Grammys 2020: The Chemical Brothers win Best Dance Recording for 'Got To Keep On', take home 2 awards this year
Big beat pioneers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons of The Chemical Brothers have just swooped up the Grammy for Best Dance Recording, making it their second award of the night. The peppy dancehall veterans also won Best Dance/Electronic Album for their record 'No Geography' at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles on January 26.
This is a fitting honor for The Chemical Brothers, considering that they helped raise the profile of electronic music over the decades, since their inception in Manchester in 1989.
Dance music is relatively new to the Grammy Awards itself. Despite it being one of the world's most popular new music genres, it was only in 1998 that the new burgeoning artform was finally formally recognized, with the award for Best Dance Recording given to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder for the song 'Carry On'.
Back then, Grammy was officially designated for solo or collaborative dance performances (vocal or instrumental) and was limited to singles or tracks only.
Since then, EDM or electronic dance music has been gathering plenty of steam in the contemporary music scene, based solely on its ever-increasing popularity with the modern masses. In 2003, the Recording Academy decided to separate the award from pop music into its own standalone dance music field, besides 'Best Dance Recording', a new category for Best Dance/Electronic Album was also ushered in through the velvet rope. The Chemical Brothers have been there from the start of it all — this is now their sixth Grammy win overall.
The nominees for this year included a slew of popular dancehall artists namely:
'Linked': Bonobo
'Piece of Your Heart': Meduza Featuring Goodboys
'Underwater': Rüfüs Du Sol
'Midnight Hour': Skrillex & Boys Noize Featuring Ty Dolla $ign
Skrillex has already won this award thrice while The Chemical Brothers has had the most nominations in the history of this particular category, with six in total.
The 2019 release of their album 'No Geography' came in conjunction with the 20-year anniversary of their classic album 'Surrender' in 1999, for which they released a deluxe box set. Something tells us that 20 years on from 'No Geography', The Chemical Brothers will have something in the works to celebrate the release of this now-Grammy-winning album.