Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, or famously known as The Weeknd has had a very successful career so far as a Canadian singer and producer. With 65 million monthly listeners on Spotify, 3 studio albums and his fourth released this year called After Hours. The lead single for the album Blinding Lights was released 3 months before the album and gained an impressive 1.7 billion streams on Spotify as of writing this article.
With 3 awards and 10 nominations, The Weeknd has been very well noticed by the Grammy Awards for his past projects. Despite releasing arguably one of his best and most successful albums this year, he wasn’t even invited to the award show, why was this? Tesfaye later tweeted, “The Grammys remain corrupt. You owe me, my fans and the industry transparency”. This has also caught the attention of other well-known artists such as Drake and Elton John, they have also spoken up on the controversy and in support of The Weeknd. Elton even stated that he thinks the lead single Blinding Lights was the song of the year.
The Interim President of the Recording Academy, who hosts the Grammy Awards, Harvey Mason Jr. claimed that the process of nominating an artist for the awards is fair but complicated and then proceeds to deny any corruption involved. He then says he “feels good” about this year’s nominees and that he doesn’t remember the last time they got 23,000 different entries, which could have affected The Weeknd’s chances of being nominated.
A The Weeknd fan, Daniel Aniks who is a grade 11 student at Riverside had some thoughts on the situation. He stated, “The fact that he didn’t even get nominated shows that the panel of judges don’t have a clue what they’re doing”. Aniks then added that it’s not surprising since they have a history of making bad picks.
Do you think that The Weeknd deserved to be nominated for the 2020 Grammy Awards? Or do you believe that there are many other artists that deserved it more than him.