TOP 10: Musicians Who SHOULD Have Won the Best New Artist Grammy
This week the podcast considered the musicians who have won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. The Recording Academy of America has presented the award nearly every since the early 1960s, honoring new talent that emerged on the national/international scene. While many legends were rightfully bestowed that honor, there are plenty more Best New Artist winners that have either quickly imploded after receiving the award, or never achieved liftoff in the first place. In fact, the track records of the collective awards winners have led the honor to be considered a curse more than a blessing.
Below find 10 of our picks for who SHOULD have won Best New Artist among the nominated musicians for that year. Disagree with our picks? Want to share your own? Drop them in the comments below.
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Honorable Mention: The Musicians of 1966 (actual winner: nobody)
There was no Best New Artist award presented at the 9th Annual Grammy Awards, which were held in 1967 and celebrated music released in 1966. If it were a fallow year for new artists, that would be understandable — and it HAS happened, looking at the winners/nominees for 1964, 1975, 1988, etc. But 1966 had some impressive musical debuts, with Cream, The Doors, The Monkees, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention all putting out their initial releases, among other acts. Any would have made a great Best New Artist winner; Cream was actually nominated for the award two years later, but lost to Jose Feliciano.
10. 1971: Elton John (actual winner: Carpenters)
This is so low on the list because Carpenters are also great winners in this category; we discuss them in the Best New Artist debate. But it was a HUGE mistake to not give the 1971 Best New Artist to Elton John. Even if you look at just the music that had been released by the two acts at that time, John already had “Your Song,” “Border Song,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Madonna.” Yes, Carpenters had “Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and “Merry Christmas, Darling.” They’re all great songs. Of course there is no way the Grammys could have known about these acts’ diverging trajectories, but in hindsight, this was a huge missed opportunity.
9. 1978: Foreigner (actual winner: Debby Boone)
One of the most laughable Best New Artist decisions. In fairness, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” is one of THE most popular/successful songs of the entire 1970s, a schmaltz epic that held the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in an iron grip for 10 consecutive weeks. But after that, nada. OG nepo baby Boone quickly faltered, and moved from adult contemporary to country to gospel music, never recapturing real chart success. Meanwhile, by 1977 Foreigner had already had THREE songs in the Billboard Top 20 charts, including Top 10 singles “Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold as Ice.” Foreigner would go on to be one of the biggest rock bands of the 1980s, with a total of six Top 10 hits, and 14 Top 20 songs over the course of its recording career.
8. 1963: The Four Seasons (actual winner: Robert Goulet)
In this bonkers decision, the Grammys went with Broadway singer/aggressively mediocre crooner Robert Goulet — who did not have a single hit song when he won the award! — over popular quartet The Four Seasons, which had two No. 1 singles in the year for which it was nominated (“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry”). The Four Seasons would go on to have more than a dozen Top 10 singles over the course of its career, and charted dozens of songs altogether, with success continuing into the 1970s, and even a bizarre 1990s resurgence for its (totally gross) song about losing your virginity, “December 1963 (Oh What a Night!).” Bob Goulet would go on to Broadway shows and cameo appearances in TV shows and movies through the 1990s. No contest.
7. 1979: The Cars (actual winner: A Taste of Honey)
There were multiple great options for the 1979 Best New Artist, and none of them were the actual winner, disco band A Taste of Honey. We love “Boogie Oogie Oogie.” It’s a disco classic! But this group is essentially a one-hit wonder — two if you count the Japanese culture-appropriating “Sukiyaki” from 1981. Meanwhile, rock band The Cars already had TWO Top 40 songs — “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl” — by the time the band lost Best New Artist. And that was just the beginning; for the next decade, the band would crank out an incredible list of songs including “Drive,” “You Might Think,” “Good Times Roll,” and “Magic,” achieving 16 Top 50 hits between 1978 and 1987. One of the best bands of the 80s lost to a two-hit wonder named after a Herb Alpert song. BTW, Elvis Costello was also a nominee for 1979. Crazy!
6. 1973: The Eagles (actual winner: America)
America is a great band. Please don’t get me wrong. The 1973 winner for Best New Artist has a slew of super-catchy songs, and in truth, when it won was the bigger act — “A Horse With No Name” from 1972 hit No. 1 on the charts, while The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” was that band’s biggest hit from the same year, peaking at No. 9. America would go on to have hit singles in the early 1970s, and a brief resurgence in the mid-1980s, while The Eagles would simply go on to be one of THE best-selling rock bands of all time, with five No. 1 singles, and 17 Top 50 hits. In restaurant terms, The Grammys went for a tasty hamburger when there was steak on the table.
5. 2001: Jill Scott (actual winner: Shelby Lynne)
Country singer Shelby Lynne’s Best New Artist wins is considered one of the biggest WTF victories in Grammy history. Given the number of questionable calls the Recording Industry Association of America has made over the years, that’s saying something. By the time Lynne won the new artist award in 2001 she had SIX studio albums to her name, and had 10 songs charted on the Billboard Country 100 going all the way back to 1989. A Best New Artist who had been on the radio for more than a dozen years before winning — the audacity of it all. Of course, none of this was Lynne’s fault, but she surely paid the price for the baffling honor. The album for which she won was meant to catapult her into pop/adult-contemporary relevancy, and it flopped — she arguably has had less mainstream success since winning the award than she did before. Meanwhile, R&B singer Jill Scott has had a series of career setbacks since her 2000 debut, many of which were not her fault. So we’re giving her this tip because: Justice for Jill Scott.
4. 2011: Justin Bieber (actual winner: Esperanza Spaulding)
At the time of this award, jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding was considered the cool, edgy choice to win in a category that also included Drake, Florence & the Machine, and Mumford & Sons. Nearly 15 years later, I think we can all agree that this was pop cynicism gone absolutely wild. First, Spalding was an established act for years prior to winning Best New Artist — Chamber Music Society was her third full-length album, the first coming out in 2008. Second, this win feels like an attempt by hipsters to convince people that they are cool and edgy by liking jazz music. Third, nobody in 21st Century America actually cares about jazz. Sorry! It’s true. Not in a popular sense, anyway. Meanwhile, in 2010/2011, Justin Bieber was dismissed as annoying and cringe, a precocious child star/pre-teen idol who created bubblegum pop. In the intervening years, he would experience massive success again and again with singles like “Sorry,” “Despacito,” “Stay,” and “What Do You Mean.” His musicianship and place in pop culture has already been reevaluated multiple times, and he is now viewed in a more positive, even sympathetic light.
3. 2014: Kendrick Lamar (actual winner: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis)
It’s true that, at the time of this contest, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis was having a Moment, with three hit singles between 2011 and 2013, “Can’t Hold Us,” “Thrift Shop,” and “Same Love.” At that point, Kendrick Lamar’s singles were peaking around the mid-20s on the charts, and he was seen as an underground up-and-comer who was attracting the attention of music industry big dogs. So you can forgive the Grammys for erring on the side of greater immediate success over potential in this match-up. But in the decade since the award, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis has all but disappeared from the music scene, while Lamar has become one of the most respected voices in hip-hop, attracting just as much love from the audience as he gets from critics. And if nothing else, he absolutely savaged Drake in his 2024 diss tracks. We’d give him a Grammy just for that.
2. 1992: Boyz II Men (actual winner: Marc Cohn)
A terrible call, even at the time. Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis” is a great soft-pop song, no question. But it never even cracked the U.S. Billboard Top 10, and it was his only mainstream success, full stop. By contract, Boyz II Men already had two Top 5 hits by the time this award was decided — “Motownphilly” and “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” — and would go on to have 7 other Top 10 hits in the 90s, and sell more than 25 million albums in the United States alone. Boyz II Men was absolutely MASSIVE in the 90s, and it was clear that was going to be the case from the very start (I can say that, I remember when they came out). They were an instant musical sensation, and a critical component to R&B’s domination of the music charts for basically the whole 90s. Boyz II Men have never received the credit they deserve — they were arguably also a factor in the 90s resurgence of boy bands — and this was only the start of the disrespect.
1990: The Indigo Girls (actual winner: Milli Vanilli/Nobody)
You knew this was coming. Of all the bad calls in Best New Artist history, none is more deserving of dismissal than Milli Vanilli winning Best New Artist in 1990. It’s true that the German R&B duo — kind of — did have a string of hits in “I’m Gonna Miss You,” “Blame It on the Rain,” “Girl You Know It’s True,” all of which hit the Top 5 in 1988 and 1989, and sold millions of copies around the world. But within months of winning the Grammy, the fraud was exposed — the supposed lead singers of the group didn’t sing a single note on the songs, and in fact were simply lipsynching and passing themselves off as the vocalists. The Grammys rescinded their award and instead opted to give it to nobody for the year. That’s a shame, because folk-pop duo The Indigo Girls would have made a truly cool winner. While the group never cracked the mainstream radio, it had a string of Top 40 hits on the U.S. Alternative charts in the 1990s, back “alternative” was still a relevant genre. Beyond success, the duo’s musicianship is incredible, and songs like “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo,” and “Least Complicated” deserved some kind of Grammy attention. (The group did win the 1990 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording, so at least there’s that.)
Who do YOU think should have won the Grammy for Best New Artist? Leave a comment below!