Morgan Wallen Is Making Sure He Won’t Get Any Grammy Nominations by Not Submitting
Morgan Wallen is ensuring his streak of never receiving a solo Grammy nomination continues by declining to submit his latest album, I’m the Problem, for consideration.
Wallen’s team confirmed the news to Rolling Stone, after it was first reported by Hits Daily Double and Billboard. Not only will Wallen not submit I’m the Problem — which has spent 11 weeks so far at Number One on the Billboard 200 — in any of the album categories, he also won’t submit individual recordings in categories like Record of the Year or Best Country Solo Performance.
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Additionally, Wallen won’t seek songwriting nominations for any of the tracks he co-wrote on I’m the Problem. But as Billboard notes, Wallen’s team won’t stop any of the songwriters he worked with from putting up their work for consideration.
Wallen isn’t the first major artist to decline to submit their music to the Grammys. Most recently, Drake, the Weeknd, and Frank Ocean have rebuffed the institution, criticizing the nominations committees and voting body for being disconnected from what’s actually popular and meaningful to contemporary audiences, especially in their worlds of hip-hop and R&B.
After he declined to submit Blonde, Ocean said in a 2016 interview that the Grammys don’t “seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from, and hold down what I hold down.” He added: “I think the infrastructure of the awarding system and the nomination system and screening system is dated. I’d rather this be my Colin Kaepernick moment for the Grammys than sit there in the audience.”
(The Recording Academy has taken some steps in recent years to diversify its voters and nominees, and add some transparency to its nominations process. Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. noted these efforts at the 67th Grammys in February before introducing a beef-squashing performance from the Weeknd.)
Unlike Wallen, however, Drake, the Weeknd, and Ocean staged their protests as multiple Grammy winners. (Though, potentially bolstering their critiques, all their victories were in genre categories, as opposed to the general fields of Song, Record, and Album of the Year, or Best New Artist.) Wallen has been nominated at the Grammys just twice, and both times as a featured artist on Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help.”
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