Kanye wasn’t at the Grammies on Sunday night. No, it’s cool, maybe there was a clearance sale on at the Persian rug and man-skirt factory or something, but despite bagging four plaudits (all exclusively in the rap category) and once caring so much about an award he stormed a stage at the VMAs to complain about it, Mr. West was M.I.A. and gave the ceremony the middle finger.

If the Grammies felt snubbed, that discord was probably mutual. West’s own morose Mellon Collie and magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a record generally agreed by the music press to be not just his best but one of the best records in our lifetime, failed to be nominated for ‘Album of the Year’ over Bruno Mars’ debut. One of them is a Hennessey and self-loathing fuelled rampage through the Guggenheim reflecting on the hamartia of hedonism. The other has the ‘The Lazy Song.’

You cannot call ‘foul’ simply because your favourite album hasn’t won. What can’t be denied, though, is that award-winners are not ordained in a vacuum or purely the result of some empirical judgement. What is deemed worthy of victory and what is not says a lot about the nature of the musical zeitgeist. The fact that only once has a rap act won the big gong at the Grammies (Outkast in 2004) surely says something about how the genre is perceived critically.

That’s not to say rap music never gets any critical attention. Some Guardian readers were aghast at Azealia Banks’s rip-roaring game-changer ‘212’ rightly featuring as the runner-up of their ‘Singles of 2011’ rundown and nearly spat their chai all over their iPads. “How could a rap song possibly be better than Bombay Bicycle Club or some other generic unchallenging landfill indie? Bah!”

The problem with this acclaim is that, more than other genre, it is all too regularly linked to how unknown and underground the artist is. The logic is: some guy rapping outside Manor House tube station at 3am > than anyone with a record deal. Appreciating rap music in this way only acts as a boost to one’s own credibility and the artist gets chucked away as soon as they attain any real success.

One individual who does admittedly get wheelbarrows full of praise is Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk. Girl Talk, to the uninitiated, takes rap music and sanitises it for the ‘hipster’ populous, mixing and gentrifying it with rock so that middle-class boys and girls can get their rocks off, perhaps hoping it’ll provide them with some ‘edge.’ There is no love for the source material here, just ‘irony’ - that cynical, snobbish, loveless substance as sticky as the dilapidated dance-floors those brogues shuffle on.

But even this isn’t as condescending as when an artist deservedly receives kudos and it’s written off as novelty. Ghostpoet, who played a barnstorming gig at Anglia Ruskin on Monday, was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize last autumn for his debut Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam. His work was nominated because it’s a left-field, ephemeral, heart-wrenchingly honest hoard of tracks that no one else in the British music scene would have dared to produce at the time. Despite what an alarming number of journalists said, his nomination was not a token gesture, it was well deserved.

The rap scene doesn’t need pity; it’s arguably in the staunchest health it has ever been in. Tentatively leaving the shackles of gangsta rap behind, it’s rediscovering its identity - it’s vital and self-aware. Two of its brightest hopes are A$AP Rocky and the aforementioned Azealia Banks, both of whom release their highly anticipated full-length debuts this year.

So why isn’t rap deemed suitable to win major crossover awards yet?

I think it’s related to what Raymond Williams wrote about academia refusing to accept “culture being ordinary” – maybe judges still have a dichotomy between ‘culture’ and ‘streets’ instilled in their mind. The problem is that a significant proportion of the public still treat rap music as a fast-food genre, devoid of any real substance or artistry. But rap is changing; the current scene’s evolution is the equivalent of Dylan going electric. The times they are a-changing.