The names headlining this year’s Grammy Award nominations make a lot of sense: Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are perennial favorites with imperial reach. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have stormed the mainstream. Shaboozey and Charli XCX made themselves inescapable.
While there was once a time when it was easy to argue that the Grammys were out of touch, barely attempting to be an accurate representation of popular music in a given year, the major acts of 2024 are all accounted for. Shedding some of its fusty baggage under the Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr. and a slate of new industry voters, the awards show has brought itself more or less in line with the Billboard charts, radio and streaming services, centering the celebrities of the moment.
Still, it’s the Grammy Awards — not everyone can be happy. So after poring over the 94 categories that make up the 67th annual class of nominees, The New York Times’s pop music team — the reporter Joe Coscarelli, the chief pop music critic Jon Pareles, the pop music critics Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz and the Culture editor Elena Bergeron — were left with a few lingering questions: Is Beyoncé’s cross-genre domination really warranted? What are the Beatles doing here? And have the Grammys gotten too safe?
We broke down the richest — and most baffling — story lines, snubs and surprises.
A Mirror to the Mainstream
JOE COSCARELLI I must admit, I’m almost sad at how predictable the Big Four categories — album, record and song of the year, plus best new artist — are these days, and this year in particular. Back in my day — not that long ago! — Beck was beating Beyoncé to close the night. And sure, you still have your occasional upsets by Jon Batiste (album of the year, 2022) or Bonnie Raitt (song of the year, 2023). But the odds of a truly destabilizing major win in February feel quite long now, likely by design.
Do we — dare I say — miss the days when these major nominations were less predictable, more prone to outrage?
JON PARELES It was definitely fun when the Grammys were so clearly oblivious (or even antagonistic) to what was actually going on in music. It certainly helped listeners define our own tastes against what the industry claimed to prize most on Grammy night (rather than what it spent the rest of the year promoting and selling). But if awards are intended to recognize quality and impact — to suggest a canon — then it’s better in the long run for the Grammys to be less clueless. And there’s still plenty of room for argument.
JON CARAMANICA This realignment has ended up feeling like an overcorrection that obscures what exactly the Grammys are meant to represent. Peers voting for peers: That’s the promise of the awards, which would suggest that the results prioritize artistic merit and respect. But when the nominees essentially just mirror the charts, then fan adoration begins to seem like the true unspoken metric here. (That’s what the American Music Awards are for, y’all.) The chance that a beloved and talented but less heralded artist might break through at the Grammys now feels faint (as opposed to what used to happen, which was feting older artists at the expense of the young).
LINDSAY ZOLADZ As has been the case for quite a few years now — at least since the former president of the Recording Academy received major backlash for telling female artists that they needed to “step up” if they wanted better representation at the Grammys — the women of pop have once again made strong showings in the major categories. Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan all, unsurprisingly, are among this year’s top nominees.
From Far Left-Field
COSCARELLI That said, two men did manage to sneak into album of the year as relative outsiders, at least musically, though they could just as easily be seen as Grammy insiders: six-time winner Jacob Collier, the studio wiz and multi-instrumentalist, earned his second album of the year nomination for his “Djesse” series (and his third overall, counting contributions to a Coldplay album), while André 3000 was nominated for his flute album “New Blue Sun” 20 years after becoming the last rap act to win the night’s biggest award as half of Outkast.
ELENA BERGERON André 3000’s nomination for album (and best alternative jazz album) seems like one of the Academy’s big attempts at a shocker, but it feels like a predictable reach. Yes, the album’s been received well, even in live performances, despite some backlash from fans who still want him to rap. André has cautioned patience with his experimentation on the flute and it seems the Grammys are making a point here to validate to the artistic pivot.
But that’s lauding effort, not mastery (a nod to Shabaka’s “Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace” would’ve done that, at least in the alt jazz category). But with the win for “Speakerboxxx/Love Below” coming 20 years ago, maybe this tees up a cute moment for the broadcast?
CARAMANICA Maybe you see the album of the year nomination for André 3000’s flute record as a kind of spiritual victory. A heartwarming indication that a well-known and widely beloved musical figure can be lauded for making a hard pivot to something novel and untested.
But André’s nominations in the alternative jazz and instrumental composition categories also set up a classic Grammy conundrum: What happens when a superstar is rewarded for dabbling in something a little less shiny? A nomination for one of the most famous musicians in the history of American pop in a category typically filled with more obscure performers is likely to destabilize the voting — depending on your perspective, it shines a spotlight on musical styles that ordinarily get little attention, or it bigfoots the people who have long worked in those formats in barely any spotlight at all.
Rebooting the Beatles
COSCARELLI The other most obvious exception to the zeitgeist bull’s-eye here is a little band called the Beatles. “Now and Then,” a new (final?) track that began from a late-1970s John Lennon demo — after the Beatles broke up — scored a nomination for record of the year, alongside smash hits like “Espresso,” “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and “Not Like Us.” Put simply: Why?
PARELES Obvious answer: boomer nostalgia. The track deliberately echoes other Beatles songs, and even borrows some backup harmony vocals directly, activating fond memories. And the song is a technical feat; it took 2020s technology to separate out a usable lead vocal from John Lennon’s original cassette. The Grammys like studio expertise.
COSCARELLI What about CGI expertise? The track has one of the most uncomfortably uncanny music videos I’ve ever seen, complete with the aging Beatles goofing around with their younger selves and long-dead bandmates.
PARELES There’s also the Grammy tendency to give better-late-than-never awards for canonized artists. While “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” won album of the year in 1968 — the first rock album to win — “Revolver” and “Abbey Road” were only nominated, and “Hey Jude” lost record of the year. “Now and Then” is ostensibly the Beatles’ last song, and their last chance at a Grammy. (It gets a second nomination as best rock performance just in case, though it’s by no means a rocker.)
Meanwhile, another hallowed boomer favorite, the Rolling Stones, got less Grammy attention for actually making a lot of new music. “Hackney Diamonds,” the rambunctious Stones album released late in 2023, did get nominated for best rock album. But it isn’t in the running for album of the year; Jacob Collier is.
‘Brat’ Winter
COSCARELLI In an era where even the biggest releases can feel like they come and go in a weekend, Charli XCX may have had the most drawn-out cultural moment for an album this year, with “Brat.” But so much of that felt extra-musical, and on an internet and nightlife frequency that the Grammys are not always attuned to. Are we surprised to see “Brat” represented so heavily here, with seven nominations for Charli XCX (who had just two previously in her career, both for “Fancy” with Iggy Azalea), plus another for her collaborator, A.G. Cook, on the Addison Rae-featuring remix of “Von Dutch”?
ZOLADZ I knew “Brat” would make a strong showing, but I’m a little surprised at how strong it turned out to be: Charli received more nominations than even Swift and is second only to Beyoncé. Apparently the Recording Academy really was bumpin’ that.
The nominations, too, are spread over quite a few different songs: “360,” “Von Dutch,” “Apple” and the remix of “Guess,” with Eilish, were all recognized. Charli’s competition is stiff for record and album of the year, but I suspect she’ll take at least one trophy home in the dance and electronic categories. The only question that remains is who will be on camera to do the “Apple” dance during the ceremony. Jacob Collier? Harvey Mason Jr.?
Is It Finally Beyoncé Time?
PARELES If you’re after a lot of nominations, the way to do it is to qualify for (or wedge your music into) multiple categories — as Beyoncé did with “Cowboy Carter.”
ZOLADZ “Cowboy Carter” is not an album so much as it is a dare to the Recording Academy to see what happens if it doesn’t give Beyoncé her long-awaited album of the year trophy. “AOTY I ain’t win,” she explicitly reminds on “Sweet Honey Buckiin.’” As The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix put it in her memorable review, “It’s a line destined to age poorly.”
Accordingly, I was hardly surprised to see “Cowboy Carter” pick up so many nods — though I was surprised to see it pop up in so many different genre classifications. One of the burning questions around this year’s Grammy nominations was whether or not “Cowboy Carter” would make a showing in the country categories, since the Country Music Awards snubbed it and Beyoncé entirely.
Given the controversy surrounding that decision, I figured the Grammys would be careful not to make the same mistake. However, I do think they went a bit overboard by nominating the fiery, Tina Turner-esque “Yaya” for … best Americana performance. Yes, “Cowboy Carter” itself is a sprawling, ambitious and sometimes excessively on-the-nose treatise about the confining nature of genre in American popular music. And yes, “Americana” is a notoriously nebulous category. But come on.
CARAMANICA It’s simply worth noting that Beyoncé received more total nominations in country music categories than Kacey Musgraves or Jelly Roll or Morgan Wallen — the genre’s biggest star who also had one of the biggest pop singles of 2024 — or any other mainstream Nashville country performer. That’s one piece of data that will certainly be read 100 different ways.
As a sidebar, there’s no Zach Bryan nominations in these categories either, not because he has explicitly and correctly distanced himself from being tagged as country music, but rather because he has joined a list of artists, including Drake, the Weeknd and sometimes Kanye West (now Ye), who have chosen not to submit their music for Grammy consideration.
The Drake-Haters Club
CARAMANICA Ye submitted this year — “Carnival” is nominated for best rap song. But even though there are no Drake nominations, there is nonetheless quite a bit of Drake — or anti-Drake — energy on display.
Most obviously there’s the acclaim for Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” (no “Meet the Grahams”?) and also for the Future and Metro Boomin album “We Don’t Trust You.” Drake remains one of the genre’s biggest stars, and is perhaps now its biggest antagonist. If he didn’t make the most popular rap music of the year, at least he inspired it.
Also Overlooked
COSCARELLI Anything else they missed? I thought the absence of Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby,” one of the defining singles of the year, was glaring. Turns out that tug of war over its genre placement was moot. And zero Dua Lipa, despite the fact that she opened the show earlier this year.
ZOLADZ “Radical Optimism” went “Houdini.”
PARELES Notoriously vague, and a perennial Grammy head scratcher, are the alternative categories, with awards for both performance (a single track) and album. “Romance” by the Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. is nominated for best rock album (alongside the Stones, Pearl Jam and Green Day) — but a song from that album, “Starbuster,” is alternative?
Meanwhile, the alternative album nominees include an album of cozy, retro-flavored pop by Clairo but ignores the year’s sonically adventurous albums from two major bands, the Smile and Vampire Weekend. The Grammys are still a long way from getting everything sorted out.
ZOLADZ After a fun year with a few wild cards — a nomination for Olivia Rodrigo; a win for boygenius — the best rock song category has more or less gone back to its normal stodginess, although I didn’t expect to see the British band Idles among such legacy rockers as Green Day, Pearl Jam and the Black Keys.
If I ran the Grammys, that category would include a nomination for the actual best rock song of the year, which is “She’s Leaving You” by MJ Lenderman. And before I wake up from that dream, I’ll add that the Americana categories are woefully missing Hurray for the Riff Raff and their excellent latest album “The Past Is Still Alive.”
BERGERON For all the acknowledgment of women in music in the past few years, the best rap album category has also remained staunchly male. No woman had even been nominated since Cardi B won for “Invasion of Privacy” in 2019. Doechii’s nod for “Alligator Bites Never Heal” — the 26-year-old rapper’s playful and confident debut LP — breathes a bit of life into a category that has in recent years been the domain of the genre’s graying elder statesmen* (see: Killer Mike and Nas; and, this year, noms for albums from Eminem and Common with Pete Rock).
PARELES The new artist category has reasonable contenders, even though Khruangbin and Shaboozey have both been around for a decade and Carpenter is technically on her sixth album.
Still, there were plenty of other possibilities: not just Tommy Richman, as Joe mentioned, but Tyla from South Africa, Tems from Nigeria (who’s nominated in R&B and global categories), Young Miko from Puerto Rico and English Teacher from Britain, just for starters. The anointment of the jazz singer Samara Joy in 2023 let the Grammys work as a discovery engine and career booster. But this year, the new artist nominees are already thriving.
CARAMANICA But that seems to reflect something larger about how the Grammys have hard-reset in recent years. It used to be a night where the seniors ragged hard on the freshmen, but now it’s oriented around studiously trying to hang with the popular new kids. It’s a reflection of the moment — poptimism’s last gasp? — but maybe not more than that.
PARELES So I guess we’re expecting a safe, sensible, possibly unobjectionable Grammys — less about elder-generation professionals scolding the young ’uns, more about ratifying the past year’s hitmakers. What could go wrong?
The post Grammys Snubs and Surprises: Charli XCX Levels Up, Beyoncé Spreads Out and the Beatles Persist appeared first on New York Times.
