What to expect from the 2021 Grammy Awards
This week marks a year since everything began shutting down because of the pandemic, including concert venues across the country.
We’ve made it four full seasons without dancing to blaring music, without swaying alongside a spellbound crowd, without exaggeratedly mouthing beer orders to friends headed for concessions.
To those with postponed concert tickets still wasting away in their email inboxes, might you settle for . . . watching the Grammy Awards this Sunday night?
Yes, it’s an unfair comparison. But the Recording Academy and CBS have committed to celebrating what they bill as “Music’s Biggest Night” and, as awards telecasts continue to struggle with ratings, will be relying on star power to attract potential viewers. Taylor Swift, BTS and Dua Lipa are headlining the ceremony, joined by Cardi B, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles and many others.
Here’s a closer look at what to expect from the show:
Beyoncé leads the pack with nine nods, which puts her at 79 career nominations – the most of any female artist. Swift, Lipa and Roddy Ricch follow with six nominations each, and both women are up for album of the year. That category features an eclectic mix of artists – joining Swift and Lipa are Jhené Aiko, Black Pumas, Coldplay, Jacob Collier, Haim and Post Malone. Megan Thee Stallion, DaBaby and Billie Eilish, who swept the main categories last year, landed four nods each.
Grammy snubs were especially glaring this year: The Weeknd, a three-time winner whose album “After Hours” held the Billboard 200′s top slot for four consecutive weeks, seemed to make as many headlines as the nominees. The singer accused the Grammys of being “corrupt” after noting his absence from the nominees announced in November. Variety and Rolling Stone reported that the exclusion might have been related to his headlining the Super Bowl halftime show.
Pop singer Halsey gave the Weeknd a shout-out in her own posts about being snubbed, writing on Instagram that the Grammy nominations are “not always about the music or quality or culture.”
“The Grammys are an elusive process,” she wrote. “It can often be about behind the scenes private performances, knowing the right people, campaigning through the grapevine, with the right handshake and ‘bribes’ that can be just ambiguous enough to pass as ‘not bribes.’”
Halsey’s call for “more transparency or reform” echoes others drawing attention to inequities highlighted by the nominations each year. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a report this month analyzing gender within the music industry and found that women have made up just 13.4% of all Grammy nominees from the 2013 ceremony onward. That percentage drops to the single digits when zeroing in on major categories such as album, record or producer of the year.
The percentage of women nominated each year has increased over time, albeit gradually. This year, roughly 28% of the nominees are women.
The Grammys can most concisely be described as back-to-back performances with awards sprinkled throughout.
Many of the artists performing have also been nominated.
Here is the full, alphabetized lineup: Bad Bunny, Black Pumas, Cardi B,
BTS, Brandi Carlile, DaBaby, Doja Cat, Eilish, Mickey Guyton, Haim, Brittany Howard, Miranda Lambert, Lil Baby, Lipa, Malone, Chris Martin, John Mayer,
Megan Thee Stallion, Maren Morris, Ricch, Styles and Swift.
Rolling Stone reported that the Grammys will be “a multi-stage, audiencefree show that highlights the year’s creative triumphs, social justice movements, as well as Covid-19’s impact on the arts.” The ceremony is set to last 3½ hours and will take place at an “undisclosed building in Los Angeles” instead of its usual home at the Staples Center. Featured artists will perform their sets on four stages, according to Rolling Stone, and one will be set aside for presenters.
The Recording Academy announced it would honor independent venues affected financially by the pandemic by enlisting employees from New York’s Apollo Theater, Nashville’s Station Inn as well as the Troubadour and the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles to present “va
Trevor Noah, nominated last year for best comedy album, will be emceeing. The “Daily Show” host joked in the November announcement that “as a one-time GRAMMY nominee, I am the best person to provide a shoulder to all the amazing artists who do not win on the night because I too know the pain of not winning the award! (This is a metaphorical shoulder, I’m not trying to catch Corona).”
In a recent interview with Billboard, the comedian said he was drawn to the multistage setup, likening it “to the feel of a music festival but designed for an audience at home.”
Originally scheduled for Jan. 31, the Grammys were postponed to March “after thoughtful conversations with health experts, our host and artists scheduled to appear,” according to a January statement from interim Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr., CBS’s Jack Sussman and executive producer Ben Winston. The coronavirus had been surging in Los Angeles at the time, to the point where hospitals were turning ambulances away over oxygen shortages.
The 63rd Grammy Awards will air on CBS and stream on CBS All Access at 8 p.m. Sunday.