The 2021 Grammy Awards, which had been scheduled for January 31, have been postponed to March 14 due to the havoc COVID-19 has caused Los Angeles County, where the awards ceremony is held. The unprecedented emergency, which raged all throughout last year, has continued into the new year and the fallout has left deep scars on many people. Will that pain have subsided enough by the time the spring Grammys are held? This article discusses some of the background that will help us better enjoy the Grammys as we wait hopefully for a healthier world in the spring. As RM of BTS quoted from artist David Hockney in his Weverse post on New Year’s Day reflecting back on 2020: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.”

What are the Grammys?
The Grammys are a US awards ceremony hosted annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (commonly known as the Recording Academy) that covers every field of the music industry, encompassing not only musicians but also songwriters, producers, and engineers, as well as albums’ visual design and liner notes. They are the equivalent of the film industry’s Academy Awards, the ceremony held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Members of the Recording Academy hold the rights to both determine what qualifies someone to become a nominee as well as voting for those people. As revealed by the President of the Recording Academy, Harvey Mason Jr., in a special interview with Billboard, every nominee and winner enjoys the highest honor and acknowledgment of their fellow artists.

When? How?
The 2021 Grammys consider music released between September 1, 2019 and August 31, 2020. Companies and individuals registered with the Recording Academy must submit themselves or their works for nomination directly. The Grammys received over 23,000 submissions for this year’s awards, which Recording Academy experts organized into 84 categories. The first round of nominations ended on November 12, after which they went through the nomination review committee, with the finalized list of nominees revealed on November 24. Lastly, final voting took place between December 7 and January 4. The Academy encourages members to only vote within their areas of expertise. They also insist that members make their judgments based on the music itself, and discount factors such as commercial performance or personal relationships. The votes are tallied by an outside accounting firm and kept a secret until revealed at the awards ceremony.

What about the Weeknd?
The countless questions along the lines of, “Why not this song/album?” mostly have the same answer: Music released after September 1, 2020 is ineligible for nomination, and qualifies instead for the 2022 Grammys. The Weeknd, however, was a massive and widely discussed exception; the Weeknd was excluded from the 2021 list of nominees entirely. Some believed the problem was that the Weeknd was set to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show—conflicting with the Grammy Awards, which is scheduled to air just two days beforehand. The Recording Academy, however, quickly explained this away, saying the nomination committee had already finalized all the votes and nominations before the Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show was announced, and insisted discussions between the Academy and the Weeknd for his performance at their ceremony had been going on for weeks before the nominations were revealed.
It’s impossible to know whether this is entirely a result of the voting process or a decision made by the committee. Nominations for the four most important categories, including Record of the Year, must be reviewed by the committee, but those nominees must first be in the top 20 as voted by the members. Whether the Weeknd met the criteria remains a secret. The Weeknd was only classified as pop in this year’s nominations, but nominations for pop awards do not go through the committee, and instead are entirely based on votes. Strong candidates like the Weeknd sometimes find their chances hurt by the voting process. The picture looks bleak for a Grammys without the Weeknd; however, the Academy appears unlikely to provide further explanation or clarification.

Points of interest and curiosity

1. Record of the Year 

This will be the second year in a row for Billie Eilish if she wins again. She would be the third to do so, after Roberta Flack and U2. Doja Cat’s “Say So”—the original, not the remix with Nicki Minaj—is nominated, as is the remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” featuring Beyoncé. These are the versions the artists submitted to the Recording Academy for consideration.


2. Album of the Year 

If Taylor Swift wins, this will be her third win in the category. She would become the fourth artist to win three of these awards, but it would be a first for a female artist. The three artists with whom she would tie are Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon.


3. Song of the Year

If Billie Eilish wins this award for her song “Everything I Wanted,” she will be on a two-year streak. As Song of the Year is awarded to the lyricist/songwriter, Eilish and Finneas O’Connell would become the first in history to win it twice in a row.


4.Best New Artist

Should the award go to Megan Thee Stallion or Chika, it will be the first time in 22 years that a female hip hop artist wins, the previous such winner being Lauryn Hill. Megan was already 11th on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019, so why is she nominated as a new artist? The Grammys view an artist as new if they have achieved mass recognition and made considerable progress only within the past year. Despite having a number of singles, mixtapes and even full-fledged albums out, a musician can still be nominated as a new artist.

 

Those awards, commonly referred to as the Big Four, are properly known as the General Field because they are awarded irrespective of genre.

5. Best Pop Solo Performance
This year, the Best Pop Solo Performance award is more fiercely contested than the Big Four. Between Justin Bieber, Doja Cat, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, and Taylor Swift, there can be no surprise winner, and no matter who wins, it will be their first award in the category.

6. Best Pop Duo/Group Performance

If BTS win here, it will be a first for any K-pop artist. It should be clear from looking at the nominees that the recipient of this award does not strictly have to be a “group.” Outside of BTS’s nomination, the list is entirely collaborations between one artist and another featuring on their song. In fact, outside of wins by Twenty One Pilots and Portugal. The Man, the award has gone to a collaboration every year since its inception in 2012. Meanwhile, if Lady Gaga takes the prize with Ariana Grande, it will be Gaga’s second win in the category—her first being with Bradley Cooper—and she will become the only artist to hold that record.

7. Best Alternative Music Album
If either Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, or Brittany Howard win this award, it will be the third time it is given to a female solo artist. If Beck is the winner, it would be his fourth time in the category. And if Brittany Howard wins, she will be the first artist to win the award twice: once as a solo artist, and once in a group.

8. Best Rap Performance
Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé would become the very first female artists to take this award home.
Performance
Awards ceremonies are a chance to see all the most important artists’ performances all in one place. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing awards shows’ performances in directions that would have once been unimaginable. In the early days of the pandemic, plenty of artists considered performing without the interaction afforded by an audience to be awkward. And yet, at some point, contact-free life provided an opportunity to surpass the limits of their imaginations when it came to planning performances. We already witnessed all kinds of experiments unfold at every awards show throughout 2020.

A standard example is Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, filmed without an audience in a natural setting. Doja Cat’s LED backdrop (Billboard Music Awards), CGI stage (MTV Video Music Awards) and other no-contact performances acted as a model for other stage directors. And you cannot miss her band version of “Say So” at the MTV Europe Music Awards. As the year went on, names like Post Malone (Billboard Music Awards), the Weeknd (MTV Music Awards), and Megan Thee Stallion (BET Awards) gave us an endless supply of performances that were essentially new music videos.

The Grammys took full note of all these examples. What kind of climactic awards show performance befitting their prestige and reputation might we see?

Transparency and diversity
This year, the biggest issue in American society, the music industry and the Grammys is securing transparency and diversity. The music industry has good reason to be sensitive about the #BlackLivesMatter movement: Compared to the share of contributions Black artists have made to popular music, there is evidence of rampant discrimination against them in the industry. Naturally, the Recording Academy has responded swiftly to the problem of existing racial bias in their awards ceremony for which they drew so much attention. This past October, the Recording Academy, in cooperation with human rights organization Color of Change, presented their #ChangeMusic roadmap. As expected, the core of the roadmap is its focus on fairness through transparency and diversity.

The Grammys have already adopted measures to alleviate the flood of concerns surrounding their history. Specifically, this year, 1,345 of the Recording Academy’s 11,000 voting members, or roughly 12%, newly received the right to vote for Grammy nominees. The Academy invited around 2,300 people to qualify this year, and of them approximately 1,700 became Academy members. Forty percent of the new members are women; forty-seven percent do not identify as white. Fifty-five percent are under the age of forty. All of these demographics are 1.5 to two times their 2019 levels. The change in titles of a number of awards has also played a part in their efforts. The Best Urban Contemporary Album, for example, has been renamed the Best Progressive R&B Album, reflecting a trend in the music world to banish the term “urban” because it serves to marginalize Black musicians. Similarly, the Best World Music Album has become the Best Global Music Album.

By looking at the year’s nominations alone, the increase in diversity within the voting collective has had an effect. Many Black artists were nominated even in otherwise previously white-centric music categories like country. The leaps in progress made by female artists across all genres is even clearer: Every one of the six nominations for Best Rock Performance are for women or bands with a female lead, all of whom, of course, have the talent to back up those nominations. Much has also been made of the focus paid to the outstanding indie rock albums nominated for Best Alternative Music Album. A significant amount of weight is also given to LGBTQ artists like Brittany Howard, Chika and Arca in all fields related to rock, hip hop, and dance.

In the end, however, it’s who the winners are that will go down in history. Jay-Z holds the record for the most Grammy nominations at 80—tied with Quincy Jones—while Beyoncé is tied with Paul McCartney for second at 79, and for this reason many people feel the Carters should receive better recognition from the Grammys. There is no way to control the final outcome of the vote. The reason we await the outcome of this year’s Grammys so attentively is because it is entangled in race, gender, nation and genre.
Article. Seongdeok Seo(Music Critic)
Photo Credit. Grammy Awards