So how do you say “f⋆ck the Grammys” without actually saying “f⋆ck the Grammys?” Let’s see…
The Weeknd, one of the most successful artists of 2020, wasn’t nominated for a single 2021 award.
That happened in spite of his After Hours album and its breakout hit “Blinding Lights” massive, undeniable commercial success.
“Blinding Lights” spent four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, and also broke the record for most weeks in the Hot 100’s top 10.
After Hours, meanwhile, debuted at the summit of the Billboard 200 and had the biggest streaming week for an R&B album ever.
A number of outraged stars have already rallied behind the singer, expressing what we all know: that The Weeknd was robbed of his deserved inclusion in the nominations list.
Elton John shared in his “humble opinion” that “Blinding Lights” is his song and record of the year. Talent manager Guy Oseary shared the notion on Instagram, listing off The Weeknd’s impressive list of accomplishments in just 2020 alone.
See here for all the celebrities, from Charlie Puth & Scooter Braun to Kid Cudi and Akon, speaking out against the Grammy snub.
Anyway, this wasn’t just another casual snub, though: The Weeknd was asked to perform at the award ceremony, but was also scheduled to perform at the Super Bowl Halftime Show earlier that year. The Grammys didn’t want him to do both, so when he accepted the Super Bowl invite, they yanked his nominations.
Allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest in the voting process have been widespread for years. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possibly the worst major award ceremony in showbusiness.
A major and long-standing problem is with race.
Between 2006 and 2020, the only non-white artists to win the main award, Album of the Year, were Bruno Mars (we’ll get to that later) and Herbie Hancock (for a cover album of songs by Joni Mitchell, a white artist). This is despite swathes of talented ethnic-minority artists being considered a.k.a. being nominated without ever winning.
In 2012, for example, there was a huge controversy when Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, the most critically-acclaimed rap album of 2012 by miles, according to review aggregator Metacritic, lost the ‘Best Rap Album’ award to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s middling record The Heist. This prompted Macklemore (who was also the only white rapper to be nominated in the category) to apologise privately to Lamar.
Lamar won the award in 2018 for his album DAMN, but lost out to Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic in the ‘Album of the Year’ category. Out of the five nominated albums, Mars’s was the worst by a good distance (again, according to Metacritic), but had the most sales due to its title track becoming a hit radio single.
The Academy have always stated that they aren’t influenced by records’ commercial success and are only concerned with ‘quality’. Lamar’s album was the first album which wasn’t classical or jazz to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, but lost to an album described by Pitchfork as “really really horny”.
What do you have to say about that, Grammy commitee? Not much, isn’t?
Here you can check out a list of the greatest Grammys snubs of all time. Spoiler alert: Kendrick Lamar and other prominent black artists got snubbed a lot.
That being said, here’s Kanye West pissing on a Grammy back in September.
