A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .

GRAMMYS 2021: the artists and albums that were left in the cold.

I have already published an article last night that addressed the rampant unfairness and rather foolhardiness of the nominations that had absolutely no regard for 'real music'. Music that meant so much in terms of songwriting and experimentation, aesthetics and overall outreach was left in the cold and that too at a juncture in our culture where we thought that previous oversights would be rectified and meritocracy will spring back to action.

Here, I share the artists, songs and albums that were treated unjustly by the behemoth we know as Recording Academy. In my honest opinion, they all deserved nominations at the very least as a mark of due acknowledgement for them and their overall teams' contributions.

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Some of the glaring snubs/ omissions were reserved for the Best Pop Solo Performance, a category that has over the years awarded and initially nominated works with no real merit whatsoever in that field. I was aghast hence when ANYONE by Demi Lovato, which began its emotional spell on us with a live rendition at the 2020 ceremony itself, did not find favour, given the studio cut was flawless and detailed the singer's brush with loneliness and a near death experience. She laid her soul bare, quite literally and it clenched ours, in turn. With just a spare piano as accompaniment, ANYONE exemplifies a solo performance and Demi is an extremely beloved artist so how it fell off the 'voters' radar, in the manner it did, is baffling and excruciatingly unjust.

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THE LUMINEERS' 3

The Lumineers' members have been collectively nominated as Best New Artist and for their breakout hit HO HEY but I believe their true artistic melifluence as an unit reached peaks on CLEOPATRA which went unnoticed by the Grammys and now their third album was again snubbed completely, given that it continued its streak of poetic lyrics and melodic whole plus Wesley Schultz's vocal beauty merited nods for songs like DONNA, JIMMY SPARKS, MY CELL and the sombre and poignant SALT AND THE SEA. They could have merited an ALBUM OF THE YEAR, VOCAL ALBUM, BEST GROUP/DUO PERFORMANCE nods for any of the above songs and the album as an entity in itself. Neglecting them is absolutely unnecessary. I am mourning their no show. I understand that they will be thought of as an alternative act or folksy to mainstream voters. Hence, it's high time they recognized music without pigeonholing categories through the prism of pre-conceived notions.

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BLOWBACK, LAND OF THE FREE by THE KILLERS