2022 Nominations: Why Wizkid and Tems’ Essence did not make ‘Record of The Year’ – Grammy CEO

The Grammy Awards nomination for 2022 was announced last night with a number of people wondering why Wizkid’s smash hit, Essence was not nominated in the Record of the Year category.

In a recent interview with Billboard, the Grammy CEO Harvey Mason was asked why Essence was not given a nomination in the Record of the Year award category. The interview was shared by Billboard on Wednesday, the 24th of November 2021.

For the first time in 27 years, the final Grammy nominations are being decided by only the Grammy voting members without being subject to the review committee.

When asked if he was confident of the voting committee’s ability to deliver without supervision, the Grammy CEO said;

“I wasn’t nervous. I felt like we’d done a lot of important work on our membership. We’ve done a lot of outreach into different communities that we felt were maybe underrepresented in our voting membership. … So I felt like the timing was right for our membership to be able to directly decide who the nominees were. That’s why we felt good with removing the nominations review committees at the time that we did it.”

When asked why Wizkid’s Essence did not make the cut for the Record of the Year award, the Grammy boss told Billboard;

“It is a great record. He’s a very talented artist. I can’t speak to why it didn’t make it, but I do really love the record.”

Wizkid grabbed two nominations last night for Best Global Music Album and Best Global Music Performance. However, many people believe that his smash hit song, Essence should have made the Record of the Year category.