Canadian rapper Drake has asked the Recording Academy to withdraw his two nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards. The reason for the same is unclear.
According to Variety, the decision was made by Drake and his management and the Grammys honored the request. The official website of the Grammy’s states the two nominations have been removed with no replacement entries. This means voting for those two categories will go ahead with just four nominees.
The artist got two Grammy nominations last month in the rap field. One was in the Best Rap Album category for Certified Lover Boy and Best Rap Performance for his song Way 2 Sexy. However, for years, the relationship between the awards show and Drake has been sour.
Last year, the rapper had taken to social media and talked about The Weeknd being shut out of nominations. “I think we should stop allowing ourselves to be shocked every year by the disconnect between impactful music and these awards and just accept that what once was the highest form of recognition may no longer matter to the artists that exist now and the ones that come after,” Drake wrote on Instagram shortly after the nominations for the 2021 ceremony were announced. “It’s like a relative you keep expecting to fix up but they just can’t change their ways.”
In 2017, Drake again refused to submit his mixtape More Life for consideration complaining about the Recording Academy only recognizing him as a rap artist when his hits, during the time, were mostly in the pop genre. “I’m a Black artist, I’m apparently a rapper, even though ‘Hotline Bling’ is not a rap song,” Drake had said in an interview with Britain’s DJ Semtex. “The only category that they can manage to fit me in is in a rap category, maybe because I’ve rapped in the past or because I’m Black,” he had said.
This year, although Drake has been nominated in two important categories, his name has not been included in other major categories.
Taylor’s nomination
Meanwhile, singer Taylor Swift lost out on one of her Grammy nominations as a songwriter for Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, which is up for album of the year. “Last week, we received the correct credits from the label that recognize Annie Clark, Jack Antonoff, and Taylor Swift as songwriters of an interpolation on the track, Deja Vu,” the academy said in a statement.
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“In keeping with current Grammy guidelines, as songwriters of an interpolated track, Clark, Antonoff and Swift are not nominees in the album of the year category for Sour,” the statement read.
Interpolation refers to when parts of a song’s composition are rerecorded to create something new. It’s a different concept from sampling, which refers to a snippet being lifted from an original song.
Rodrigo’s Deja Vu included an interpolation of Swift’s Cruel Summer, a track she co-wrote with Antonoff and Clark for her 2019 album, Lover.
The 64th annual Grammy Awards ceremony will be held on Jan. 31.