All you need to know about the 66th Grammys: Taylor Swift vs SZA, who’ll win big?

Swift’s music holds an important place in the lives of her fans — who remain fiercely loyal and vocal about their adoration for her and her songs — and she’s arguably the biggest pop star on the planet currently. In fact, it’s safe to say she’s transcended the pop music sphere and is a formidable pop cultural force, given how much and how often she dominates the news cycle. Midnights, her 10th studio album, sees Swift reflective, lyrical, conflicted, introspective — pondering over the emotional fragility of life — set over gentle synth-pop produced by Jack Antonoff. Surely this gong goes to her then, right?

Not if SZA has anything to say about it though. The AOTY, part of the ‘Big 4’ Grammys, is a very competitive field, with the number of nominees reduced this year from 10 to eight. (Incidentally, of those eight, seven happen to be women this year.) American R&B is having a moment right now, with artists such as SZA, the Weeknd, Daniel Caesar, among others, all garnering massive fanbases and widespread attention. A joyful, rhythmic elasticity remains central to R&B, which makes it a popular medium for collaboration. A lot of crossover hits over the past few years, employing permutations of R&B, hip-hop, pop, and electronica, have resulted in the genre establishing a sort of hold over pop music and audiences. SZA’s second album, SOS, a gorgeous, expressive R&B record, came out in in December 2022, five years after her debut, and was received glowingly.

She’s an innovator with the form, pushing R&B to the limits; this record has a floating, textural foundation underpinning her reflections, her innermost thoughts, as mid-tempo rhythms accentuate her remarkable gifts at finding a memorable melody. Kill Bill, one of the standouts here, builds a stream of consciousness narrative over a lush sonic palette; she sings: “I might kill my ex/Not the best idea/Rather be in jail than alone”. She has racked up an incredible nine nominations this time.

The tea leaves suggest it’s one or the other between SZA and Swift, though some quarters of the internet feel a dark horse might have a change. Both Swift and SZA share a spirit of introspective self-expression, but sonically the two records wander off in contrasting spaces. Midnights has polished — though not overtly so — and measured arrangements on which Swift can bare her phenomenal gifts as a lyricist and songwriter. SOS, though, at 23 songs spread out over 67 minutes, has a rather more itinerant spirit to it, as songs jump around in sound and feel at whim. It’s an exciting, challenging experience. The other names on the list include Olivia Rodrigo, the incredible Janelle Monáe, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Ray, boygenius, and Jon Batiste.

Switching it up to one of the ‘lesser’ categories, the one award I keep an eye out for each year is the Best Rock Album. This year, it’s a battle between two genuine heavyweights. Metallica, with 72 Seasons, go up against But Here We Are by the Foo Fighters. Metallica are thrash metal legends who effortlessly found a spot within more commercial musical territories, but Foo Fighters are the kind of band that revels in the kind of mainstream, Hollywood-esque sound-and-lights carnival that the Grammys are. They — frontman Dave Grohl, particularly — are Grammy darlings, having bagged a cool 15 awards. More than that though, Foo Fighters is a band beset by recent tragedy. Their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died tragically in 2022, and this record is the first one in ages on which he hasn’t featured. It’s filled with grief and introspection, as the band grapples with the loss of a cherished member, and offers a kind of emotional heft that deserves wider recognition. It’s the emotional choice, and thus a favourite, if not necessarily the ‘best’.

Among the other major categories, there’s Record Of the Year. Contrary to what the name suggests, this award is handed out to a single finished song, looking at every element of it. The Song Of The Year, on the other hand, judges only the songwriting of a given song, and not the thousand other things that go into its creation (production, mixing, mastering, and so forth). The scintillating Kill Bill by SZA is a contender in both, as is Anti-Hero by Swift.

Miley Cyrus, after her many creative explorations over the years, found mainstream success through Flowers, a song that many seem to be rooting for. Dua Lipa, who — as desi social media informed us with glee — visited India recently, has an SOTY nomination as well for Dance The Night. And Billie Eilish, a rare talent able to blend a sharp mainstream sensibility — the stuff that appeals to a wide range of people — with a certain creative whimsy and spirit of experimentation, makes the cut for her Barbie song, What Was I Made For?. These two categories are a bit of a wildcard, dependent on how the Academy votes in the AOTY category, and how willing they are to offer consolation prizes. Could the Barbie song get the nod, just to sidestep the fan reaction? What about all the other brilliant songs here? The only possible prediction we’re willing to make here is that many people are going to be unhappy.

Really though, there’s this vague derision that people seem to feel around the Grammys, often for good reason. The Grammys carry around this historical baggage, and there’s a philosophical and political case for the Grammys being an irrelevant anachronism of a forgotten time.  Their complicated relationship with race, with hip-hop and Latin music, or indeed often with just innovative, expressive, experimental music, has been written about widely. As have great snubs, such as the case of Beyoncé who, despite having accumulated a ridiculous 32 Grammys, has never once won the prestigious Album Of The Year. Voting patterns of the Recording Academy, or even their functioning, remain famously opaque and hard to discern. As for the Global South, music from the continents of Asia and Africa is barely even a speck on their radar, beyond an almost tokenistic “Global Music” category. Incidentally, Shakti — featuring some of the great Indian classical wizards Ustad Zakir Husain, Shankar Mahadevan, V. Selvaganesh and G. Rajagopalan alongside John McLaughlin — is up for that award this year. Zakir Hussain, Zubin Mehta, Anoushka Shankar, Priya Darshini, AR Rahman, Ricky Kej, among others, have all received acclaim and recognition from the Grammys.

The awards do offer value, both tangible and abstract — from recognition and validation to an opportunity to expand your audience — and there’s arguably a place for them. But we, as fans, should ideally view them if not with suspicion then at least not with automatic reverence. There’s a middle ground to be found. Free from all the baggage, it’s just a lot of fun to observe the awards from a distance. To see if my favourites win; to see the artists that annoy me crash and burn. I decide whether I like or hate the Grammys based entirely on who wins or loses in a given year. They spark conversation, original thought, passionate debate. They define, so often, the dreaded ‘discourse’. On top of that, there’s an X-factor, an element of surprise, to the actual ceremony itself: from Elton John and a brash young Eminem collaborating, to Michelle Obama appearing on stage, or Adele declaring on stage that Beyoncé deserves the award she herself won. It’s all very exciting in a campy sort of way: both a guilty pleasure and not.