On Friday, Nov. 10, the Recording Academy unveiled their official nominations for the 66 annual Grammy Awards held on Feb. 4, 2024 at the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles with women accounting for nearly all the nominations in the most-anticipated award categories.
The leader of the nominees with nine nominations in the 2024 Grammy Awards is SZA, who is up for nomination in the leading categories of album, song and record of the year. Four other artists, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Miley Cyrus and John Batiste are also nominated in the three most-anticipated categories alongside SZA.
The other artists up for a plethora of nominations include Phoebe Bridgers and Victoria Monet with seven nominations, and John Batiste, Jack Antonoff, Boygenius, Brandy Clark, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo each earning six nominations.
Lana Del Rey is also nominated for album and song of the year, along with Pop Duo/Group Performance, Alternative Music Album and Alternative Music Performance. She took to Instagram to share her gratitude for the nominations, posting a clip of her laughing and smiling and exclaiming ,“Very excited about these Grammy nominations. Five!” It is the most nominations in a single year for the artist, with her previous record being two nominations in a single year in 2014 and again in 2020.
Female artists take up all five spots in Best Pop Solo Performance and make up eight out of ten artists nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. Men still have a predominant scale in the nominations for other genres, but it’s clear that pop music is entering an era of female domination. The days of boy bands and artists like Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake are nearly obsolete.
Songs from the Greta Gerwig film “Barbie” swept up a whopping eleven nominations, earning the most nominations overall this year, with two songs from the film, Dua Lipa’s “Dance The Night” and Billie Eilishes “What Was I Made For?” being nominated in the big name category of Song of the Year. The bright and loud pink-pop girl power society looks down upon mostly seems to be finally getting some love and time in the spotlight to be celebrated.
Female significance also has made its way into other categories, with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Ballad of A Homeschooled Girl” and Boygenius’ “Not Strong Enough” bleeding into the nominees for Best Rock Song, alongside Foo Fighters, The Rolling Stones and Queens of The Stone Age. With Rock music being seen on the decline, some would argue that nominees who are also in the pop categories (Rodrigo and Boygenius) nail the head in the coffin. However, others see it as the beginning of finally seeing more female representation in the genre apart from the most popular female front-ran rock group, Paramore.
The Grammy Awards were under fire not too long ago back in 2018, after only one woman took home a major award that year- Alessia Cara who took home the Grammy for “Best New Artist.” Coincidentally, SZA was the most-nominated woman that year in the awards but left empty-handed.
The 2018 Grammys sparked a lot of controversy after the awards. They received major backlash for the winners, with viewers taking to social media to make the hashtag #GrammysSoMale trend on platforms worldwide. In response to the criticism, Recording Academy President Neil Portnow told journalists after the show that women should “step up.”
Women more than “stepped up” in the years following and have become some of the Grammy’s most recognizable nominees. As far as records thst the 2024 Grammys could set, there’s an abundance. If Taylor Swift wins Album of the Year for Midnights, she would break the record for most “Album of the Year” wins with four. If Billie Eilish wins Record of the Year for “What Was I Made For?” it would put her in a three-way tie as the artist with the most wins in the category alongside Paul Simon and Bruno Mars. This would also solidify Eilish as the first woman to win this category three times and the first artist to win three times in the space of five years.
The 66th Grammy Awards will broadcast live on CBS and on-demand at Paramount+ at 8-11:30 p.m. Eastern time.
