unfolding would seem to make change inevitable.

After the board terminated Dugan on January 16—just 10 days before this Sunday’s Grammy Awards—Dugan filed a scorching complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The polemical 46-page document lays out a narrative in which the new CEO discovered corruption and malpractice and attempted to remedy it, only to be stymied. It also recaps the public evidence that critics have long cited against the Grammys—and argues the organization is even more sexist and racist than it has appeared to be from the outside.