Drake has withdrawn his two Grammy Award nominations.
The Hotline Bling star received nominations for Best Rap Album for Certified Lover Boy and Best Rap Performance for Way 2 Sexy, featuring Future and Young Thug, last month but has now withdrawn them, a representative for the Recording Academy confirmed to Variety.
Drake has not yet explained the reasoning behind the withdrawal, but according to the publication, the decision was made by Drake and his management and the Grammys honoured the request.
Instead of drafting in another nominee to keep those categories at five, the voting will continue with just four nominees because the Grammy ballots were posted to voters on Monday.
The unusual move comes a year after the rapper called for the show to be replaced "with something new that we can build up over time and pass on to the generations to come". The criticism was a result of The Weeknd not being nominated for any of the 2021 categories, despite having one of the most popular singles and albums of 2020.
"I think we should stop allowing ourselves to be shocked every year by the disconnect between impactful music and these awards and just accept that what once was the highest form of recognition may no longer matter to the artist that exist now and the ones that come after," he wrote on his Instagram Stories at the time.
"It's like a relative you keep expecting to fix up but they just won't change their ways," he continued. "The other day I said @theweeknd was a lock for either album or song of the year along with countless other reasonable assumptions and it just never goes that way."
The 2022 Grammys will be held on 31 January.
