Bob:

Yes, these nominations are embarrassing. It’s quite eveident NARAS is a bunch of OLD, WHITE MEN. But let me alert you to something else.

The Grammys are manipulated by the majors just like everything else. When I worked in the industry, our label was surprised every year at how few nominations our artists received no matter how special the releases were or how many "Grammy campaigns" we tried within the industry. One year, when I saw that a ridiculously high number of random Jive and Universal acts were nominated (Bowling For Soup, Tonic, anyone?), I decided to investigate.

Want to know what I found? It turns out you only need a few recording credits to be eligible to vote. Sure, some A&R folks and executives at the labels had enough credits to be eligible, but that’s certainly not enough to sway the process so that TONIC is nominated. So what did these companies (and pretty much every company) do? They pulled their employees from the office for a few hours and recorded bogus holiday CD’s. I present to you the Zomba Choir…

I’m sure you never saw that on the top of the holiday charts. They ship a few copies to the stores never to be sold and then 100 upwards to 300 employees at the label are now officially eligible to vote. Now THAT can make an impact when tons of titles are being nominated. Pretty interesting huh? I’m sure if you do some investigating, you can find holiday releases from many of the majors. The Mariah nominations this year lend me to believe there could have been an Island Def Jam release in the recent past.