One of Marilyn Manson’s Two 2021 Grammy Nominations Has Been Rescinded
Despite the fact that he’s currently being sued by half the women he’s ever known for various forms of abuse, Marilyn Manson recently scored two Grammy nominations: one in the Album of the Year category, for his contributions to Kanye West’s recent release, Donda, and one in the Best Rap Song category, for the Donda cut “Jail.”
Understandably, this upset a lot of people — so much so that Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of The Recording Academy (a.k.a. “The People Who Give Out the Grammys”), had to defend the decision, stating:
“We won’t restrict the people who can submit their material for consideration. We won’t look back at people’s history, we won’t look at their criminal record, we won’t look at anything other than the legality within our rules of, is this recording for this work eligible based on date and other criteria. If it is, they can submit for consideration.
“What we will control is our stages, our shows, our events, our red carpets. We’ll take a look at anyone who is asking to be a part of that, asking to be in attendance, and we’ll make our decisions at that point. But we’re not going to be in the business of restricting people from submitting their work for our voters to decide on.”
Five days after Mason made that assertion, the cops raided Manson’s home and reportedly seized his hard drives, which I’m sure made Mason feel all the warmer about his comments earlier that week.
It would appear that the brouhaha got somebody though. According to The New York Times, the shock rocker has now lost one of those two nominations:
“Manson, whose real name — and official songwriting credit — is Brian Hugh Warner, has been removed from the rap song category; although Manson is credited as a writer on ‘Jail, Pt 2,’ another track from Donda, he is not listed among the writers on the most current version of the album.”
On the surface, this doesn’t seem to suggest that Manson losing one nomination has anything to do with his current legal woes. But if you ask me, this whole thing stinks worse than The High End of the Low. The timing is obviously quite convenient. More to the point, “Jail” and “Jail, Pt. 2” are practically the same song. They’re even have the same exact length. It’s hard to imagine what Manson’s substantively-different contribution to the latter cut could have been.
Also, you’re telling me that one of the biggest celebrities in the world submitted material to the Grammys and no one in his camp caught an error which credited a publicly-scrutinized accused rapist of writing a song he didn’t write? Really?
I mean. Sure. Maybe that’s happened. But it feels like there’s a big piece of the story missing here. It makes me wonder if that police raid, and its suggestion that Manson could be looking at jail time, didn’t make Kanye re-think his association with the shock rocker.
