Kendrick Lamar performs on day 2 of the New Look Wireless Festival at Finsbury Park on July 4, 2015 in London, England. From the year’s leading rapper up for Best Dance Recording and a diss track garnering the voters’ love to Patti Smith hoping to end her long Grammy shutout with a Spoken Word win and Roger Waters’ 1992 LP getting a 2015 nod, here are the weirdest, most surprising and unknown Grammy nominations.
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In the other major categories, Lamar, Swift and the Weeknd also fared well, though Swift was the only performer to be nominated for album, song and record of the year.
“To Pimp a Butterfly”, his third studio album, has topped the USA and United Kingdom music charts with its fusion of funk, jazz and poetry.
The nominations, announced Monday by the Recording Academy, cover 83 musical categories, including album of the year, for which Lamar (“To Pimp a Butterfly”), Swift (“1989”) and the Weeknd (“Beauty Behind the Madness”) all received a nod.
Erotic drama “Fifty Shades of Grey” powered The Weeknd to three of his Grammy nods for single “Earned It” which was featured on the movie’s soundtrack.
The 24-year-old tweeted: “I wasn’t expecting the Grammy noms, thank you”.
And for those expecting an epic battle between Swift and Adele for Grammy glory, it wasn’t meant to be: The “Hello” singer’s new album “25” was released two months after the deadline for consideration for the 2016 Grammys.
Second-guessing the Grammy voters’ choices is something of an annual tradition, and the rest of the year’s nominations offered the usual mix of welcome and head-scratching selections.
He is nominated twice in the Best Music Video category for “Bad Blood” and “Alright”, and twice for Best Rap Song for “Alright” and for his co-writing credit on Kanye West’s “All Day”. Glen Hansard is up for Best Folk Album. Hip-Hop’s complicated relationship with The Grammys has been well documented for decades, especially as of late, when artists that many consider to be “Pop” find themselves nominated for core rap awards, most recently the controversy surrounding Iggy Azalea.
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Other British acts who have secured nominations include James Bay, Florence + The Machine, Ellie Goulding and Lianne La Havas. Saxophonist Jimmy Greene, the father of one of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, earned two nominations for an album inspired by his late daughter Ana Márquez-Greene. The awards ceremony will take place on February 15 at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, and will be televised on CBS.
