Twitter temper tantrums are all the rage as A-listers become social media crybabies after being denied a nod on “music’s biggest night.”
Grumbles and snide remarks from top musicians have dominated digital spaces in the weeks leading up to the 2023 Grammys, airing live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, Feb. 5.
Annually, celebs who’ve been snubbed by the Recording Academy — such as The Weeknd, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and Halsey, to name a few — have publicly blasted the awards show, alleging that it’s “corrupt,” sexist and biased for “the white man.”
Not shy about expressing his ill-will towards the Grammys, The Weeknd has opted to boycott the ceremony for a second time in 2023. The Canadian crooner’s fellow countryman, rapper Drake, will also reportedly be absent during Sunday’s celebration as he has, too, declined the invitation.
And, in a shocking twist, soul duo Silk Sonic — Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak — withdrew their trending anthology, “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” for Album of the Year consideration in October sans explanation.
“We truly put our all on this record, but Silk Sonic would like to gracefully, humbly and most importantly, sexually, bow out of submitting our album this year,” Mars said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “We hope we can celebrate with everyone on a great year of music and partake in the party. Thank you for letting Silk Sonic thrive.”
Here’s a list of chart-topping celebs who have cried the blues about being overlooked for the Grammys gold. Should The Weekend and company save their cyber tears — or do they have good reasons to cry foul?
Zayn Malik
“F—k the grammys and everyone associated,” Malik, 30, raged on Twitter in 2021. “Unless you shake hands and send gifts, there’s no nomination considerations. Next year I’ll send you a basket of confectionary.”
The One Direction singer’s foul-mouthed rant came four months after the Recording Academy released its list of 2021 hopefuls.
Malik, who’s never been nominated for a Grammy, dropped his third solo album, “Nobody Is Listening,” in January. However, the Recording Academy declared his 11-track project wasn’t considered for Grammys shine because it was released after this year’s eligibility period of Oct. 1, 2019 through Aug. 31, 2020.
The Weeknd
The “Starboy” was seeing “Blinding Lights” when none of his top-charting work from the album “After Hours” received Recording Academy acclaim during November’s nominee announcement.
“The Grammys remain corrupt. You owe me, my fans and the industry transparency…” The Weeknd, 32, cried through his keyboard just moments after the 2021 noms were revealed.
The three-time Grammy winner echoed his displeasure with the voting committee by likening the snub to a “sucker punch,” and saying “forget awards shows,” during an interview with Billboard.
However, three days before the Grammys 2021 broadcast The Weeknd really went in: “Because of the secret committees, I will no longer allow my label to submit my music to the Grammys,” the “Save Your Tears” singer said in a statement to the New York Times Thursday.
Recording Academy chair and interim president/CEO Harvey Mason Jr. denied those claims, saying in a statement to Rolling Stone: “Unfortunately, every year, there are fewer nominations than the number of deserving artists … To be clear, voting in all categories ended well before The Weeknd’s performance at the Super Bowl was announced, so in no way could it have affected the nomination process.”
As for The Weeknd’s decision to boycott the show from here on, “We’re all disappointed when anyone is upset,” Mason Jr. said in his statement.
Halsey
Halsey, 28, huffed and puffed and blew “bribes” shade the Recording Academy’s way back in 2019 when her “Manic” masterpiece failed to garner any awards show honors.
“The Grammys are an elusive process,” the “You Should Be Sad” songstress lamented in a lengthy Instagram Story.
“It can often be about behind the scenes private performances, knowing the right people, campaigning through the grapevine, with the right handshakes and ‘bribes’ that can be just ambiguous enough to pass as ‘not-bribes.’”
Reps for the Recording Academy did not respond to The Posts requests for comment on on Halsey’s accusations.
Meanwhile, the “Graveyard” singer went on to shade the awards franchise while picking up her 2019 AMA statuette — and later blasted the Grammys for excluding her certified-platinum ballad “Without Me,” from the 2020 noms list.
Justin Bieber
Bieber couldn’t belieb it when his platinum-selling anthology “Changes” earned a nod for Best Pop Vocal Album rather than Best R&B album.
“Changes was and is an R&B album,” the 28-year-old Canadian vocalist whined on Instagram after receiving his four nominations for the 2021 ceremonies. “It is not being acknowledged as an R&B album which is very strange to me.”
While “flattered” by the Recording Academy’s acknowledgment, Bieber continued: “For this not to be put into that category feels weird considering from the chords to the melodies to the vocal style all the way down to the hip hop drums that were chosen it is undeniably, unmistakably an R&B Album!”
The Biebs was apparently so perturbed by his album’s misclassification that he ultimately chose to boycott the awards show all together.
Nicki Minaj
No stranger to whistle-blowing the Recording Academy, Minaj, 40, made a commotion on Twitter in October 2022 after learning that her hit “Super Freaky Girl” had been moved from the “Best Rap Song” category and relegated to the “Best Pop Song” list.
“I have no prob being moved out the RAP category as long as we r ALL being treated FAIRLY,” Minaj wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “If SFG (‘Super Freaky Girl’) has 2B moved out RAP then so does “Big Energy!,” the Queens native added, referring to newcomer Latto’s chart-topper. “ANY1 who says diff is simply a Nicki hater or a troll.”
On Instagram, Minaj then shared a 17-minute rant against the Grammys saying, in part: “If you can’t tell by now that there is a concerted effort to give newer artists things that they really don’t deserve over people who have been deserving for many years, then you’re not paying attention….They don’t want the people that they have in the industry to go up against me.”
In the past, the “Anaconda” raptress has bashed the awards show for repeatedly overlooking her when it came time to hand out one of its coveted trophies.
Kanye West
How pissed off does one have to be to urinate on a Grammy? Apparently, very.
Amid his 2020 presidential campaign, West, 45, took aim at the Recording Academy in one of his most infamous digital rants. After plunging one of his 21 Grammys into a toilet, the Chicago native showered the trophy in pee and shared an image of the act on Twitter in September.
LL Cool J called out West for disrespecting his Grammys, advising that he “Piss in a Yeezy” instead.
The “Stronger” emcee’s since-deleted liquid rebuke of the awards came amidst a mélange of tweets bashing the music industry for subjecting black artists to unfair treatment.
Reps for the Recording Academy did not respond to The Posts requests for comment on Minaj and West’s claims of racial inequity in the nomination process and industry as a whole.
The real tear-jerker
Twitter fits from scorned singers notwithstanding, researchers are calling out the fact that women make up less than 3 percent of all music producers and engineers — despite the Recording Academy’s major push for gender equality in the industry.
“Women were 2.6% of producers overall across 600 songs,” according to the authors of a recent study from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Their findings were spelled out in tweets published by the Initiative’s verified Twitter account in 2021.
The Recording Academy launched its Women in the Mix Pledge in 2019 as an effort to welcome more lady music masters in the studio. The call to action rallied artists, label executives and other producers to consider at least two women in the hiring process of making any song.
However, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the Academy’s efforts failed to generate a single charting song produced by a woman in 2020.
However, the Recording Academy has started to close the gender gap when it comes to issuing nods to women in the top 5 categories: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist and Producer of the Year.
But the study noted that out of all the nominees up for the highly coveted accolades over the last nine years, only 13.4 percent were women.
Some might consider that a crying shame.
