After Hours is the best full-length album of The Weeknd‘s career, and this year “Blinding Lights” has been about as ubiquitous as photons. Many observers expected a slew of Grammy nods for the artist born Abel Tesfaye, so when the nominations were announced earlier today, it came as a shock when he was shut out entirely.
As Variety points out, there are a few possible explanations. First, perhaps The Weeknd’s representatives at Republic Records forgot to submit his music for consideration. Granted, they successfully handled Taylor Swift’s paperwork, helping her on the way to five nominations, but it’s conceivable. Another possibility is that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing; that the R&B committee considered him pop, the pop committee figured he counted as R&B, and he slipped through the cracks. The Weeknd has not responded to a request for comment.
As for the Grammys, Recording Academy interim president/CEO Harvey Mason, Jr. did not confirm or deny that The Weeknd had been submitted for consideration. But he did defend the “process” that produced the nominations, telling Variety that,
“The process is there so we can continue to monitor excellence. I was in the ‘core room’ this year [which decides the main categories] and I observed, and the people in it are music professionals, at the top of their craft in songwriting and producing and there are a lot of artists. And they were critically listening to every song that came across their desks — or virtual desks — so I don’t think it shows a flaw in the process. It’s a long, arduous process and people take pride in it. The people in that room care: there are no agendas in there, there’s no ‘let’s snub this person’ or that person. It’s about, ‘Let’s try and find excellence.’”
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Mason did not confirm if this is the same commitment to “excellence” that saw the Recording Academy bestow a heavy metal award on Jethro Tull, reward Milli Vanilli after they had been outed as frauds, or lift up Macklemore over Kendrick Lamar. Award shows are objectively stupid, but the Grammys continue to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
In other news, the Grammys finally gave a music nomination to a K-pop group, recognizing BTS for “Dynamite”. The Weeknd will is already on to bigger and better things, and will be headlining the 2021 Super Bowl Halftime Show.
