She enters this year’s event the winningest woman in Grammy history, with 28 victories. She is tied with her husband, Jay-Z, for the most nods collected by any artist, with 88.
In what could make for dramatic television, Beyoncé needs just three more Grammys to match — and four to beat — the record for most overall wins, a position currently held by the conductor Georg Solti, who died in 1997. And for the third time in her career, Beyoncé, 41, is nominated in all three top categories — record, song and album of the year — raising the possibility that her crowning moment could come at the climax of a show that has struggled in recent years to find an audience and generate positive headlines.
While many Grammy watchers believe Beyoncé will enter from a position of strength, with “Renaissance” garnering both commercial and critical success, the singer’s coronation is far from assured, thanks to her own complicated history with the awards. Despite Beyoncé’s oodles of wins, she is just 1 for 13 in the major, all-genre categories for releases on which she was a lead artist.
The key question for fans and industry insiders isn’t how big she will win, but rather: What if she loses, again?
A prominent win for Beyoncé could be seen as an overdue make-good, which is something of a Grammy specialty. But a notable loss may call into question the redemption narrative that the Recording Academy, the institution behind the awards, has been carefully tending for years, as it has tried to address longstanding criticism that the show too often fails to recognize Black talent with top awards.
Only three Black women have ever won album of the year — Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill, all in the 1990s — and of Beyoncé’s 28 wins, only one of them was in a top category, song of the year. That was more than a decade ago, when she was recognized as a songwriter for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
A push to create a voting pool that is younger and more diverse has attracted 19 percent more women and 38 percent more members from “traditionally underrepresented communities” since 2019, the academy says.
Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who is the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said it would be unfair to look to a Beyoncé victory or loss in any single contest as a test of changes to the voting membership, which numbers about 11,000.
But Brandon Katamara, a student in Cardiff, Wales, who runs @rumiyonce, a Beyoncé fan account with more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, predicted a “9.5 out of 10” on the social-media backlash scale if she loses.
“We don’t care if she just takes one award,” he said. “We just want her to win album of the year.”
