CLEVELAND, Ohio – With the rise in streaming and digital downloads, Song of the Year and Record of the Year have come on strong at the annual Grammy Awards.
Still, Album of the Year remains the ceremony’s biggest award, eluding some of the greatest artists in music history. This year’s nominees for Album of the Year include Adele, Beyonce, Justin Bieber and Sturgill Simpson.
Album of the Year
- Adele – “25”
- Beyonce – “Lemonade”
- Drake – “Views”
- Justin Bieber – “Purpose”
- Sturgill Simpson – “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth”
But if you’re to award the album that represents the current state of music the most, Drake’s “Views” will walk away with the honor. If only that were the way things go.
Why it could win: The resume for “Views” is quite impressive. It was the top album of 2016 by a pretty wide margin, having broken just about every streaming record possible. The numbers are skewed, thanks to the way Billboard now counts “stream-equivalent sales” totals. Still, the modern computing puts Drake’s “Views” in the same rarified air as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” as blasphemous as that sounds.
More than any other album nominated, “Views” represents how we as a society consume music. It’s a streaming juggernaut built on big singles that mimic popular sounds, proven to get stuck in your head. Drake knows what he’s doing and has constructed an album that’s more 2016/2017 than anything else you could think of.
Why it won’t win: Sales actually don’t matter all that much when it comes to Album of the Year. For every Taylor Swift or Adele victory, there’s someone like Beck or Arcade Fire coming away with win. Drake also has to face the fact that only two hip-hop albums have ever won Album of the Year and they were seminal works from Lauryn Hill and Outkast.
Working against Drake the most is that “Views” may just be his worst (or least great) album. Subject matter wise, it’s a big downer with at least a few tracks that could be considered filler. What might be even harder to swallow for Drizzy is that, from a quality standpoint, “Views” is at the bottom of the heap of this year’s nominees. Though, again, that doesn’t make a win impossible.
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