While Beyonce already holds the record for being the most Grammy nominated woman in history, it turns out that the singer broke another record: She is the only artist to have Grammy nominations across four different genres in the same year.
Her nominations include: Best Pop Solo Performance for ‘Hold Up’, Best Rock Performance for ‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’ featuring Jack White, Best Urban Contemporary Album forLemonade and Best Rap-SungPerformance for ‘Freedom’ also featuring Kendrick Lamar.
Bill Freimuth, official Head of Awards at the Grammys,explained in an interview with Complex how this feat has never been achieved by anyone ever before. “This is actually the first that 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 time for us and personally, I think it’s appropriate and pretty cool.”
Freimuth also cleared confusion for those who are wondering how Beyonce’s music can be considered ‘rock’. According to him, the song went through a sorting committee to consider whether the song could be nominated under the rock genre.
“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.’”