The artists nominated for the 63rd edition of the prestigious Grammy Awards 2021 were announced on Tuesday. The awards, divided into 105 categories, this year were dominated by songs and artists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, and a diva among all, Beyoncé, who now holds nine nominations with her visual album distributed exclusively by Disney+.
2021 Grammy Awards, 10 videos in which architecture is fundamental
After the announcement of the nominations, we picked up a selection of the videos that we appreciated the most this year.
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- Romina Totaro
- 26 November 2020
Among the controversies of the names excluded from the prize and forecasts of the winners, we propose here the music videos of the candidates we liked the most and in which scenographies, architectural icons and virtual worlds made us dream.
The 25-year-old rapper nominated in three categories, including Best New Artist, presented her hit with a video in John Lautner’s Hollywood Goldstein Residence, a set design already used in films such as The Grane Lebowski (Ethan and Joen Coen, 1998) and Charlie's Angels (McG, 2003). Among vinyls and design objects, Say So gives back the glamour of Hollywood’s 70s to architecture.
The video of the Canadian artist’s single, in collaboration with rapper Lil Durk, was entirely shot at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, inaugurated in 2019 with an architectural project by Skylab Architecture. The video, featuring stacks of Nike product placement, features cameo clips of numerous athletes, including Kevin Durant, Marshawn Lynch and Odell Beckham Jr.
The French musician and director returns after seven years of absence from the music scene with the single Goliath. The video-clip, directed by Yoann Lemoine himself, plunges into the heart of an open-air quarry and follows the day of the workers, who end up running into a mining monster. For the artist, Goliath is grappling with the rampant, insatiable destruction of the natural world.
We already talked about the rapper and record producer for the virtual concert this April on the Fortnite video game platform. In this video, instead, Scott makes a surreal journey through a dark and cloudy world. The images of his imagination go in and out, whether he has his head in the clouds, is taken hostage and tortured, is in a strip club or walks precariously on a steel beam on an unfinished skyscraper.
The popstar is nominated as Best Pop Vocal Album for Chromatica, an album that also includes the single 911. Directed by Tarsem Singh, the video is set in a strange village in the desert. Gaga dances, plays with religious iconography, flies like a kite, dresses in Mediterranean fantasy clothes. Only to discover in the finale, however, that it was just a hallucination of a woman victim of an accident.
In her video-clips the British singer-songwriter, nominated in six award categories, has repeatedly set her songs in architectural icons of London brutalism (Blow Your Mind, in the Barbican Centre, and Fever, in Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate). Among the songs, however, the new album Break My Heart portrays her in action as she shoots into space to find her crystal heart on a desolate and colorless planet and, also, as she fights against giant robots.
The second work of the disc jockey was released as a visual album, lasting 40 minutes and directed by Baauer himself. Starting from a distant cosmic space, we land on Earth and fly through subways, picnics and jungles, only to return to space when the galaxy becomes a giant rave ballroom.
Along with the canonical video-clip, the song Circles was also presented with a second synchronized music video for two phones, available exclusively on Spotify. The videos also work on their own, but fans can only get the whole story if they are synchronized with a friend.
June 19 in the United States is the unofficial United States holiday known as Juneteenth, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. On the same day this year Anderson .Paak released the new single Lockdown, in which he reflects on the ongoing global protests against police brutality triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. In the clip, directed by Dave Meyers, Paak and other musician friends Jay Rock, Syd from The Internet, SiR, Dominic Fike and Dumbfoundead go to a diner after a protest.
With nine nominations, his latest work is titled Black Is King, musical film and visual album published as exclusive for the Disney+ portal. The film was made in concert by Walt Disney Pictures and Parkwood Entertainment, a distribution company founded by Beyoncé itself. “Celebratory memorial for the world on the Black Experience” Black Is King includes a cast of well-known and familiar faces, such as Lupita Nyong'o, Kelly Rowland, Pharrell Williams and JAY-Z, and moves around the world - New York, Los Angeles, South Africa, West Africa, London and Belgium - to capture the performances of actors and dancers who appear in various tableau.