Hey, everyone listening to the podcast. This is Ari Melburgh, and this is one of our podcast extras.

You guys have told us in the comments and elsewhere that you kind of like it sometimes when we share

stuff beyond the nightly show. And as you can tell, because I'm addressing you directly,

that's what this is, looking at music, justice, and a whole lot more, including change afoot

at the iconic Grammys.

Just like the Oscars, it's an award show that people sometimes say they don't care about

or artists say they don't need, but it carries a lot of weight and prestige and has been

under pressure for having an academy at times and voters at times that are completely out of sync

with America and the music industry.

Well, Harvey Mason Jr. says he's changing

that. He is the newer leader of the Grammys. He has a big background of music that you're going to hear,

and we have this extended discussion coming up. So this is a whole longer conversation we had that goes

in-depth for our pod, goes well beyond sometimes the time constraints of TV and I want to share

that with you after that you're going to hear a breakdown I did of a song that's up for a Grammy

at the new Grammys this weekend and that is a god did um that sort of posse cut track with DJ

college Jay Z and more and a lot of you reached out who listened to the pod about the breakdown I did. So you're going to hear that. It explores what Jay-Z was saying in that song about his trajectory, the arbitrariness of the American drug war, racism, and a whole lot more. So that's coming up. And then after that, we have something really special, which I hope you check out if you keep listening. And that's a conversation I got to have, you know, one of the cool and interesting parts of this job. Sometimes I get to really chop it up with a lot of different people well out of TV mode. And this is a conversation I had with DJ Collid and other folks involved in his work. It was kind of an audio thing through Twitter spaces, but we clipped what we think is a good part of it, not all of it.

So you'll hear Collet, me, and then Jay-Z himself, and I'll tell you, just to give you the backstage story,

I didn't know he was going to jump on, but he jumped on the audio, and we exchanged some brief words,

and he also talked about his approach and stuff that I think relates to not only art, music, and life, but also justice and politics. So all of that's coming up in this podcast extra. As always, you can rate us five stars what everything we're worth. It turns out that stuff matters on the pod. So if you give us a good rating, I think it helps share it. You can always connect with me at ari melber.com. That's ari melber. And thanks for listening

to The Beat with Ari Melbert. American politics has long been linked to our music culture, whether

it's the recent smackdown by Dr. Dre against Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green,

misusing his music to artists who shaped public views over the decades on civil rights,

...