Grammys 2023: Where’s Rosalía’s Album of the Year Nomination?
The nominations for the 2023 Grammys are here — and, as always, there are a fair share of perplexing, unexpected, or just plain sad omissions from the top categories. Here are nine of the biggest snubs for next year’s awards.
Rosalía
Three years ago, Rosalía made history as the first Spanish-language act to be nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy. This year, her third album, Motomami, built impressively on all the buzz she built up back then, winning some of 2022’s biggest rave reviews. Its innovative, daring sounds got her eight nominations at the Latin Grammys, which will air this Sunday — but she’ll have to keep waiting to see any of the Big Four categories at the Anglo Grammys again: Motomami got a courtesy nod in the Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album category, but Rosalía is nowhere to be seen in Album, Record, or Song of the Year. It’s a glaring absence that shows that the Recording Academy still has a lot to learn about music in other languages. — Brittany Spanos
Blackpink
Blackpink are one of the world’s most exciting pop acts, filling arenas worldwide with a brash sound that combines everything from trap beats and sticky hooks to Eighties bombast, classical violin, old-school R&B and, most of all, swagger — yet they were completely shut out. No nominations whatsoever is disrespect to the idea of fun itself.
Nicki Minaj
Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” was a resounding commercial success for the prolific rapper, so when she found that the Recording Academy had decided it would compete against (much bigger) pop songs in a preliminary Grammy vote, rather than other rap songs more like it, her concerns were warranted. What wasn’t warranted, perhaps, was dragging Atlanta MC Latto and her hit “Big Energy” into it, which devolved into a messy war of words on Twitter. Between her singles and features, Nicki apparently appeared eight times on the long list considered by voters — five times in rap categories — but that didn’t translate to any nominations. —Mankaprr Conteh
Megan Thee Stallion
When Megan Thee Stallion’s Traumazine works, it really, really works, and given the accolades the Recording Academy showered the Houston rapper with in 2021, it wasn’t wholly unreasonable to expect they’d recognize the triumph in her second album. But while Traumazine’s critical reception was mostly positive, it wasn’t overwhelmingly so, and amongst general listeners, could even seem lukewarm. Her absence from the nominations this year is stark, if not totally surprising. —M.C.
Noah Cyrus
Noah Cyrus had only released a few short EPs before the Recording Academy nominated her for Best New Artist last year, so it seemed likely that her stunning debut album, The Hardest Part, would be a favorite in several categories. The LP, produced by Mike Crossey, was an intimate and beautifully made project spanning pop, folk, and country sounds, but it ultimately went unacknowledged in the nominations. — Julyssa Lopez
Latin Music Producers
Bad Bunny finally broke out of the Grammy’s narrow Latin categories and got recognized for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance — a deserved feat for a guy who’s been the biggest artist on the planet two years in a row now. Yet it’s a bummer that his closest collaborators, especially reggaeton mastermind Tainy, production renegade MAG, and the sound maverick La Paciencia, were all left out of Producer of the Year, even after making tracks for the smash success Un Verano Sin Ti. — J.L.
“Titi Me Pregunto”
Speaking of which: Those other nominations for Bad Bunny are great — but how about “Titi Me Pregunto”? The upbeat, insistently catchy track was an instant standout from what is likely the year’s biggest album. If you went to almost any public space this year, you more than likely heard it a million times (and likely haven’t gotten sick of it yet). A song that ubiquitous surely deserved consideration in Record or Song of the Year, yet it’s nowhere to be seen. — B.S.
Kid Harpoon
Kid Harpoon helped bring rock sounds back to the pop mainstream — and all the way to Number One — with his inventive work on Harry Styles’ much-nominated Harry’s House (including the chart-topping Song of the Year and Record of the Year candidate “As It Was”) and Maggie Rogers’ Surrender. But despite honoring Styles’ album over and over, the Academy skipped over Kid Harpoon. — Brian Hiatt
Stromae
The Belgian pop star’s Multitude would seem like a lock for a category called Best Global Music Album: He pulled from the electro-cumbia sounds of Mexico, worked with a charango player from Bolivia, emulated the sound of a Bulgarian choir he heard in a Japanese film, and more. Stromae also benefited from a TikTok boost for his 2010 hit “Alors on Danse” — but even that wasn’t enough to get the Recording Academy’s attention. —Tomas Mier
