Paak’s exacting pastiche of a ’70s R&B sex jam, “Leave the Door Open.” Look at some of the other Grammy darlings of recent years: H.E.R.
Record and Song of the Year, meanwhile, went to lab-made Grammy bait: Bruno Mars and Anderson. Last year’s AOTY winner, Jon Batiste, is a wildly talented musician who plays multiple instruments but had been mainly known as Stephen Colbert’s bandleader before the Grammys gave him 11 nominations in seven different fields. At this point, backward-looking wins aren’t exceptions from the Grammys but the rule. And Lizzo, the other big pop star of the bunch, won Record of the Year for the overly obvious ’80s throwback “About Damn Time” - which, if the guitar riff didn’t give it away, directly name-checks its template, Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” in the bridge. A jazz singer, Samara Joy, took Best New Artist (the second jazz BNA win in less than 15 years, if you can believe it). Bonnie Raitt won Song of the Year for “Just Like That,” a track she wrote by herself and performed with little more than a guitar. (Styles said the record was named after a 1973 Japanese album called Hosono House, but it couldn’t have hurt that there’s a Joni Mitchell song called “Harry’s House” either.) On top of that, Styles had the “most personal album yet” angle going for him with interviews about how the pandemic and his mental health influenced the record.Īdditionally, Styles’s creative approach lined up with one of the more conservative nights in Grammys history. Harry’s House is exactly the sort of old-fashioned sonic throwback the Academy likes to hear, and voters have proved that up and down the ballot the past few years. (Maybe he was referring to being a former boy-band member that doesn’t change it coming across as insensitive.) He’s obviously not just wrong from a race and gender standpoint - he’s wrong musically. “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often,” Styles said in his acceptance speech, a sound bite that was instantly criticized. Harry’s House is right in the Academy’s sweet spot. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, or Lizzo stole votes from her, why didn’t the same happen to Styles with ABBA, Adele, or Coldplay?) It also feels beside the point to argue whether Styles deserved AOTY over Beyoncé - we’ve done that with her past two snubs for Beyoncé and Lemonade, and the answer remains a resounding “yes.” All that matters is that the Recording Academy clearly thought he did. (That’s never felt like more of a fool’s errand, though if Mary J.
With ten AOTY nominees in total, we can dream up innumerable explanations for who siphoned off votes from Beyoncé this time. Beyoncé, on the other hand, added a fourth snub for the top honor to her career, this time for Renaissance, a spectacular, holistic project celebrating Blackness and queerness that many critics had already declared the record of 2022. The speech that followed was noticeably awkward with Styles acknowledging there was “no such thing as best in music” despite winning a trophy that attempted to judge just that. Styles won on his first AOTY nomination for his third (solo) album, Harry’s House, a pleasant but too comfortable set of songs influenced by ’80s synth pop and classic rock. But this one was particularly painful to swallow. Anyone other than Bey winning would’ve been met with some level of vitriol - especially after the Grammys spent the entire night hyping AOTY, and especially after she became the winningest artist in the Recording Academy’s history earlier in the ceremony.
On Sunday evening, it was a different British pop star who stood between her and her first Grammy for Album of the Year: Harry Styles. Adele turned out to be the least of Beyoncé’s worries.
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