Getty Dave Mustaine is fighting to have another heavy metal category added to the Grammy Awards, which has been severely lacking in the rock and metal categories for years.
Dave Mustaine, frontman of Megadeth, is fighting to have another heavy metal category added to the Grammy Awards, which has been severely lacking in the rock and metal categories for years.
According to Blabbermouth, in an effort to grow and evolve the Grammy Awards process over the year, The Recording Academy announced in 2011 that it woul dbe restructuring the Grammy categories across all genres and fields, essentially combining several of the categories together and bringing the 2012 total of 109 categories down to just 78.
Dave Mustaine (Getty)
“As a result, instead of separate ‘Best Metal’ and ‘Best Hard Rock’ performance prizes, there is now a single ‘Best Metal Performance’ award,” Blabbermouth reports. “In addition, ‘Metal’ remains one of the 70 or so categories that aren’t televised during the performance-heavy broadcast.
Mustaine took home his first-ever Grammy back in 2017 for “Best Metal Performance” regarding the title track of Megadeth’s latest album Dystopia. He told San Francisco’s 107.7 The Bone radio station that heavy metal deserves to have another category, and the awards are well past-due to add one. Check out part of his interview below:
“I joined the Grammy chapter out in Nashville to address that exact thing,” Mustaine said (hear audio below). I joined the Grammy chapter because we have one metal category and I think they’ve got a dozen polka categories. I stopped going to the Grammys because you’d have to sit through, like, 30 Latin jazz records, and then you’d have to sit through another 30 jazz Latin records. And it’s, like, ‘What?’ So a couple of years ago, the guy that produced our record ‘Th1rt3en’, Johnny K, and a couple of other guys at the Grammys tried to get another [heavy metal] category, and they were so close, but it failed. And I called them up and I said, ‘We’re doing this.’ So 2020, we’re fighting — we’re getting all of the metal labels that we know, we’re trying to get them all together to petition the Grammys to give us another metal category.”
“My record was one of the Top 25 records of the year worldwide for Universal. Don’t tell me that we don’t deserve another category.”
You can check out the full interview below:
Dystopia‘s nomination marked the 12th Grammy nomination for Megadeth, and though the band took home the Grammy last year, Mustaine told The Columbus Dispatch in a 2017 interview that he won’t be fully satisfied until brings home a Grammy with his own name on it.
“As crazy as I am, I was thinking about the Grammy the other day and [how] it was given to Megadeth,” he said. “I was thinking it would surely be a lot better if it was given to Dave Mustaine and not to Megadeth. I guess you’ve got to keep the fire burning.”
The band is currently working on a new album, set to be released in 2019, and will support Ozzy Osbourne during the singer’s “No More Tours 2” tour in North America.
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