Massively Popular Musicians The Grammys Snubbed

The Recording Industry Association of America's annual awards for achievement in music, the Grammy Awards, have been around for quite some time. How long, one might ask? Well, "Grammy" is short for "Gramophone," so ... that long. For decades, the awards have been doled out during star-studded ceremonies, recognizing excellence in performing, recording, songwriting, and even such things as liner notes, music videos, and film scores. The hallowed institution, presided over by folks who are supremely dedicated to the artistic integrity of the music business, is famously dead-on with its nominations and awards year after year, having offered up nary a divisive decision in its long history.

The preceding sentence, of course, is one big, fat, honking lie. As it turns out, music fans and critics are just a wee bit opinionated, and the decisions of Grammy voters often seem to be based on something other than artistic merit — money, perhaps, or maybe greenbacks, or moolah. Whatever the case may be, the Grammys get it blatantly, offensively wrong early and often — and while it would be impossible for virtually any single nomination or award to please everybody, there sure seem to be a lot of times when they are specifically calibrated to please nobody, up to and including the artists receiving them. These are some of those times.

Along with contemporaries like KRS-One and X-Clan, Public Enemy were among the first to hang their hats (and in the case of hype man Flavor Flav, clocks) on the mantle of "conscious rap," which used to be a thing that existed. The band were calling out institutionalized racism, drug policies disproportionately targeting people of color, and other social ills long before it was cool — and their message, delivered in frontman Chuck D's booming baritone over the cacophonous, blistering audio collages of production team The Bomb Squad — resonated with listeners of all colors and backgrounds. Between 1988 and 1991, Public Enemy dropped three platinum albums, and at the 32nd Grammy Awards, held in 1990, their landmark single "Fight the Power," which appeared on the soundtrack to Spike Lee's classic film "Do the Right Thing," was up for a statue for Best Rap Performance.

The other nominees in the category, with the possible exception of De La Soul's "Me, Myself, and I," were of the more poppy variety — and "Bust a Move" by Young MC, a classic if undeniably lightweight tune, ended up lifting the Grammy right out from under "Fight the Power." Unfortunately, Public Enemy's loss foreshadowed the fate of "Do the Right Thing" — a masterful, incendiary picture that in 1990 would fail to garner a Best Picture Oscar nod. The statue went to "Driving Miss Daisy," a non-masterful, non-incendiary, shamefully whitewashed portrait of race relations in the Jim Crow era.

When discussing the British Invasion of the mid-to-late '60s, there are, of course, two bands that fans and critics wax poetic about — the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Which is fine — hey, they deserve it — but no discussion of wildly inventive British rock groups sporting genius songwriters is complete without mention of the Kinks, one of the coolest, quirkiest, flat-out greatest bands ever. Driven by the talents of the Davies brothers, lead singer and songwriter Ray and lead guitarist Dave, the Kinks are deserving of all the accolades; they've sold 50 million records, helped to invent hard rock by way of the fuzziest guitar yet recorded on their landmark 1964 single "You Really Got Me," and are first-ballot inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What they are not, though, are Grammy winners. Check that: Grammy nominees.

That's right — one of the top-selling, most influential, most wildly innovative, and creative bands of all time has never garnered so much as a single Grammy nomination. In 1999, "You Really Got Me" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, a kind of consolation prize for songs and artists that should have been awarded boatloads of statues, but were not. In 2016, Ray Davies received an even better consolation prize: he was awarded a knighthood by the Queen of England, who knew a ripping good band when she heard one.

Iconic British band Queen only scored four Grammy nominations in their storied career, winning none — but it's the details of their first two nods, and subsequent losses, that should make any music aficionado's blood boil. First, let's state the obvious: Frontman Freddie Mercury is widely considered to be among the greatest vocalists of all time, and Queen's 1975 single "Bohemian Rhapsody," which Mercury wrote and is probably his magnum opus, features one of his most brilliantly nuanced performances. The song was fittingly nominated at the 19th Grammy Awards in 1977 in two categories: Best Pop Vocal Performance and Best Arrangement for Voices. As detailed in "Queen: The Early Years" by Mark Hodkinson, the song's more elaborate passages required up to 180 overdubs, with the band recording and re-recording vocals for hours on end, day after day, for three weeks. It was perhaps the most ambitious vocal arrangement in all of rock at the time — and it lost the Grammy to "Afternoon Delight" by Starland Vocal Band.

To add insult to injury, Mercury's stellar lead vocal wasn't enough to score the Grammy over the maudlin, sappy performance of Chicago vocalist Peter Cetera on their hit single "If You Leave Me Now." Queen would be twice-nominated again a few years later, for Hard Rock Performance for "Another One Bites the Dust" and for Producer of the Year — losing to "Against the Wind" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, and Billy Joel producer Phil Ramone, respectively.

One could easily make the case that legendary trio Nirvana is among the most influential bands of all time. They didn't single-handedly steer hard rock away from hair metal and power ballads; they had some help from their peers in bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. But if you were old enough to understand anything in 1991, then you immediately understood upon hearing their single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time that everything had changed. Its sound, its attitude, its sonic palette; everything about it was nothing like anything else on the radio at the time, and the album that birthed it, "Nevermind," was similarly an atomic bomb on the landscape of popular music. Fittingly, "Nevermind" received a Grammy nod at the 34th awards in 1992 — but not-so-fittingly, it was nominated only in the "Best Alternative Album" category, and not for the more prestigious Best Rock Album award. Even less fittingly, it lost — albeit to "Out of Time" by R.E.M., a mega-selling album with significant, if not quite comparable, cultural reach.

The following year, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was nominated twice, in the Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Rock Song categories — losing to "Give It Away" by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eric Clapton's acoustic version of the Derek and the Dominos classic "Layla," respectively. Nirvana would go on to be nominated three more times, winning only once — in the "Best Alternative Music Performance" category for their "MTV Unplugged" appearance. The win came at the 38th awards in 1996, nearly two years after frontman Kurt Cobain's death.

Legendary rock band Radiohead and ridiculously talented rapper Eminem may seem like a bit of an odd couple, but they have at least two things in common. First, in 2000, they both dropped albums that constituted radical artistic statements, and redefined what could be done in their respective genres: Radiohead's "Kid A" and Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP." Second, both of those albums were nominated for, and lost, the Album of the Year award at the 43rd Grammys in 2001, to an absolutely shocking competitor: "Two Against Nature," the comeback album by veteran classic rockers Steely Dan.

To be fair, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (pictured above), the only two consistent members of Steely Dan over the years, are unfairly talented musicians and songwriters who have contributed tons of classic songs to the annals of rock, not to mention at least a couple of rock's all-time great albums in 1977's "Aja" and 1980's "Gaucho." But "Two Against Nature" was simply a decent album — far from being their greatest work, and little-remembered today. Radiohead and Eminem have both won their fair share of Grammys — but in 2001, they both got robbed.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, anchored by the songwriting, vocal, and guitar talents of frontman John Fogerty, is one of those bands that seem to get overlooked in those "greatest of all time" discussions, which frankly is a crime. Ask any classic rock fan to name one of their tunes, and they'll probably automatically return "Proud Mary." Then, they'll think about it for a minute, and start rattling off a whole freaking laundry list of classic songs: "Bad Moon Rising," "Down On the Corner," "Fortunate Son," "Up Around the Bend," "Who'll Stop the Rain," — one could do this all day. The band is a national treasure, having sold over 28 million records and earned an induction into the Rock Hall of Fame. They were never nominated for a single lousy Grammy.

As if to set this right, Fogerty went on to earn eight nominations as a solo artist, even finally winning one at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998 in the Best Rock Album category, for his LP "Blue Moon Swamp." Of course, one might reasonably argue that nobody really remembers that record, and that there may have been other nominees — including U2's uneven but ambitious "Pop" and "The Colour and the Shape," the sophomore effort from Foo Fighters — who were slightly more deserving. After getting snubbed for his brilliant work for decades, though, one could make just as strong a case that Fogerty deserved to be on the other end of the snubbing for once.