Grammy nominations 2016: Kendrick Lamar and Courtney Barnett stand out alongside head-scratching picks

t’s nearly impossible for the Grammy awards – the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’s annual awarding of prizes to popular music’s “best” – to get it right. Music is too vast of a field for five of anything to be representative of what a year could offer; the Grammys’ peculiarities result in some truly head-scratching picks (but more on Meghan Trainor in a minute); the idea of “best” is relative, and dependent on whether you’re talking about something that artistically shone, or something that slaughtered the marketplace, or something that managed to do bothBut the nominees for the 58th running of the golden gramophones, for all that they left out, did manage to get a few broad narratives about the last 15-ish months of popular music correct.Kendrick Lamar, whose impassioned To Pimp A Butterfly has dotted year-end best-of lists and sold 739,000 copies to date, garnered 11 nominations, including a song of the year nod for the protest anthem Alright. Taylor Swift, who strutted into pop territory with catwalk-ready confidence, received seven nods; The Weeknd, whose nihilistic funk-pop developed greater focus (if not much more empathy) on the radio-saturating Beauty Behind The Madness, did as well. (The nomination period runs from 1 October to 30 September, meaning that Adele, who recently set American chart history by having back-to-back weeks of a million-plus-selling album with 25, will have to wait until next year.)

The rough-voiced Nashville lifer Chris Stapleton, whose appearance at the Country Music Association Awards last month helped shoot his much-beloved debut Traveller to the top of the charts, was awarded an album of the year nomination, among others; the slow-burning Alabama Shakes, whose electric live performances and critical-darling status helped them become festival headliners, are up for that award as well for Sound & Color, which captures their in-concert spark better than any of their albums to date.Two of the song of the year nominees, Swift’s winking Blank Space and the Wiz Khalifa/Charlie Puth mope-rap track See You Again, hit No 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart; Blank Space also got a Record of the Year nomination, as did chart-toppers Uptown Funk and Can’t Feel My Face.Ed Sheeran, whose songwriter bona fides and nods to hip-hop make him at least an ideal type of pop star, nabbed song and record of the year nominations. And D’Angelo, whose sprawling, political, brilliant Black Messiah was surprise-released a year ago, was given a record of the year nomination for the swooning Really Love.

Things lose the plot, though, in the best new artist category, which has among its nominees Meghan Trainor. Putting aside her vocal-fried retroisms, which are annoying when they’re at their best, she was nominated last year for the irritating All About That Bass – in the record and song of the year categories, no less. (A Grammy explainer on Sheeran’s similar double-dip a couple of years back reveals that she slid in on a technicality: “A Grammy nomination in a performance category in a prior year disqualifies an artist from competing in this category, unless the nomination came from a single or a guest spot on another artist’s recording, and the artist hadn’t yet released a full album.” Title, Trainor’s first full-length, was released in January of this year.)

The category is, otherwise, interesting enough; Sam Hunt’s hip-hop-Nashville hybridization, Courtney Barnett’s scruffy, wordy, pop-punk; Tori Kelly’s glossy yet youthful pop; James Bay’s nu-Sheeran sensitivity. But the absence of Fetty Wap, whose roaring Trap Queen was one of the year’s most infectious pop songs, only makes Trainor’s presence in the category more grating. (Fetty Wap did nab two nominations in hip-hop specific categories.)

Some out-and-out snubs are buried in the lower reaches of the nominations: Jason Derulo, whose joyous, blippy Want To Want Me celebrates the libidinal and – in direct contrast to The Weeknd’s body of work – puts forth the idea that it’s OK to enjoy the company of one sexual partners, and whose haunting Cheyenne sounds like the regret it’s enumerating, came up empty; Carly Rae Jepsen, whoseE•MO•TION had an anxiously beating heart at its core and some of the most human pop songs of the year, did as well; Janet Jackson, whose Unbreakable planted a flag in the present day while nodding to her storied past; a slew of metal bands formed in the past 10 years and pushing the genre in new directions, who were ignored in favor of honoring the graying Sevendust.It’s hard not to wonder what the reactions to the Grammy nominations would be like if, like the Oscars did in 2009, the Big Four genre-spanning categories – record, song, and album of the year, as well as best new artist – were expanded to 10 picks each. Would Miguel’s openhearted Wildheart sit alongside The Weeknd’s dance floor-ready dourness?

Would tracks such as Barnett’s Pedestrian At Best be considered as viable song of the year candidates? An expansion would be far from a perfect solution; the remit of pop music in the 2010s, when artists who self-release via outlets like Bandcamp and Soundcloud, independent labels entrenched and upstart, and, yes, even major labels put out strong artistic statements, is too wide, for starters. But it would, at the very least, result in the event that is self-advertised as “music’s biggest night” becoming even more of a showcase for the very best that the medium has to offer.