for the love of music
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By Owen Tait
As many of you have likely read, the nominees for the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards were announced Tuesday, and in a not-so-shocking turn of events, music listeners everywhere were disappointed. I’ll admit, there were a few choices I was pleasantly surprised with this year: Freddie Gibbs was nominated for Best Rap Album, Phoebe Bridgers and Fiona Apple both received recognition in the Best Alternative Music Album category, and Thundercat & Jhené Aiko were submitted for Best Progressive R&B Album. Regardless, in the grander scheme of things, I would argue that this was a weaker year for the already out-of-touch award show. Almost instantly, I came up with a long list of artists that could’ve been rewarded over the current nominees, so without further ado, here are my top 10 snubs of the 63rd Annual Grammy’s (in alphabetical order), along with their best performances.
With the recent release of Limbo fresh in everyone’s minds, I was fairly surprised Aminé didn’t snag any nominations this year. Not only was his most recent project his most sonically diverse and simultaneously most cohesive, but I also felt that it was a project that contained his strongest and most mature performances. Songs such as “Roots” and “Mama” showed us a softer, more introspective side of Aminé I felt I was missing on his previous releases, yet hits such as “Shimmy” and “Compensating (feat. Young Thug)” ensured a mainstream appeal that the Grammy’s tend to gush over. Add Amine’s endless charisma and energetic pen game to the mix, and it’s almost baffling how this project received no recognition.
Best Performance: “Pressure In My Palms”
While Charli XCX does tend to stray into the experimental every now and then, her albums feature all the qualities of what someone should expect from an outstanding pop project. The personality, catchy lyrics, ear-worm melodies, and clean production were all there in her most recent project how i’m feeling now, and let’s not forget that she released yet another critically acclaimed album last year with Charli. That’s right: not one, but two outstanding and extremely creative pop records in the span of one Grammy cycle, yet no awards to show for it. Utterly disappointing.
Best Performance: “Thoughts”
Yes, it’s true that Denzel Curry’s recent projects haven’t pushed the same numbers that many recently nominated artists have. However, in a year where the nominees for Best Rap Album include less popularized artists such as Freddie Gibbs and D Smoke, I don’t think the idea of Curry being nominated should be contained to wishful thinking. And even if UNLOCKED was not enough to warrant a nomination for this category—it was a shorter project, around 20 minutes long—I could’ve easily seen Denzel taking home Best Rap Performance for tracks such as “‘ Cosmic ’ .m4a” or “DIET_.” He simply brought an energy and hunger this year that has yet to have been paralleled.
Best Performance: “‘ Cosmic ’ .m4a”
Once again, aside from the gorgeous track “cellophane” and a short feature on Ty Dolla Sign’s “Ego Death,” FKA Twigs is an artist who hasn’t boasted numbers in recent years. However, she has received Grammy nominations in the past, and the almost ethereal quality of last year’s Magdalene landed her an interview in Rolling Stone’s 2021 Grammy Preview, a series in which the publication highlighted artists likely to sweep the show. Despite all the hype, Twigs received a whopping zero nominations, a revelation that left me almost as sad as her album did. Perhaps Magdalene delved a tad too far into the strange or simply didn’t sell enough to make waves at the Grammys, but this only demonstrates the award show’s misdirected prioritization of accessibility over quality.
Best Performance: “sad day”
I know what you might be thinking: “Isn’t Lil Baby already nominated for multiple Grammys?” Yes, he is, and rightfully so. His track “The Bigger Picture” is—in my opinion—one of the better tracks that was nominated for Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance, and I look forward to seeing if he’ll take the trophies for those categories home. However, I’d like to argue that he got snubbed for Best Rap Album on the criterion of sheer numbers. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of Lil Baby, but given that My Turn is one of the top selling rap albums of 2020 and has remained in the top 10 on the Billboard Rap Charts for 38 weeks, I believe some credit is due.
Best Performance: “The Bigger Picture”
I’m typically hesitant when awards shows nominate or tease wins from artists who have passed away for the sake of views and clicks (see Mac Miller’s last project, Swimming). However, I’ll be damned if Circles wasn’t the best posthumous album I've heard from any artist in the past ten years. As opposed to the way other artists’ posthumous releases have been handled (see Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die), Circles felt as if it was crafted with care from start to finish, and a handful of the tracks on it still make me emotional to this day. It’s a beautiful and heavy album that I can see people genuinely struggling to come back to, but it's this raw emotion the project evokes that makes it all the more worthy of praise.
Best Performance: “Good News”
Yes, his hit “Dior” got him a nomination for Best Rap Performance, but how could I mention the late Mac Miller without bringing up Pop Smoke, an artist who gained massive momentum and captivated listeners just prior to an all-too-soon passing. I was skeptical going into his posthumous project Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon, but upon listening, I was met with a consistent ensemble of drill & pop rap anthems set for anyone’s gym playlist or a drive down the PCH. For an artist who was still on his way up, Pop Smoke demonstrated impressive range and an early mastery of his sound, and the fact that Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon remains one of the highest selling rap albums of 2020 shows how appreciated he was by the hip-hop community.
Best Performance: Make It Rain (feat. Rowdy Rebel)
Killer Mike and El-P, the masterminds behind the groundbreaking Run The Jewels series, are no strangers to addressing politics in their music. With 2020 quickly establishing itself as a heated, year-round fight for the presidency, the duo chose not to hold back artistically and politically, and it’s safe to say they delivered. RTJ4 saw Killer Mike and El-P delivering some of their most politically charged verses to date over trunk-knocking production, and this amalgamation of sounds perfectly embodied the passion behind various sociopolitical movements we’ve witnessed this year; if there’s one album to represent the social and political climate of the 2020, it’s this one.
Best Performance: “a few words for the firing squad (radiation)”
If there’s one artist this year who I would have personally nominated for Best New Artist, it would have to be Australian singer & rapper Tkay Maidza. Her most recent project, Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, was a short yet eclectic group of tracks that blew me away upon my first listen, and it currently sits as one of my favorite albums of 2020. A handful of cute, R&B flavored tracks somehow transition perfectly into grimy, dark bangers such as “Awake” and “Grasshopper”—which in turn transition back into floaty, breezy alternative pop records. It’s a feat that I’ve seen few other artists pull off to the extent Maidza does, and I would say her range and songwriting skills make her an artist to watch.
Best Performance: “Awake (feat. JPEGMAFIA)”
I’m just going to state it plainly: what the fuck happened here? Not only did Canadian R&B artist Abel Tesfaye (as if he needs an introduction) come out with one of the most commercially successful albums of the year that gave birth to some of the biggest hits of the year, but After Hours was a complete critical success as well. The project had everything: a unique blend of genres that had rarely been explored in R&B past the 2000s, stunning vocal performances, tight & transformative production, a highly consistent narrative arc, stellar pacing, dark & haunting lyrics characteristic of The Weeknd’s signature style… the list goes on and on. To top it off, the Grammys couldn’t even be bothered to nominate Tesfaye for one of the highly conceptual music videos he’s released over the past year. Nearly every instinct within me expected this album to not only be nominated for Album of the Year, but to win it as well. Unfortunately, I was wrong in what was easily my biggest Grammy upset of the year.
Best Performance: “Scared To Live”
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