Metal is coming back to the main Grammys show this year. Metallica confirmed they will be performing at the 59th annual award show.
"We’re thrilled that we have been invited to perform on the 59th annual Grammys telecast on Sunday, February 12, 2017!" Metallica posted on Instagram earlier today.
Metallica is nominated for "Best Rock Song" for the title track off their new album, Hardwired…To Self Destruct. I'm assuming the band will be performing that track live. Normally, I would say because the performance is confirmed, it's virtually a lock that they will the category, but they are going up against David Bowie – and the Grammys love to shower icons with awards posthumously. View all the nominees in our initial Grammy report.
At this point, it's not expected for "Best Metal Performance" to be on the main show. Metallica performed at the Grammys just three years ago, on the 2014 telecast, performing their signature track "One" with pianist Lang Lang.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3K9e7pP24Y[/youtube]
Metallica haven't been to the Grammys since 1992 when they won Best Metal Performance for The Black Album. That was a few years after they were robbed of a Grammy, famously losing to Jethro Tull, not a metal band, in the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental. The band joked about it when they eventually won their Grammy:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/r5fTtd_hdok[/youtube]
There was a controversy when the nominations for this year's award show were announced and found Beyonce and Disturbed nominated in "Best Rock Performance." Disturbed frontman David Draiman commented saying "When you can have, with all due respect, a Beyonce and a Disturbed in the same category, something has gone wrong. Not taking anything away from her whatsoever, we’re just very different from each other." He also asked "When did it all become ‘rock'?" saying that musicians of his ilk have limited entry points to Grammys."
Metal Injection spoke with The Recording Academy's Senior Vice President, Awards, Bill Freimuth and he qualified the nominations in the category: "When you exclude metal, the rock category is one of our biggest umbrellas." Freimuth notes. "Not quite as broad as pop, but maybe the next up in terms of what constitutes rock – it can be blues rock, folk rock, ballads. All of that. I think what we found this year is that so many artists that were in rock or adjacent to rock were really taking more sonic risks this year than ever before, and it made for a really exciting dynamic landscape in that field."
He went on to defend the Beyonce performance as a rock performance: "That [Beyonce] recording has Jack White in it and it has Led Zeppelin samples in it and I think it's Beyonce really stretching. It's an artist at the height of her musical powers, really reaching in many different directions and we are all the better for it." Read his full comments here.
