Category: News

Yesterday saw the Recording Academy’s announcement of the nominees for the 2021 Grammys. The news brought about much controversy, mostly related to artists like The Weeknd who virtually everybody felt didn’t get the recognition they deserved. Now The Killers, whose new album Imploding The Mirage was released just before the end of the 2021 Grammy eligibility window, have jumped on the “we got snubbed” train with a hilarious tweet.

The band didn’t receive any Grammy nominations this time around, so their lifetime nomination count remains at five. They decided to respond to that news with a tweet poking fun at Donald Trump’s reluctance to accept the results of this year’s presidential election, which went in Joe Biden’s favor. Hitting caps lock and writing about Grammy conspiracies, the band tweeted, “OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS. WE WON THE GRAMMYS, GOT LOADS OF LEGAL VOTES. BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE. NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. DOZENS OF BALLOTS WERE SENT TO PEOPLE WHO NEVER ASKED FOR THEM! #RIGGEDGRAMMYS #WEWON.”

Had The Killers been nominated this year, they would have been looking for their first win, as they came up empty with their five previous nominations. It’s been a while since the band’s last nomination: “When You Were Young” was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video in 2006.

Find the (mostly) complete list of 2021 Grammy nominees here.

(Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in 2016. We republishing it today to commemorate Thanksgiving.)

The Last Waltz is a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese about a star-studded “retirement” show by The Band that occurred 40 years ago on Thanksgiving day in San Francisco. The co-stars are Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, and about another half-dozen rock stars from the ’60s and ’70s. Every year around this time, I try to watch The Last Waltz at least once, in the way that people watch A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life whenever mid-December rolls around. I’ve come to regard The Last Waltz — and I preface this by offering sincere apologies to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles — as the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever. That’s not simply because The Last Waltz takes place on the holiday, but also because this film embodies what’s wonderful, horrible, hilarious, and moving about one of this country’s most sacred annual traditions, and how many of us manage to survive it. Other films have used Thanksgiving as a backdrop. But to me, The Last Waltz is Thanksgiving.

Allow me to recount the plot of The Last Waltz: A dysfunctional family of five brothers has decided to stop living together. Before they split up, they invite a coterie of friends dressed in colorful suits and floppy hats over for a holiday celebration. Despite years of pent-up resentment — the brother with the amazing voice loathes the brother with the amazing haircut, whom he views as disloyal and undermining — all parties agree to put these tensions aside and put on a good face in front of the guests.

The guest list at this party is truly a mixed bag. There is a wise old man from Mississippi. There is a beautiful blonde poet from the Hollywood hills. There is a jive-talking hipster from New Orleans. There is a coked-up Canadian hippie. There is a portly, purple-suited Irishman who mistakenly believes that he knows karate. And then there’s the Jewish rock star for Minnesota who can’t decide if he really wants to be there.

Thus far, it sounds like I’m describing a Wes Anderson film. And, in some ways, I am — beneath the formalism of the filmmaking is a whole lot of messiness.

On the surface, the party is lavish — there are chandeliers on loan from Gone with the Wind (really!) and the lighting is bold and theatrical and there are famous writers reciting indecipherable passages from Chaucer. Beyond the pomp and circumstance, however, it’s like the bowery. Nearly everyone is sneaking away to get smashed on booze and smuggled chemicals — this is out of habit, but also because family reunions tend to be fraught with tension. It is the most certain of all inalienable truths. The trio of sweet, soft-spoken brothers know that the brother with the amazing haircut will be overbearing and arrogant, and that the brother with the amazing voice will make his stirring but problematic case sympathizing with Southerners who lost the Civil War. And the sweet, soft-spoken ones will once again be caught hopelessly in the middle. You feel for them. Weird politics and flawed family dynamics – who can’t relate to dreading these things at this time of the year?

And yet — in spite of the resentments, and the betrayals, and the intensifying intoxication — everyone is able to come together and conjure a feeling of community. When they gather around to tell old family stories that have been told and re-told umpteen times — like the one about Jack Ruby, or the one about shoplifting bologna and cigarettes — the brothers pretend to laugh whenever the overbearing brother takes over the conversation. (The upside of being on stage is that you can turn off his microphone.) After a while, the laughs seem less forced. They’re faking it so well that they start to feel actual community and love and understanding. This is what The Last Waltz, and Thanksgiving, is all about.

Earlier this month, Robbie Robertson put out a memoir, Testimony, that concludes not long after The Last Waltz. (Condolences to anyone hoping for an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of 2011’s How To Become Clairvoyant.) My feelings about Testimony are as conflicted as they are about Robertson — he’s a great artist and an insufferable person, and Testimony similarly is artfully rendered and often hard to stomach.

As is my custom with rock memoirs, I’ve been reading Testimony out of order, in order to get to the parts that most interest me. The Last Waltz is near the top of that list. Robertson was the chief engineer of The Last Waltz — he conceived the concert, brought on Scorsese, and acted as the film’s producer. Unsurprisingly, his view of the concert is sanitized and romanticized — he goes into deep (perhaps unnecessary) detail about the conception and planning of the concert, recounting every personnel hire and rehearsal. Of course, every move is confirmation of Robertson’s genius.

For people that have seen The Last Waltz as many times as I have, Testimony will be interesting be default. Because I am one of those nerds who is curious about any and all minutia related to this concert, including what Van Morrison was wearing before the show. (“A beige trench coat,” Robertson writes, clearly less exciting than the extravagant purple jumpsuit he wore on stage.) For anyone else, however, Robertson might seem ponderous. He heaps praise upon the performers, particularly Neil Diamond, who in Robertson’s estimation performed “Dry Your Eyes” (which Robertson co-wrote) “like a sermon out of Elmer Gentry.” Robertson even spends a paragraph describing the Japanese bath in his San Francisco hotel room.

As for the other guys in The Band… well, Robertson admits that they weren’t as into the film as he was, but “they didn’t have the cinematic passion that I did.” Hm … sounds a little fishy, Robbie.

At that point, I decided it was best to chase what I was reading in Testimony with some passages from Levon Helm’s scathing 1993 book This Wheel’s On Fire, a dishier and more overtly nasty book than Testimony.

(Notice that I said “overtly” — Robertson isn’t above score settling, he just does it in a more magnanimous tone. For instance, when describing a disastrous 1970 gig at the Hollywood Bowl, Robertson hints that Helm’s heroin addiction adversely affected The Band’s performance, though he later diffuses the accusation by adding that Helm himself admitted as much after the show. Why Robertson chose to write about a forgotten concert — and throw Helm under the bus 46 years later — is a mystery. Though, perhaps, it does explain why he waited until after Helm died to write a book.)

In Testimony, Robertson claims that when he brought up the idea of a retirement concert to the guys in The Band, “no one was opposed to the idea.” Even Helm “knew we couldn’t continue with out live shows.” If Robertson really believes that, then I suggest that he read This Wheel’s On Fire. Helm’s take on The Last Waltz is unequivocal: “I didn’t want any part of it,” he writes. “I didn’t want to break up the band.”

In Helm’s version of events, Robertson pressed Helm about the dangers of the road, and how it took the lives of everyone from Hank Williams Sr. to Jimi Hendrix. “Every time I get on the plane I’m thinking about this stuff,” Helm recalls Robertson saying. “The whole thing just isn’t healthy anymore.”

“I’m not in it for my health,” Helm replies. “I’m a musician, and I wanna live the way I do.” (This quote later inspired the title of the heart-rending 2013 documentary, Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film about Levon Helm.)

Helm claims he only went along with The Last Waltz because management made it seem that he had no choice — whether that’s really true or if it speaks to the same self-defeating fatalism that caused Helm and the rest of the Band to slowly cede control to Robertson, it’s hard to say. Like so many families, the Band was undone by money problems. Robertson was credited as the Band’s primary songwriter, a distinction that Helm felt put too fine a point on the group’s collaborative process. At one time, these men freely pooled their talents and personal experiences for the common good. While Robertson technically wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the song’s authenticity and soul came from Helm. But that partnership was over by the time of The Last Waltz.

In The Last Waltz, Robertson’s dark proclamations about “the road” form the narrative, while Helm’s contrasting view goes unacknowledged. This inevitably influenced Helm’s view of the film. When Helm finally saw The Last Waltz, he “was in shock over how bad the movie was,” he writes in This Wheel’s On Fire. Helm hated how many overdubs there were. (In Helm’s book, the Band’s producer John Simon claims that the only tracks that weren’t re-recorded were Helm’s vocals and drums.) Helm hated that Scorsese (whom he refers to, hilariously, as “the dummy”) didn’t shoot the dress rehearsal or any of the pre-show festivities orchestrated by concert promoter Bill Graham, which he felt were some of the best parts of the event.

Most of all, Helm despised Robertson’s “world-weary angst” about the life of touring musicians. In Helm’s view, this was like a gangster trying to leave the mafia. Ultimately, Helm felt that Robertson sold out his former comrades. “To me,” Helm concludes, “it was unforgivable.”

All of this stuff composes the poisonous subtext of The Last Waltz. Perhaps it’s easier to enjoy the movie if you aren’t aware of it. Or if you stick with Testimony and ignore This Wheel’s On Fire. But for me, the subtext actually deepens the experience of watching The Last Waltz.

I don’t think the movie would be as rich if it was simply about an old ’60s rock group that decided to hang it up. The tension between the joyous performances and the embittered back-stage reality is what gives The Last Waltz its emotional and spiritual power. If Helm really hated being there, then his ecstatic yodeling at the end of “Up On Cripple Creek” is all the more remarkable. If Rick Danko was already focused on his solo career — when Scorsese tries to interview him in The Last Waltz, Danko instead plays the luminous “Sip The Wine” from 1977’s Rick Danko — then his definitive performance of “It Makes No Difference” is that much more awe-inspiring. If Richard Manuel already seemed to be on his last legs, as both Robertson and Helm suggest in their books, the courageous grit he lends to “The Shape I’m In” is flat-out heroic.

(Garth Hudson is the only member of The Band I have not yet directly referenced. I am the one billionth person to make this mistake when talking about The Band, but only because he was seemingly unbothered by the humanoid craziness surrounding him in The Last Waltz. To quote Ronnie Hawkins, Hudson was werrrd, a musical genius living in his own solar system.)

Perhaps Helm’s point of view made it into The Last Waltz after all. No matter what Robertson says about the impossibility of road life, the rest of the guys refute by showing. These musicians are so devoted to their craft that they can perform masterfully, no matter the circumstances. They are weary men who find the wherewithal to transcend their weariness and approach grace.

This is what keeps me coming back to The Last Waltz every Thanksgiving. It affirms the faith in the power of ritual to heal — at least temporarily — whatever is awkward or unresolved or plain broken about your familial bonds. Sometimes, that belief is just enough to make things okay for a little while.

2019 saw the release of a pair of Ted Bundy movies on Netflix: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a biopic of sorts starring Zac Efron as Bundy, and Conversations With A Killler: The Ted Bundy Tapes, a four-part documentary about Bundy featuring interviews with the killer. Both were directed by Joe Berlinger, whose filmmaking bona fides are well established; not only did he direct the Paradise Lost documentaries that eventually led to the West Memphis Three being released from prison, he created the seminal portrayal of metal band dysfunction in Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster.

Berlinger’s Bundy movies ended up being less well-received. Perhaps because they were both based on the same impossible-to-reconcile paradox: that Ted Bundy seemed like an affable, caring guy to the people that knew him even as he was killing and raping women and keeping their heads as trophies on the sly. They gave us a Bundy’s whose inner workings would remain more or less forever opaque, which is undeniably disappointing even if it speaks to some higher truth. As Matt Zoller Seitz wrote at Vulture, The Bundy Tapes “treats Bundy as a horrifying void of a man whose true emotional interior remains just out of sight, a Kurtz hidden in moral and psychological gloom no matter how much light is cast by detectives, reporters, and childhood friends.”

I saw Extremely Wicked myself at Sundance and had similar thoughts. That Bundy could at least feign normalcy — the boy-next-door killer, more or less — is the gist of almost every story about him, from Wicked and the Bundy Tapes to memoirs by Bundy ex-live-in girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall (The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, upon which Extremely Wicked was based) and Bundy friend Ann Rule (The Stranger Beside Me). As Berlinger described it to the LA Times, “Bundy defied all stereotypes of what a serial killer was.”

Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, Crazy, Not Insane, which was just released on HBO, seems to challenge that assumption. (Note: spoilers to follow, if you believe that discussing something in a documentary counts as a spoiler).

The documentary is a profile of forensic psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who has spent her career studying serial killers to see what makes them tick. While Bundy himself and to some extent both of Berlinger’s Bundy movies perpetuated the notion that Bundy had a fairly normal childhood, Otnow, who throughout her career has attempted to identify and explore the then-controversial diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, describes something much different. Otnow, who conducted a four-hour interview with Bundy the day before his execution in 1989, initially found no neurological problems, just some “abnormalities seen in depressives.”

This is important considering the general thrust of Otnow’s career. According to Otnow, serial killers virtually always have observable neurological defects caused by childhood abuse or trauma. However, Otnow goes onto explain where her 1989 diagnosis was wrong, or at least, incomplete. Based on her interviews with family members, Bundy’s aunts described how Ted, at three years old, would come into their rooms and place kitchen knives around them under their bedcovers. She also relates a family history that included a Bundy grandmother who had received electro-shock treatment for depression, and interviews with Bundy’s mother, revealing that Bundy’s father (whose identity is still unknown) had taken her to an abortion doctor and given her pills that were supposed to result in an abortion — which didn’t work. Bundy’s mother initially tried to put the baby up for adoption, but ended up bringing him home again, where he was eventually raised to believe his grandfather was his father and his mother his older sister.

Bundy’s grandfather-father was, in turn, “a violent and disturbed man” with an extremely violent temper. Otnow also relates a story about Bundy telling her about a sexual encounter Bundy had had with his sister during childhood. The “smoking gun,” of sorts, is a box of letters delivered to Otnow by Bundy’s ex-wife years after his death, in which Otnow shows that Bundy would often sign his letters under different names, notably as “Sam,” the name of his own abusive grandfather. This last piece of evidence is Otnow’s justification for a belated diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.

That Otnow has spent her career trying to promulgate the central idea that “killers are made, not born” may suggest treating these revelations with a grain of salt, seeing as they do tend to confirm her biases. Yet it’s hard to watch Crazy, Not Insane and not feel like it’s filling some important blanks in last year’s Bundy movies.

Berlinger’s movies are studiously factual and focus, fairly, on the aspect of Bundy as a guy who you might come away from thinking he was a normal, caring person, even to many people who were close to him. Yet it’s missing the connective tissue between normal guy and psycho killer. Surely that paradox was part of what he was attempting to explore in the films, but it ends up feeling like he’d set up a big mystery and pointedly left it unsolved. Otnow’s analysis in Crazy, Not Insane, offers perhaps some false catharsis in that sense. It “solves” Bundy, to some degree, inviting us as viewers to think “Aha! I knew there was something really off about that guy who murdered 30 women and had sex with corpses!”

We surely wouldn’t have been able to know that just from meeting Ted Bundy, or maybe even knowing him fairly intimately. In that sense, Berlingers’ movies are more fair to Bundy’s surviving acquaintances, and don’t allow us to separate ourselves from Bundy acquaintances, as gullible or as victims, or from Bundy, as something different than the everyday human beings we interact with every day.

Yet it also seems slightly… off for The Ted Bundy Tapes to leave us only with Otnow’s 1989 diagnosis of Bundy. She appears briefly in the Ted Bundy Tapes, offering the anti-climactic new diagnosis of Bundy as a manic depressive, without any of the later information described in Crazy, Not Insane. At one point, the lawyer for Bundy’s last appeal says of Otnow, “she was extremely confident that there was something unique in Ted’s brain that had led to this.”

That’s the last we hear about Otnow in The Ted Bundy Tapes, naturally leading us to conclude that she was wrong and there was nothing unique in Ted’s brain. In his LA Times interview, Berlinger described deliberately leaving some new information out of The Bundy Tapes (without saying what it was) “that we decided not to use because it would be new to the public and that wouldn’t be fair.”

Yet wasn’t there something unique in Bundy’s brain? He may have been unique in his ability to pose as a normal, everyday fellow, even famously convincing the judge of it in the trial depicted in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile. But it seems just as important to note that Bundy wasn’t exactly a normal guy. At least as Otnow argues it, Bundy was an unwanted child raised in an incestual household by an abusive family who had once tried to abort him.

Maybe that’s reductive in some way. Maybe every generation has their own explanation for Ted Bundy, whether it’s pornography (as Bundy told James Dobson in the 80s), genetic psychopathy, or the trauma-induced DID Otnow alleges. We’ll have to come back to that one in 10 years. For now, Crazy, Not Insane feels like it completes a sketch that Extremely Wicked and The Ted Bundy Tapes started but left notably unfinished.

‘Crazy, Not Insane’ is available now via HBO. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Taylor Swift famously loves to hide Easter eggs in her music and promotional materials, and there was a big one in Folklore. Her Bon Iver collaboration, “Exile,” was co-written by the two artists, along with somebody named William Bowery. Swift fans speculated that the real identity of this mysterious songwriter was Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn, a theory that Swift has finally confirmed.

Swift’s new concert film, Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, premiered on Disney+ last night, and aside from the performances, it also includes conversations between Swift, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner. During one of those chats, Swift confirmed the identity of Bowery, saying, “There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity because it’s not a real person. […] So, William Bowery is Joe, as we know. And Joe… Joe plays piano beautifully, and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things.”

She continued, “It was a step that we would never have taken because why would we have ever written a song together? So this was the first time we had a conversation where I came in and I was like, ‘Hey, this could be really weird, and we could hate this, so because we’re in quarantine and there’s nothing else going on, could we just try to see what it’s like if we write this song together?’”

Swift also released audio from the film as a live album, so stream that below.

There’s a good chance Aubrey Plaza has appeared in one of your favorite movies or shows. There’s an even better chance that she’s one of the reasons why you love it so much. Since her Emmy-worthy deadpan performance as April on Parks and Recreation, Plaza has worked with Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and the Muppets (Muppets Now), hosted the Independent Spirit Awards twice, starred in Legion, voiced Eska on The Legend of Korra, and become the “new queen of indies,” thanks to Life After Beth, Ingrid Goes West, and the upcoming Black Bear, which looks very good. Also, Plaza voiced Grumpy Cat in the Lifetime original movie Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, and still has a career. That’s how much people like Aubrey Plaza, who’s finally getting the appreciation she deserves.

In director Clea DuVall’s queer romantic-comedy Happiest Season, Kristen Stewart plays Abby, who plans to propose to her girlfriend Harper (Halt and Catch Fire great Mackenzie Davis) until she learns that her partner hasn’t come out to her family. Also complicating matters is the presence of Harper’s ex-girlfriend Riley, played by Plaza. She’s been trending all morning on Twitter for her performance in the delightful Hulu movie, as she should. Plaza stands out even in a stacked cast with Stewart, Davis, Dan Levy, Alison Brie, Mary Holland, Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen.

It’s not Happiest Season — it’s Aubrey Plaza season.

When the Recording Academy releases its annual list of Grammy nominees (as it did yesterday), there’s always backlash. It felt particularly potent this year, though, since The Weeknd, who put out some of the most commercially and critically successful music of the year, was somehow completely absent from the nominations. He wasn’t the only superstar missing from the list, though, as Cardi B’s “WAP,” perhaps the biggest single of the year, isn’t up for any Grammys. There’s a good reason for that, however: Cardi didn’t actually submit the song for consideration, and now she has explained why.

Yesterday, she said in an Instagram Live video:

“Stop playing with me. Like I said, I’m never pressed for a Grammy, but y’all are not gonna take away something that I know that I worked my ass off that I deserve. If I was pressed for a Grammy. I would have submitted ‘WAP’ for this year, and I didn’t submit it. I didn’t submit it. I didn’t want to be submitted to award shows until I put out my album because I think my album is so good, and it just means something and I worked on it a lot. I’ve been working on it for almost two years. Some songs are so emotional to me because I did them during quarantine. I’m not pressed or nothing, but y’all not gonna keep doing this sh*t constantly, constantly because y’all are upset. Y’all cannot take my success.”

Find the complete (or rather, almost complete) list of 2021 Grammy nominees here.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Prior to September, the last time Saba shared solo work with the world was not too long after his 2018 album, Care For Me, with his “Where It’s At” single. Since then fans caught flashes of the Chicago native on the Pivot Gang crew’s debut album, You Can’t Sit With Us, He also joined Smino and Noname to create the Ghetto Sage trio. Finally, after the long wait, Saba made his return in September with a pair of singles — “Mrs. Whoever” and “Something In The Water” — and two months later he’s back with two more singles, “So And So” and “Areyoudown? Pt. 2.”

The latter single is an energetic effort that comes attached with a guest appearance from Tobi Lou, who is also native to Chicago. On the other hand, “So And So” is a much more relaxed release that comes attached with a video that finds Saba wandering through a group of makeshift clotheslines filled with vibrant fabrics. Along with the video, the rapper revealed that a conversation between friends helped inspire the song.

“I was talking with some friends recently, and we were talking about vulnerability,” he said in the description of the YouTube video. “My idea or explanation of it immediately went to dealing with adversity and sharing that experience of overcoming it. Everybody kind of came to that conclusion for it. And another friend brought up the fact that sharing joy and sharing happiness is also vulnerable.”

You can watch Saba’s video for “So And So” above.

What remains of the Trump team has found itself in an unusual position: They’ve begun the process of formally handing the presidential reins to Joe Biden, but they’re also still trying to sell their boss as a strong man battling non-existent voter fraud. The day after Trump gave formally obscure bureaucrat Emily Murphy the blessing to start the transition process, he was back to acting like an unhinged weirdo. Ditto one of the major figures on his shrinking legal team — former critic Jenna Ellis — tried to make him look tougher than he is. And it didn’t go so hot.

On Tuesday night, Ellis took to Twitter, posting an image of Trump leaning on his Oval Office desk, looking down at a camera perched at a low-angle, trying to make him look huge and strong. Above it ran a simple, all-caps caption: “WARRIOR.”

It was a slam-dunk bid to Trump’s base, who continue to see him as a powerful leader and not, let’s say, a whiny narcissist who’s been acting like a spoiled child who can’t accept a clear defeat. While there were a number of hosannas from stalwart fans, this was social media, so there were a number of people who, shall we say, disagreed with the premise of Ellis’ tweet.

Many took umbrage with calling someone who used “bone spurs” as an excuse not to fight in the Vietnam War.

Others pointed out what Trump has reportedly said about soldiers, from those who were been captured, like John McCain, to those who died for their nation.

And some pointed out that Ellis was once upon a time, well, not a Trump fan.

The Weeknd opted against holding his tongue on Tuesday night and shared a post to Twitter where he called the Grammy awards “corrupt.” His accusation came after he failed to receive a single nomination in any category for the 2021 Grammys. His tweet also came shortly after TMZ reported that the singer did not get nominated at the award show because he insisted on performing at both the Grammys and the Super Bowl. Hours after The Weeknd’s tweet, The Recording Academy’s interim president/CEO Harvey Mason Jr. put out a statement that Variety shared where he denies The Weeknd’s claims and says he was also “surprised” that the Canadian singer was not nominated.

Congratulations to today’s Grammy nominees, who have earned their peers’ recognition for their incredible work. There were a record number of submissions in this unusual and competitive year. We understand that The Weeknd is disappointed at not being nominated. I was surprised and can empathize with what he’s feeling. His music this year was excellent, and his contributions to the music community and broader world are worthy of everyone’s admiration. We were thrilled when we found out he would be performing at the upcoming Super Bowl and we would have loved to have him also perform on the Grammy stage the weekend before.

Unfortunately, every year, there are fewer nominations than the number of deserving artists. But as the only peer-voted music award, we will continue to recognize and celebrate excellence in music while shining a light on the many amazing artists that make up our global community. 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.

All Grammy nominees are recognized by the voting body for their excellence, and we congratulate them all.

This is Mason Jr.’s second statement since the Grammy nominations were revealed. Earlier on Tuesday, he addressed some of the biggest snubs from the award show. “The Grammys have shifted in terms of what they value,” he said in his first statement. “Now they seem to value championing newer and less well-known artists over reinforcing things that have already been rewarded in the marketplace.”

(via Variety)

The Grammy Awards have been a heated topic of conversation all day, and it even saw a pair of rappers engage in a quick back and forth on Twitter. After Wiz responded to a Twitter user’s comment about Cardi B winning a Grammy before Nicki did, some fans condemned Wiz for pitting the two female rappers against each other. “Cardi wining a Grammy when nicki minaj didn’t is the biggest proof that they don’t know a shit bout music,” the fan said. Wiz replied, “Most self made artists have this problem.” And this caused a big response from Cardi and her fans, but the Pittsburgh native quickly returned to clear things up.

Cardi responded to Wiz tweet saying, “This was N****s in my dms in 2016! They really support you when you grinding at the bottom then it’s a different story when you make it !” Wiz kept things peaceful while looking to clear things up. “Damn that wuz good advice. I still support u,” he replied. “Nothings changed. Your self made in my book as well.” Eventually Khalifa attempted to prevent the situation from worsening, tweeting, “I just don’t want a Cardi/ Wiz war goin on for no reason.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.