Grammy nominations to be announced today
Artists who are chosen to announce the Grammy nominations typically collect a few bids themselves, so rapper Kanye West, country singer Gretchen Wilson, rock balladeers Hoobastank and The Black Eyed Peas can count themselves among the likely contenders this year.
The announcement, set for today at the Music Box Theatre in Hollywood, is also likely to recognise Usher, who had the year’s top album and single, and the late Ray Charles, whose posthumous album, Genius Loves Company, has become the biggest-selling record of his decades-long career.
Usher’s mega-hit Yeah! Is likely to receive record and song of the year nominations, and Confessions, which has sold more than 7 million copies and spawned four hit singles, seems set for album of the year.
But he’s also likely to be nominated in the pop and R&B categories for his performances on songs such as Confessions and Burn, and could get other nominations for his collaborations with Alicia Keys on My Boo, his current big hit, and Ludacris and Lil Jon on Yeah!
But it won’t be a one-man show when the nominations are announced by The Recording Academy in Los Angeles.
Among others expected to get multiple nods: 2002’s Grammy darling, Alicia Keys; country’s self-proclaimed “redneck woman,” Wilson; The Black Eyed Peas’ jumpy single Let’s Get It Started and rap innovator and newcomer West – who complained after losing at the recent American Music Awards that he had been “definitely robbed”.
With his debut, The College Dropout, West became an unlikely rap superstar by eschewing typical rapspeak about sex, money and gangsta life and offering prose about atypical subjects (lamenting a bevy of social problems in Jesus Walks, for example).
Meanwhile, Keys’ multi-platinum debut album, Songs in A Minor, netted her five Grammys, including song of the year for Fallin’.
Keys has two songs from her follow-up, The Diary of Alicia Keys, that could qualify for that honour this year: You Don’t Know My Name and If I Ain’t Got You, both retro-soul ballads that were Top 10 hits. The album might also make it for album of the year.
Other album of the year nominees could include Prince’s Musicology.
If Prince is nominated, it would be fitting, since he kicked off his comeback year with an electrifying appearance on the Grammy telecast last February.
Other artists who could hear their name called include country legend Loretta Lynn for Van Lear Rose, produced by the White Stripes’ Jack White; Hoobastank for The Reason, which became a huge rock anthem; Jay-Z, whose Black Album is supposedly his last; Brian Wilson for Smile, his finally finished album from the 1960s; omnipresent rapper-producer Lil Jon, responsible for Usher’s Yeah!; and the pop band Maroon 5.
One of the biggest questions will be whether Ashlee Simpson gets a nod; although her debut album, Autobiography, was among the year’s biggest hits, her lip-synching on Saturday Night Live may have left some Grammy voters wary.
The Grammys will be given out on February 13 in Los Angeles during a broadcast on CBS.
