This year, we saw many established pop artists releasing new music. Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Beyonce, and Ariana Grande all had new records this year, along with an extreme surge in electropop music following the release of Charli XCX’s BRAT. According to the New Yorker, 2024 was a “pop girly summer”– but what does this mean for the 2024 Grammys?
Newer artists also rose to fame this year, including drag queen and pop star Chappell Roan. According to Rolling Stone, 2024 was “her year.” Roan was nominated for Best New Artist, along with Sabrina Carpenter, Doechii, RAYE, and more.
Roan deserves to have been nominated for this award. Despite recent controversies over her refusing to take photos with fans and calling her role as a popstar “just a job,” she has shown immense songwriting talent as well as the ability to amass an even cult-like following. Also, her music is fun and people enjoy listening to it! The rising popularity of the female pop artists who I mentioned this summer not only influenced Spotify statistics. In summer of 2024, we saw an acceptance of fun, bright, vulnerable, and traditionally feminine trends and attitudes, contrasting the previous expectation of women to be edgy, calm, cool, and collected in order to be deserving of respect. The women behind this culture shift absolutely deserve recognition at the Grammys this season. We are in an age where streaming services are free to be used by anyone, social gatherings and parties more often than not include listening to music, and concert attendance has become, at least in more affluent areas like Hastings, an activity that people do with their friends. The music industry is pop culture, and the people being commended for their contributions to it should be artists like Chapell Roan or Billie Eilish, who facilitated the passionate and unapologetically female summer of 2024.
However, I do believe that some artists were snubbed. Singer-songwriter Hozier, despite having a new, lyrically beautiful album in 2023 and a Number 1 Billboard Top 100 song in 2024, has not gotten nominated for a Grammy since 2015. Similarly, artist Zach Bryan never got nominated for his 2024 album, The Great American Bar Scene, which I think is a major oversight. Despite being entirely different in genre, both Bryan and Hozier have some of the most lyrically beautiful songs, exploring themes of family loss, American culture, Irish culture, and love, in the 2023-2024 cycle.
Some “Grammy snubs,” however, are also due to artists not submitting their own work for awards, such as Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), who stopped submitting his music in 2021. This, I believe, has something to do with how self-promotion in a creative field can be deemed as “selling out.”
For the 2026 Grammy cycle, I hope to see a wave of some newer artists but also artists who have been creating for a long time and still deserve recognition for their work.