Q&A: Neil Portnow on Stepping Down

Something that most people who know the name Neil Portnow don’t know about Neil Portnow is that Neil Portnow was once in a band. Yes, the suit who steals three minutes out of each year’s Grammys to discuss the state of the recording industry once played bass for The Savages. You wouldn’t guess it. Portnow, who has served as the National Recording Academy’s president and CEO for the past 17 years—which, yes, means he runs the Grammys—doesn’t talk like a former rocker. Today, he talks more like a senator. When asked a question, he winds his way to an answer, staying on message while gracefully maneuvering around any potential potholes.

Which is why it’s ironic that lately Neil Portnow is best known for a massive gaffe: namely, the infamous two words—step up—that he uttered to women in 2018 as part of a longer response to a question about how to fix the Grammys’ gender imbalance. Portnow quickly walked the comment back and tried to explain it away, but the damage was done. It became a meme, a rallying cry, and a symbol of the Academy’s disconnect with reality.

It may have been a low point in a tenure that was otherwise largely fruitful and stable, but according to Portnow, it’s not the reason he’s stepping down this summer. Instead, Portnow says, the decision was made a couple of years ago. Getting up there in age (he’s 71) and with his contract expiring this summer, it felt like the right time. The overriding impetus, he says, was to provide a fluid transition between him and his successor—the CEO of the (RED) AIDS charity, Deborah Dugan—something he feels proud to have done.

And yet, talking to Portnow, it’s hard to imagine him without the organization. Even as his time is winding down, he won’t separate himself enough to reveal what some of his favorite albums were from last year. So rather than look ahead to what Portnow will do next, GQ spoke with him about his term leading the academy—how he’s processed criticism, whether he believes the Grammys have properly represented popular music, and how he fits in his own music fandom.

GQ: When you decided to step down, was there a part of you that didn't want to do the job anymore?
Neil Portnow: No, I don't think so. There isn't even today. Today, as we're five or six weeks out, I might think to myself for a minute, Wow, won't it be cool to get up when I feel like it? Somebody else asked me, "Hey, when was the last time you did a two-week vacation?" I said, "I don't think I've ever done that during my entire tenure in the workforce over many years." Those kinds of ideas jump in and out as being appealing in the short term. But that's not a long-term plan for me.

I'm assuming when you took the job you thought you were the best person for it. Do you still think that you are the best person for the job going forward, or do you think that new blood will help the organization in some way?
When I took the job, I believed—and I was frankly helped to believe by others who encouraged me to seek the job—that I was the right person at the right time. Of course, not being objective, but being as humble as I could be, I think that turned out to be the case. I feel very proud and very good about it. That being said, never in my wildest dreams did I think this was going to be a 17-year run. I can't think of too many folks, certainly in the entertainment business, who have had that kind of a run anywhere. It is a little bit unusual, and it’s quite wonderful.

Not having had that expectation, do I still think I'm the best person for the job? I think I could continue to do a good job with what I'm doing, but then I feel I have a responsibility to the organization to pay it forward, and to ensure that leadership here can grow and change and evolve. Frankly, another year, or another two years, would not necessarily prove anything for anybody.

From my own perspective, from my own self-interest, I'm thrilled and blessed and do not take it for granted that I'm healthy, and well, and vibrant, and very active. If, when you get to a certain part of your life, you think maybe there's another chapter, or there's some other things that could be interesting if you allow the environment for that to happen, then that would be another reason [to move on], too. Life's funny. You don't know what's around the corner.

And from the organization’s standpoint, I think it's a good time. I think it's appropriate to make the change. Is it going to be better? The best piece of my legacy that I could add here would be that I created and delivered a great platform for a next leader to excel and have a great run herself.

Your job is such that you receive a lot of public feedback. I'm curious how you process that. How do you listen and decide what's valid and what's not?
One thing that I learned early in the game is: you can't please everybody, particularly in any situation where there's a competition involved. There are going to be a lot of different opinions, and that's fine and that's healthy.

The thing that makes it even more challenging here for us is our process in and of itself is unique. It's complex, and it's really, frankly, not widely understood outside of our industry. We are unlike any of the other awards processes where it's evaluation based on, let's say, sales, or chart position, or popularity, or even a fan vote. In that case, everybody's weighing in, and can have an opinion, and can like it or not like it, and have a dialogue about it. What's different here is that our process is a peer award, and there are thirteen and a half thousand voting members who make the decisions about our awards.

As far as taking in the accolades and the criticisms, it's just par for the course. What I try to do is just balance that with having an open mind, and saying to myself, "Okay, so there's some criticism or question about this. I don't want to summarily dismiss that. I want to examine that and see to what degree there's validity to it."

With the goal of objectivity for a subjective award system, do you feel as though the Grammys have been representative of music during your tenure?
I think it depends on how you want to define that. The fact is that any recording that's released within the eligibility period qualifies from a distribution standpoint. I think we're averaging about 22,000 entries every year in the Grammy process, across all genres and styles and kinds of music. Everybody that's making music has access and the ability to put themselves in the process. And it's a two-step process. You have the first round, which then creates the basis for coming up with the final nominations. Along the way, I think you'll find most genres, and most styles, and most levels of music are represented. It's when it comes down to the final choice, and you're coming down to five—or in the case of the four general fields, eight—nominees, that it tightens up. Of course, that's going to not be as widely representative. So to your question, does the Grammy process represent and reflect music at any given time? I think for the most part it does. The recipients of Grammy awards in any given year may not collectively do that, but then that's just a matter of personal preference and choice, and how good our voting membership is, which is something we strive to improve all the time.

This past Grammys was the first at which a hip-hop artist won Record of the Year or Song of the Year. And that artist was Childish Gambino, who is only tangentially a hip-hop artist. Being that hip-hop has probably been the most popular—or at least the most important—genre over the last 15 years, how do you square those results with the Grammys reflecting music?
I probably would take exception to 15 years. I mean, I don't think that hip-hop has been dominant for that length of time. It's been a growing, building, and thankfully very successful and wonderful part of the musical landscape, but I don't know that it was as dominant 15 years ago as it is today.

But the Academy, by nature of being an institution, isn't always ahead of the curve on those kinds of things, and admittedly so. Our job is always to try to be reflective of what's happening, and as often as possible to be ahead of the curve. But then again, that goes back to the process, and that goes back to having a membership that is vibrant and active. Because it's only by one vote that someone may or may not receive a Grammy in any given year. Then I think the question becomes: have the various communities been engaged, or engaged themselves—because the opportunity is there—adequately to have the votes to do that in any given year? It is a basic equation of one person, one vote. And who's voting for what? And who are the voting members? And are all communities represented to the extent that they should be? That's always a goal for us, to make sure that we engage communities actively, and regularly.

Then the other part of the responsibility is on the communities to participate. It really is simple. If you want to take a trophy home, then it's a matter of join and vote. That is available to anyone that has the qualifications. I think part of the reason you're seeing a better showing in terms of representation is that we are making good headway in who the membership represents, combined with the fact that certain genres are just becoming more and more predominant. You don't even have to necessarily have the hip-hop community voting for a hip-hop record. The music is so widely accepted, and loved, and has such a level of excellence that just within any voting population it's going to have a strong chance of receiving a Grammy in any given year.

I'm curious about how you take the feedback from somebody like Kanye West, who in 2016 publicly talked about wanting to meet with you to talk about making the Grammys more relevant, or Drake, who at this year's Grammys made an argument about the awards being meaningless.
From my perspective, at the top of my list of qualities that makes somebody a good leader is to be not only good, but a great listener. I want to hear all of that, and I'm always available and open and actually proactively in the community hearing people's perspective and point of view. Not surprisingly, in many cases, opinions gets formed based on either misinformation or not enough information. We certainly live in a time of sound bites, and there isn't necessarily deep thought and investigation and understanding of things. People will rush to a quick judgment, and that's the nature of the world.

But to your point about individual artist criticisms, I'm always sitting down and having conversations with them about their perspectives, and very often there are points made that are very valid, and very real, and very meaningful. The question for us is what we can do with them. Again, we're a big institution. We have lots of rules, regulations, historic precedent, and so on. It's not always easy to turn on a dime. And also, a lot of what we do is calendar-sensitive, so if we wanted to change something that happened two months ago, and have that implemented in time for this year's cycle of Grammy awards, it may not be physically possible to implement because of where we are in the calendar.

I think when most artists and most people hear the facts and they understand the challenges we face, they're far more empathetic, sympathetic, open-minded about it. Then our job is to really convince them, if we can, that the way to be part of the solution is to be engaged rather than just critical from afar. They can make a difference.

Can you give me some examples of artists who you've met with that have voiced critiques or observations that you've heard, and listened to, and that changed your thinking on something?
I don't think I'd shout out anybody individually, but I can tell you that a lot of the things that we've changed over time come from artists’ perspectives because we have artists on our boards.

In the general field—Album, Song, Record of the Year, Best New Artist—moving from five nominees to eight nominees came through a process of a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion, a lot of soul-searching, some research, and then a decision to try it, with the objective of broadening the scope of musical styles, of genres, of diversity within those categories. That's something that got put in place last year that frankly we felt served us well.

Do you think that it's a problem that critics’ tastes tend to diverge pretty greatly from the Academy's?
Well first of all, I don't know that I would subscribe that that's a given. Year to year, case by case, there are varying opinions.

You play music. You're at the head of an organization that is all about music. Obviously you're a music fan. So in terms of music listening, what do you listen to and how do you listen?
Being a musician has its pluses and minuses as far as what you listen to, when you listen to it, how you listen to it, when your full-time job is also in the music industry. For many years, prior to being here, being on the commercial side of the business, my music listening had a couple components. One, it was my job to listen to music, and try to identify music that could be commercially successful. That's the A&R role. You're trying to create some objectivity over something that's inherently subjective. And something that could be incredibly fine, ground-breaking, unique, unusual music might not be commercially viable or popular from an economic standpoint.

For me, I was always a huge classical music fan, and in my business life I didn't have a lot of responsibility for classical repertoire. That could just be pleasurable, and the same is true of the jazz world. Those continue to be genres and areas that I love very deeply, just on a personal level. I appreciate as a musician that they're challenging. But then again, there's gospel, and country, and Latin music, all of which are part of my past as a musician, and which resonate very deeply. It's kind of a mix of all of those things.

What have you loved recently?
I'm still on the job, so I'm not going to pick and choose. I would say I think last year's crop of final nominations were pretty wonderful. I think what's really interesting, though, is the genre-bending and mashups and the combinations and taking the walls down. The availability of music and it being so ubiquitous is having a really wonderful effect on the creative community.

In the leaving, what do you think is the biggest challenge that Deborah Dugan faces as president?
The rapid and radical change in the business and the business side of our industry is something that has been challenging. We really did hit bottom, as you know. We've rebounded really nicely in many ways. Certainly, the companies especially are in a far healthier, better position. But the artist community is not there yet, and revenue streams from streaming platforms are not comparable to the potential during the time of physical products. The landscape, whether it's live touring, merchandising, synchronization rights, the use of music in games, etc. is a bit new. And the fact is that it's changing faster than ever in history.

So the challenge for the Academy is to be plugged into all of that, to be aware of all of that, to be well-educated, and to be strategic about where we fit into all of those things as they change. That's what's going to keep us relevant. I have no doubt that we've established a platform here, and a sense of stability, and the organization is healthy in every fashion. There's a great stepping off point to move forward, and that's what I'm looking forward to. Seeing new eyes, new hands, new approaches, taking this to the next level.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on GQ