The Grammy Awards nominations for 2022 were released last night, and many people were surprised that Wizkid’s huge hit, Essence, did not receive a nomination in the Record of the Year category.
Harvey Mason, the Grammy CEO, was recently asked why Essence was not nominated for a Record of the Year award in a recent interview with Billboard. Billboard published the interview on Wednesday, November 24th, 2021.
For the first time in 27 years, the Grammy nominees are determined solely by the voting members of the Grammy committee, with no input from the review committee.
When asked if he was confident of the voting committee’s ability to deliver without supervision, the Grammy CEO said;
“I wasn’t nervous. I felt like we’d done a lot of important work on our membership. We’ve done a lot of outreach into different communities that we felt were maybe underrepresented in our voting membership. … So I felt like the timing was right for our membership to be able to directly decide who the nominees were. That’s why we felt good with removing the nominations review committees at the time that we did it.”
When asked why Wizkid’s Essence did not make the cut for the Record of the Year award, the Grammy boss told Billboard;
“It is a great record. He’s a very talented artist. I can’t speak to why it didn’t make it, but I do really love the record.”
Glamsquad Magazine recalls that Wizkid grabbed two nominations last night for Best Global Music Album and Best Global Music Performance. However, many people believe that his smash hit song, Essence should have made the Record of the Year category.