The Grammys’ Lukewarm Like for Beyonce, by the Quantities

Numerically talking, Beyoncé has obtained additional adore from the Grammy Awards than almost any other artist. The 39-12 months-previous performer is the most-nominated feminine artist in the awards’ historical past (equally solo and as a member of Destiny’s Kid), and is tied with Paul McCartney for 2nd area on the all-time checklist — just 1 guiding her husband, Jay-Z, and legendary 87-year-aged producer-composer Quincy Jones. She’s also seventh on the checklist for most wins, with 24, and second for most Grammys won by a female artist, at the rear of 27-time champ Alison Krauss. There have been only two several years in this century that Beyoncé has not been nominated for a Grammy.

Included to that, she’s the most-nominated artist for the 2021 awards, with 9 — oddly, in a 12 months when she unveiled no album. She’s nominated for the sole song she produced as the guide artist in 2020 (“Black Parade”) for the one variety on which she’s featured (Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix) for a video clip (2019’s “Brown Skin Girl”) and her “Black Is King” film, a companion to last year’s “Lion King.”

But a search past the major figures reveals that the Grammy enjoy has been a little bit lukewarm of late. 3 of her earlier four solo studio albums have been nominated for album of the calendar year, without a win — in 2017, Adele even tried to give her album trophy to Beyoncé instead of herself. “I simply cannot maybe settle for this award,” Adele explained onstage, soon after winning for her “25” album. “The artist of my lifetime is Beyoncé, and the ‘Lemonade’ album is just so monumental.”

And though several consider Beyoncé to be the most influential Black female singer since Aretha Franklin, about the several years she’s often been similarly ghettoized into R&B and other classes, and absent from the “Big Four” (album, music and history of the year, as nicely as new artist). None of Franklin’s 18 wins and 44 nominations were in the Large Four, and if it weren’t for the R&B and gospel races, she’d have a lot less than a handful of nominations in whole.

While Beyoncé’s 15 Big Four nominations have provided her a a great deal larger existence in people classes than Franklin ever experienced, she’s only received one of those trophies — music of the calendar year in 2010 for “Single Women (Place a Ring on It)” — and only four of her 24 full wins have been outdoors the R&B contests. In the same way, with two exceptions, Destiny’s Child’s 14 nominations and a few wins all have been in R&B and slight groups.

And she’s had some quite large yrs: In 2004, the 12 months of “Dangerously in Appreciate,” Beyoncé won 5 out of 6 nominations, and in 2010, with her “I Am … Sasha Fierce” album, she scored 10 nods and six wins. But whilst she scored nine “Lemonade”-connected nods in 2017 — even one for rock functionality for her Jack White collaboration, “Don’t Damage Yourself” — she took household just two awards that 12 months: city up to date album and new music online video (for “Formation”). Adele swept album, music and record of the year groups.

In reality, to place the imbalance in standpoint, Adele has gained every single of the previous 13 Grammy Awards for which she’s been nominated, and has missing only three of her 18 full bids, 50 % of which were in the Huge Four types.

The rationale driving the Grammys’ reluctance to entirely embrace the dominant woman artist of the century is beyond this article’s purview (and phrase count). But Beyoncé’s 9 2021 nominations contain 3 in the Significant 4: “Black Parade” for song and file of the calendar year, and “Savage” in the latter category as very well (which indicates she’s competing with herself). Provided the skewed logic that Academy voters have shown during Grammy background, it would pretty much make sense that one particular of Beyoncé’s least-prolific decades would be the a single when she normally takes household the most trophies.