The 12 Most Egregious Snubs in Grammy History
Reading Time: 5 minutesLet’s take a walk down musical memory lane and consider when the Grammys really missed the mark.
Our sibling-site The A.V. Club recently took at look at the biggest snubs and surprises among the just-released 2023 Grammy nominations. All the head-scratching omissions (like not even nominating Megan Thee Stallion‘s excellent Traumazine for anything) got me thinking about the worst Grammy snubs in music history.
There are a ton of them, but I have narrowed my list down to a dirty dozen examples of times the Grammys totally missed the mark. Consider it a lesson in how to not be musically out-of-touch—go listen to these songs and albums, and banish the ostensible winners from your memory forever (if you can).
There’s nothing wrong with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis necessarily. The duo spits out catchy, novelty rap tunes like ‘Thrift Store,’ the massive single that catapulted them to super-stardom in 2013, as well as slightly more serious tracks like ‘Can’t Hold Us.’ But it wouldn’t have taken a psychic to see that these dudes had ‘one hit wonder’ (or at least ‘one album wonder’) written all over their faces. When you consider that they were up against Kendrick Lamar, you might conclude that the Grammys are rigged—or at least that Grammy voters don’t have the first clue about hip hop.
For more proof Grammy voters have never understood hip hop, you can go back to 1989, the first year they gave an award for rap. That year, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’ took the Grammy over Kool Moe Dee’s ‘Wild, Wild West,’ LL Cool J’s ‘Going Back to Cali’, and Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Push It.’ Three classics. While Prince & Jazzy definitely had charisma and crossover appeal, the silly track that took the Grammy is a for literal children, and so much less a worthy winner than any of the other nominees.
I blame this one on the Pandemic. If Grammy voters had been able to leave their houses in 2020/2021, they would have heard The Weeknd’s After Hours—it was impossible to not to. So I’m assuming the fact that this excellent album was not even nominated for a single award in any category was because the people who pick Grammy nominees were entirely unaware of the existence of The Weeknd. Either that or dude did something very, very bad to the Mayor of the Recording Industry.
If you look at Grammy winners for best album in the 1980s, you’d have no idea that hip hop, EDM, post-punk/alternative, and even hair metal were invented in that decade. You’d think that everyone was getting off to weak sauce like Christopher Cross (1981), Toto (1983), Phil Collins (1986), and George Michael (1989) instead of Public Enemy, The Replacements, and Guns and Roses.
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a ridiculously great album. It veers between spontaneous, organic, first-take exuberance and moments of grandiosity that will make the hair on the back of your arms stand up. And the vulnerability is off-the-charts. It’s so good that being relegated to only winning Alternative Album of the Year is a huge snub—what does ‘alternative’ even mean in the 2020s anyway? When you consider the competition included a tepid Coldplay release and the Album of the Year winner was Taylor Swift’s easy-listening Folklore, it’s even more ridiculous.
Perennial Polka Grammy winner Jimmy Sturr’s 2007 album Polka in Paradise‘s tropical music-meets-polka vibe was an amusing novelty, but hardly the kind genre-pushing release that should be taking home a Grammy, even if Bobby Vinton is a special guest. It’s even worse when you consider the competition. Either Eddie Blazonczyk’s Versatones’ Batteries Not Included or Lenny Gomulka and Chicago Push’s As Sweet as Candy would have been a better choice.
(NOTE: I know literally nothing about Polka music.)
Like everyone else on earth, I’d never listened to Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, but I put it on this morning, and let me tell you, it is horrible. I like both Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock, but this album of schmaltzy horseshit clinically extracts everything interesting about Mitchell’s music and replaces it with noodley, soft-jazz syrup until you’re clawing your eyes out and asking yourself whether there is anyone on the entire planet who is uncool enough to actually enjoy music that sounds like this. It’s remarkably bad, the kind of album that doesn’t usually come out until an artist is long dead and their estate needs to clear some debts. And it beat out both Kanye’s Graduation and Amy Winehouse’s Back in Black! I know there’s no accounting for taste, but really, the Grammys?
I don’t know what it is about Bruno Mars makes him so unlikeable—he’s a great singer, a great dancer, a great showman, and probably a super nice guy, but there’s something so forgettable and basic about his music and his whole thing. The world needs cookie-cutter radio pop, but something like Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic doesn’t deserve to win every grammy, right? Album of the Year, Song of the Year, R&B Album, R&B song, and more. Mars would have won for Polka Album of the Year if the category hadn’t been dropped in 2009. Here’s who didn’t win: Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, and Jay-Z.
I believe it is impossible to listen to Nirvana’s Nevermind and not recognize it as a masterpiece, but in 1992, it lost even the lame-ass ‘Best Alternative Album’ Grammy—to freakin’ R.E.M! The only explanation I can come up with is that the category is so meaningless, it impossible to vote on. The other nominees that year were Elvis Costello, Jesus Jones, and Richard Thompson, and I defy anyone to explain how you’d compare straight-up folk singer Richard Thompson with techno-influenced soft-rockers Jesus Jones or new wave troubadour Elvis Costello, let alone Nirvana and R.E.M, so I assume the Grammy voters just threw up their hands and said ‘R.E.M. I guess?’ Before snorting more coke.
Steely Dan are the most annoying band in the history of popular music history, and Two Against Nature is group’s most-annoying album. Released after a 20-year break, this irrelevant collection of yesterday’s news seems to have won its Grammy as an apology—Steely Dan didn’t win very many awards during its ‘heyday’ in the 1970s, probably because all of their music was horrible (except ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ which rocks.) In spite of being terrible, Steely Dan beat Radiohead’s Kid A, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, and Beck’s Midnight Vultures.
Speaking of Radiohead getting screwed… If there’s a running theme with Grammy snubs, it’s current, cutting edge music losing out to dinosaurs, and that can’t be illustrated better than by 1998’s award for album of the year going to Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind over Radiohead’s OK Computer. No offense to Dylan—I’m a huge fan—but Bob was way past his prime in 1998, and it’s hard to imagine anyone listening to OK Computer and Time out of Mind and concluding that Dylan’s forgettable late-career album was on the same level as Radiohead’s masterpiece. This is a clear case of Grammy voters picking the voice of the last generation over the voice of the current one.
You can forgive Grammy’s voters for snubbing cutting-edge artists when they’re hot and new—the voters are largely older music industry lifers who are far from having their ears on the streets. But the Ramones were around for years, dropping album after album that defined and perfected punk rock. They (arguably) invented the entire genre. Despite being the greatest rock and roll band that has ever lived on planet earth (inarguably), not only did The Ramones never win a Grammy, they were never even nominated for one. They should have won 18 grammys for the one-note guitar solo on ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ alone! The pity ‘Lifetime Achievement’ statue they won in 2011 after Joey Ramone died doesn’t count—too little, too late.