Looks like the most recent head of the Recording Academy didn’t want to play ball with the dumb ass elitists who run the show. After just five short months on the job, Debrah Dugan was fired from her position at the Recording Academy.
It’s pretty clear from the stories that Dugan ruffled a lot of feathers in the past few weeks. Including a scathing letter to HR exposing voter bias, financial insecurities and mismanagement, unnecessary legal bills to outside attorneys among other conflicts of interest. In other words, she wasn’t there to play their ball game, much like her predecessor, Neil Portnow did. There were many reports about how difficult she could be to get along with. Of course, many of those claims have either been justified or challenged from other members of the Academy. The claims have been that Dugan wanted to dramatically cut costs so the board fired her because she wanted to limit their spending.
But there’s something deeper here, I think her exposing the voter bias on certain genres is another element. If there was only speculation before that the Grammy’s greatly favor electronic pop and rap, it’s pretty much confirmed now. I mean, it was pretty obvious before. But now it’s all but confirmed. And these are all the same people who run the Rock Hall and other bs organizations. It’s all intermingled. And these guys DO NOT want change. Plus, there’s a major diversity issue in the academy that was also exposed. And that’s what Dugan set out to do, make change. A direct quote from the report reads as follows, ‘We want to ensure that music creators from the broadest range of ages, backgrounds, genders, genre, crafts, and regions are fully represented with the organizations leadership. The board of directors is not diverse, is not independent, and is perceived by some underrepresented members (and non members in the music industry) as out of touch.’ That is clearly not happening now. She may have been a little prickly, but her integrity is exactly what the music industry needs right now. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like things are going to change significantly in the near future.
