On Tuesday, The Recording Academy announced the nominees for the 2023 Grammy’s, as well as five new categories. Maddy Brown has the story.
Music fans everywhere will be excited to hear that the nominees for the 2023 Grammy’s were announced today.
The announcement contained both expected and unexpected nominees, fantastic new breakout artists like Omar Apollo and Latto, and even some new categories.
Of course, longtime music legend and worldwide superstar Beyoncé led the pack with nine nominations, eight of which are for her recently released album, Renaissance. This ties her for the record of most Grammy nominations with her husband, rapper Jay-Z.
All eyes will be on the Album of the Year category as Adele and Beyoncé show down just as they did in 2017, when Adele’s album 25 beat Beyoncé's Lemonade. Adele herself was nominated seven times, including for her album 30.
Harry Styles fans will be happy to know that the former One Direction band member was nominated six times. His album Harry’s House, which he’s on tour performing right now, was nominated for Album of the Year.
Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled, and The-Dream, who collaborated with Beyoncé on Renaissance, were also each nominated six times. Kendrick Lamar scored eight.
Along with the announcement of the nominees came the reveal of five new Grammy Awards categories.
The new categories are Songwriter of the Year (Non-Classical), Best Alternative Music Performance, Best Americana Performance, Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games And Other Interactive Media, and Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.
There will also be a new special merit award under the category of Best Song For Social Change.
Taylor Somerville, a music industry major in the USC Thornton School of Music, had some thoughts on the new categories and what their impact will be.
Somerville: I think those are really good categories. I heard about the video game soundtrack one. I think that’s really cool because I think it’s a video game Valorant that has become really popular because of the really intense music that they use in their soundtracks. So I think that that’s really cool. And the Americana category. I do appreciate Americana for sure, because it kind of integrates blues and country and R&B and folk music. So I think we really cool to see what comes out of that.
Somerville had some additional thoughts about the new special merit award, the best song for social change. She thinks the award will inspire artists to create music relevant to current social changes.
Somerville: I’m really excited to see what songs are going to be like nominated for that category because I know, for example, a very popular like political change song is “This Is America” by Childish Gambino? And that’s always so impactful, especially here in the United States and everything that’s going on here with Black Lives Matter. I’m really excited to see what creative minds come into, like, songwriting. To see kind of like what they can come up with that’s relevant to what’s happening today, if that makes sense.
Somerville also said that these new categories will be important to artists.
Somerville: Just to get the recognition that they need. A lot of artists don’t feel that they fit into the really strict Grammy categories. I think a really positive thing to come out of this, as in many artists could branch out so they can get a Grammy in a different category or just like kind of explore their genre and not stay in the same thing.
The 65th Grammy Awards show will take place on Feb. 5th, 2023 at Crypto.com Arena here in Los Angeles.
For Annenberg Radio News, I’m Maddy Brown