Queen at the disco – Newspaper Kommersant No. 213 (7414) dated 11/17/2022

The Recording Academy has announced the names of the Grammy nominees. The 65th American Music Awards will take place on February 5 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The award was nominated for works published between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022. Tells Boris Barabanov.

Beyoncé Knowles is the top nominee this time around. Last summer, she released her first studio album in six years, Renaissance. Beyoncé is represented in nine categories. At the moment, in terms of the number of Grammys won in her entire career (28), she is the leader among all nominees in history. In terms of the number of awards, she also surpasses her husband Jay-Z (24). In the current race for prizes, Jay-Z claims five Grammys.

It only takes Beyoncé to win four out of nine nominations to become the most Grammy-winning artist in history. Now such is the conductor Georg Solti.

Among other things, Beyonce claims awards in electronic categories – “Best Dance/Electronic Recording” and “Best Dance/Electronic Album”. The world of dance electronics is huge and diverse, and it is from there that a new sound and young producers with out-of-the-box thinking come to pop music. By giving places on the lists of nominees in this category to Beyonce, the academics reduced the chances of less famous, but more relevant artists. Clearly, the industry believes that Queen B must reaffirm and reinforce her status by any means necessary.

However, in these nominations she has worthy competitors – Diplo, Odesza, British producer Bonobo and Frenchman David Guetta. The latter received a nomination for the song “I`m Good (Blue)”, recorded together with American singer Bebe Rexha.

“I`m Good (Blue)” is a reworking of Eiffel 65’s 1998 hit “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”. Moreover, the track uses not just a sample, but the entire melodic line. An interesting story is the co-author of “I`m Good (Blue)” – a longtime creative partner of David Guetta, the owner of the Abletunes platform Timofey Reznikov. He was born in Saratov, trained as a jazz trumpeter, then moved to Belgium, entered the Royal de Mons Conservatory and studied piano and electronic music, and subsequently worked as a producer on tracks by Dimitri Vegas and Gucci Maine.

That is, Beyoncé in the nomination “Best Dance / Electronic Recording” is opposed by a team of a French DJ, a singer of Albanian origin from Brooklyn and a Saratov trumpeter who covered an Italian hit from the Disco of the 90s category.

Of course, I would like to wish them good luck.

Another Russian name on the list of contenders for the Grammy is Daniil Trifonov. The Nizhny Novgorod pianist was nominated in the nomination “Best Classical Instrumental Solo Recording” for the album “Bach: The Art Of Life”. This is a double album released in 2021 by Deutsche Grammophon: Russian artists get into the Grammy nominations almost only if their recordings are released by major foreign record companies. In 2019 the magazine Forbes included Daniil Trifonov in the rating of the most promising Russian professionals under 30, and The Guardian called his technique “even frightening”.

In any case, Trifonov already has one Grammy: he received an award in 2018 for the album with the works of Franz Liszt “Transcendental” (see interview with the musician in “Kommersant” dated September 26, 2018).

One could say that the list of Grammy nominees for Trifonov is a familiar context. However, the presence of a Russian name on this list in 2022 is still not the most expected event.

Especially if you believe the stories about the wildest cancellation culture that is used in the West in relation to our cultural figures.

It should also be noted that Tanya Muinho, a music video maker from Odessa, was nominated in the Best Music Video nomination. She is well known to music lovers around the world, including music videos for Born Anusi, Monatik, Time and Glass and IOWA, as well as Lil Nas X, Cardi B, Lizzo and Post Malone. She is nominated for a Grammy with a video for the song “As It Was” by Harry Styles. This is Tanya Muinho’s second nomination in a row. Last year, she was nominated for Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” video.

The overall statistics of the leaders in terms of the number of Grammy nominations this year looks like this. The leader is Beyoncé with nine nominations. With eight nominations for Kendrick Lamar, seven for Adele, she is the only one who competes with Beyoncé in the “top four” nominations – “Album of the Year”, “Record of the Year” and “Song of the Year”. Country singer Brandy Carlyle also received seven nominations. She is followed with six nominations by Harry Styles, whose song “As It Was” became a TikTok hit this year. Six nominations each from Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled, The-Dream and studio engineer Randy Merrill. In the visual arts category, Encanto is sure to be a success. They have three out of four nominations in these categories, although many must have been disappointed that the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” did not make it to the main nominations. But this is only because there are no children among the academicians.