New Rules, Who Dis?

Things that happened behind the scenes at the GRAMMYS while I was on leave the last couple weeks: MARILYN MANSON lost one of his two nominations for the 2022 awards, not because of the multiple allegations of sexual assault he's facing but because he wasn't actually credited on the KANYE WEST song whose Best Rap Song nomination originally included him... TAYLOR SWIFT, JACK ANTONOFF and ST. VINCENT were removed from the list of 10 collaborators included in OLIVIA RODRIGO's Album of the Year nomination after the RECORDING ACADEMY discovered their only participation in the album was having written Swift's song "CRUEL SUMMER," which Rodrigo interpolated... (By contrast, more than 100 people are listed in Kanye's nomination for DONDA under new eligibility rules introduced this year and they all get to stay—for now anyway. The Academy was still adding and removing names throughout the Grammy field as recently as last Wednesday, two days after final ballots were sent to voters.)... Singer/songwriter LINDA CHORNEY was added as a bonus sixth nominee for American Roots Song a week after the nominations were announced, for a song that isn't mentioned on her website and exists as a little-heard standalone single in SPOTIFY and other streaming services. The circumstances behind the nomination are even stranger than the circumstances that led to her first Grammy nomination a decade earlier. Chorney, who's famous in Grammy circles for not being famous, may have to write a second book and make a second documentary to explain what happened, with the caveat that her first book and film are apparently why she was nominated, un-nominated and re-nominated this time around... DRAKE, who's been sparring with the Grammys for years, decided after the nominations were announced that he didn't want the two he got, including one for Best Rap Album. The RECORDING ACADEMY agreed to remove him from the ballot, leaving those two categories with four nominees instead of five... The year's most-nominated album, JON BATISTE's FREEDOM, got a new credited producer and two new credited engineers in two corrections a week apart... Even Linda Chorney got three new credited collaborators, a week after she herself was added... And of course we already knew about the two extra nominees tacked on to each of the show's four marquee categories, including that Kanye Album of the Year nomination, after the Academy knew (and, one imagines, wasn't satisfied with) the names of the original eight nominees in each category.

Who, you might find yourself asking, is in charge here, and why, two years out from the controversial ouster of Recording Academy CEO DEBORAH DUGAN and one year out from the Grammys badly missing on the WEEKND, are they having such a hard time with the pre-execution of a show that they know is under heavier than usual scrutiny? Is there a quality control department in the house? What else is being missed or will be missed? Is the Academy losing control of its own show? Will you trust the results? Will you care?

Some of the mistakes can be blamed in part on the record companies who made the original submissions. But the show, and the final responsibility, belongs to the Academy. Will an Olivia Rodrigo sweep make everything better? Would a Jon Batiste sweep be preferable? Or will any result, no matter what it is, be a little suspect?

Scene and Not Scene

Trouble is brewing in country music polling circles, where the NASHVILLE SCENE has scrapped its long-running annual poll of country critics in response to a problematic essay written earlier this year in a different publication, PASTE, by the freelancer, GEOFFREY HIMES, who runs the poll. (In short, Himes thought it would be a good idea to coin a new genre consisting entirely of Black people who record country or country-adjacent music, and then to use the occasion to gratuitously trash a couple of the most acclaimed artists he had thus pigeonholed. Here's an archived version of the original essay, which has since been deleted. And here's a response, also published and deleted by Paste, by JAKE BLOUNT. There's been more back-and-forth that you're free to seek out if you're curious.) Apparently the Nashville Scene can't simply replace Himes because he owns the rights to the poll, and Himes can't simply take it somewhere else, even if he could find a taker, because it's a complicated poll to run and it was too late in the year for anyone else to make it happen. Which is all to say, you may have to discover ALLISON RUSSELL's, MORGAN WADE's and CARLY PEARCE's 2021 albums by yourself. (Or you can peruse the country entries in our ever-growing MusicSET "Best Music of 2021: The Year in Lists" and see where that leads you.)

Rest in Peace

Up-and-coming Columbus, Ohio, rapper KAMNUTTY, at least the 24th hip-hop artist shot to death in the US in 2021 (and the second in Columbus; Boog the Bandit was murdered in May)... DAVID LASLEY, singer/songwriter and backing vocalist to the stars.