Grammys boss responds to Justin Bieber's claims that his album nomination is in wrong category

On Tuesday (24 November) the 2021 Grammy nominations were rolled out. Justin Bieber earned four nominations including Best Pop Solo Performance for "Yummy", Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for "Intentions", Best Country Duo/Group Performance for "10,000 Hours", and Best Pop Vocal Album for Changes.

Bieber responded to the nominations via Instagram shortly after, revealing that while he is "flattered to be acknowledged", he is "very meticulous and intentional" about his music. Bieber went on to say he "set out to make an R&B album" and wrote that it "feels weird" for Changes to be nominated in the Pop category rather than the R&B category. Bieber captioned his post, "Please don’t mistake this as me being ungrateful, these are just my thoughts take em or leave em. Thank you to the people who fought for me to even have any noms."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber)

Yesterday (25 November) Pitchfork managed to catch up with Harvey Mason Jr. to discuss Bieber's post. Masonn Jr. told Pitchfork, "We always want to respect the artist’s wishes. Art’s a funny thing because it’s so subjective, and at the Academy our goal is to honor excellence. At some point, decisions have to be made as to how to compare different things, and it is a very tough process and one I don’t think we get right every time. We use our best efforts to get people where they wanna be and where they should be and try to evaluate them as best as we can. If he felt that was that type of a record, then, you know… I’ll just leave it at that. We try really hard to make sure people’s art is respected and evaluated in the right category."