Kanye West’s stormy relationship with the Grammys erupts again

NEW YORK — When the latest Grammy nominations were announced in November, Kanye West picked up five nods, including album of the year, teeing up a potential reconciliation between one of pop music’s most mercurial stars and the institution he has spent much of the last two decades criticising, challenging and sometimes outrightly insulting — even as West has yearned for its affirmation.

But last Friday, a little more than two weeks before the 64th annual Grammy Awards ceremony set for April 3 in Las Vegas — and weeks into negotiations over a planned performance at the show — organisers told West’s team that he would not be allowed to perform, according to a representative of the rapper and producer.

The organisers cited West’s erratic and troubling public behaviour in recent weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the decision, who was granted anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

That behaviour included the release of an animated music video that portrayed the kidnapping and burial of a figure who looked a lot like Pete Davidson — the comedian who has been dating Kim Kardashian, West’s former wife — and an Instagram post taunting Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, who is hosting this year’s Grammys, with a racial slur that resulted in West being banned from Instagram for 24 hours. (Noah said on Twitter that he had not called for West to be cut. “I said counsel Kanye not cancel Kanye,” he wrote.)

For West, music’s perennial chaos agent, the episode may have been just the latest blur of sensational headlines.

But for the Grammys, it is also a setback in a campaign to lure West back to the fold. He is perhaps the most vocal of a circle of high-profile Black creators — also including Jay-Z, Drake, the Weekend and Frank Ocean — who have condemned the Grammys for often failing to recognise the work of creators of colour, particularly in hip-hop, in its most high-profile categories. The Recording Academy, which presents the awards, has made extraordinary efforts to accommodate West, who has won 22 Grammys in his career.

For the latest show, a last-minute rule change resulted in West being added to the ballot for album of the year.

In an interview with Billboard, Harvey Mason Jr, the academy’s chief executive, said when the initial slate of nominees was prepared with eight contenders in the major competitions, he noticed a dearth of rap in the top categories. Within days, a proposal to expand the ballot to 10 slots in those categories was approved by the academy’s board, bringing “Donda,” along with Taylor Swift’s Evermore, into consideration for best album.

Since becoming the academy’s chief last year, Mason has made personal appeals to dissenting artists, including West.

That outreach, and the album of the year nomination, stirred frustration and anger among some members of the academy, who have been appalled by West’s past antics, such as posting a video on social media in 2020 that shows a Grammy trophy apparently being defiled in a toilet bowl.

“How vile and disrespectful,” Diane Warren, the Grammy-winning songwriter of hits like Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, said at the time.

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