When Beyoncé scored nine Grammy nominations yesterday, she continued to uphold her title as the most Grammy-nominated woman in history, but she also broke another record. According to Bill Freimuth, official Head of Awards at the Grammys, she became the first artist to score nominations across four different genres in the same year.
Beyoncé's diverse nominations include: Best Pop Solo Performance (for "Hold Up"); Best Rock Performance (for "Don't Hurt Yourself" feat. Jack White); Best Urban Contemporary Album (for Lemonade); and Best Rap-Sung Performance (for "Freedom" feat. Kendrick Lamar). In an interview with Complex, Freimuth explained how the singer's nods in that many genres are totally unprecedented. He told the site:
"This is actually the first time that's it's happened all in the same year. You've had other artists in the past, say Michael Jackson maybe, who have been nominated in that many different fields, but not in the same year and on the same album. This is a first timer for us and personally I think it's appropriate and pretty cool."
Of the four categories, Best Rock Performance might come as the most surprising, since Bey has often been linked to pop, hip-hop and R&B. But her song "Don't Hurt Yourself," in which she collaborated with rock favorite Jack White, was different. Her team submitted it to be considered for the rock category, and it went through a sorting committee of experts on the genre, Freimuth said. (There are 24 sorting committees overall.)
"Lots of moves are made by those committees and sometimes where an artist thinks they should be, or where a label thinks they should be, doesn't necessarily match up with our definitions of a particular genre. But in this case it did," he added. "The committee listened to it and said, 'Yeah, that's rock.'"
Beyoncé's other genre-jumping track, the country-inspired "Daddy Lessons," wasn't nominated for a Grammy, but she did bring it to the Country Music Awards earlier this year. Watch the performance below.
