Rapper leads Grammys with 11 nominations

The 58th Grammy Awards nominations were announced Monday on CBS and showcase quite an eclectic group of nominees.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar earned the most nods, with 11, folllowed by seven each for Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. Drake captured five nominations, including Best Rap Album for If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

All three were nominated for the coveted Album of the Year prize – Lamar for “To Pimp a Butterfly”, Swift for “1989” and The Weeknd for “Beauty Behind the Madness”.

For Record Of The Year, Ed Sheeran (Thinking Out Loud) is up against Taylor Swift (Blank Space), D’Angelo And The Vanguard (Really Love), Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (Uptown Funk) and The Weeknd (Can’t Feel My Face).

The 28-year-old singer-songwriter from Melbourne will compete in one of the elite Grammy categories, Best New Artist, against Meghan Trainor, Tori Kelly, Sam Hunt and James Bay. In addition, her single “Blank Space” is nominated both for record of the year – which honors vocal performance, songwriting and production – and again in the song category, which is strictly a songwriter’s award. He also observed that the cast album for the Broadway hit “Hamilton”, which uses a variety of musical genres in its score, didn’t get an album of the year nomination.

Due to the Recording Academy’s calendar, Swift’s album “1989”, released in October 2014, is eligible for the 2016 awards while Adele’s “25”, which broke the record for most sales in a single week in November, is not.

Pharrell and West are also nominated for four awards, including album of the year for producing songs on Lamar’s album. At least in his own categories-best rap album, performance, collaboration, and song-Lamar will nearly certainly win.

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance “Ship To Wreck” – Florence + The Machine “Sugar” – Maroon 5 “Uptown Funk” – Mark Ronson feat. In terms of well-roundedness, look no further than Album of the Year: Alabama Shakes representing the indie rock/Apple commercial crowd, Chris Stapleton as the appointed country representative, the year’s most political record and two of its biggest, Max Martin-led pop records.