The Grammys arrived last year embroiled in scandal, with newly installed Recording Academy president and CEO Deborah Dugan ousted just over a week before the ceremony. Dugan had entered the role pledging to improve the academy’s woeful record on honoring Black and female musicians, and claimed that her dismissal was punishment for her efforts to reform the institution, which the academy denied.
The two parties are currently in arbitration, but almost a year later, the nominations for the 2021 Grammys, announced on Tuesday, have done little to temper the familiar criticisms of the awards. The academy’s chairman, Harvey Mason Jr., has replaced Dugan on an interim basis, and as The New York Times pointed out on Tuesday, the organization invited over 2,300 members to join its voting ranks over the past year in an effort to diversify its nominations, with 74% accepting. After Black Lives Matter protests swelled across the world this past summer, the academy announced that its world-music category would be renamed best global music album in order to avoid what it said were “connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American,’” and that urban contemporary would become progressive R&B.
Any effect those changes could be perceived to have, however, was swiftly overshadowed by The Weeknd not being nominated for any Grammys on Tuesday. The singer’s album After Hours was a critical and commercial success, with its single “Blinding Lights” setting a record by spending the last 40 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. A number of publications have characterized the shutout as the biggest snub of the year, if not in recent memory. The Weeknd addressed the matter in more direct terms:
By the end of Tuesday, Mason was left defending the integrity of the awards process. “I don’t think [The Weeknd’s omission calls the nomination] process into question, honestly,” he told Variety, adding, “There’s no ‘let’s snub this person or that person.’ It’s about, ‘Let’s try and find excellence.’”
It was a fitting coda for the current state of the Grammys, in which the scandals unraveling behind the scenes tend to garner more attention than anything about the awards themselves. As Billboard noted on Tuesday, Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 3 became the first album to be nominated for album of the year before making the Billboard 200, and Black Pumas’ self-titled album came just one chart spot away from doing the same. The Black Pumas album that was nominated is a deluxe edition of an album that was originally released in June 2019.
Whatever opinions one has of After Hours or of the relevance of chart success, these two albums weren’t on the tips of many tongues. That they came out on top anyway helped ensure that the same old questions plagued the Recording Academy on the day it said it was once again starting anew.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Why Princess Diana’s Controversial 1995 Interview Still Stings
— Inside Britney Spears’s Fight for Legal Control Over Her Life
— Prince Charles Will Wear the Same Royal Wedding Suit As Long As It Fits
— Internet It Girl Poppy Is Burning Down 2020 and Starting Again
— Curious Duchess Camilla Will Watch Herself on The Crown
— Can Princess Märtha Louise of Norway and Shaman Durek Live Happily Ever After?
— Prince William’s COVID Diagnosis Was “No Secret” Among the Royals
— From the Archive: Tina Brown on Princess Diana, the Mouse That Roared
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.