Which rock band has won the most Grammy Awards?
Winning any of the Grammys has always been one of the most divisive awards a musician could possibly get.
Most artists aren’t in the business for the trophies of the showmanship behind their music, but every so often, it’s nice to be reminded that some of their songs had an impact on people much greater than a bunch of units sold. And while The Grammys have more than a few times where they have completely missed the boat on certain artists, there is the odd artist that makes you realise that they were definitely onto something back in the day.
While Stevie Wonder deserves every single Grammy he ever got during his insane run of albums, there were still some people the Grammys were clearly in the wrong about. It took a while for them to realise their mistake when it came to the metal category, and even when there’s an obvious shoo-in pick for one of the greatest of the year, there are always going to be awards given to people like Macklemore that get people talking whenever they gloss over massive acts.
But the Grammys aren’t always about the raw impact that someone has on the music industry. Sometimes it comes down to the most tasteful players in the business, which is probably why some of the greatest innovators get forgotten every now and again. Everyone from Queen to Jimi Hendrix never got the award for any of their albums or songs, but that might have been because the world wasn’t really ready for what they had done at the time.
Of course, the Recording Academy does have a habit of trying to correct their mistakes by giving artists Grammys years after their relevance, but there hasn’t been a single band that has had as much love for the music industry as U2 has. They lived and breathed everything about American culture, and the Grammys never forgot about that throughout every single moment of their career.
In the moment, though, you can see where the award show was coming from when awarding the Irish legends. Some of the biggest songs of the 1980s belonged to them, and since they were paying lip service to the greatest American artists that came before them on Rattle and Hum, they practically came in prepackaged and gift-wrapped for the Grammys when they won for The Joshua Tree. But the band had become more awarded than anyone can really make sense of over the years.
Sure, their inspirations like The Beatles have garnered Grammy accolades more than a few times, but when it comes to their albums, U2 have walked away with 22 of those awards, which makes them one of the most decorated rock and roll bands in the history of the ceremony. And with no disrespect meant to any members of the band, it doesn’t even seem to make sense after a while.
The jets have admittedly cooled on the band over the years, but their renaissance in the 2000s made it look like they were the only rock and roll band working at the time. All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a great album, but when you look at everything else that was nominated, it’s strange to think that one of the biggest rock bands that started in the 1980s was winning for tunes like ‘Walk On’ while everyone was glossing over tunes like ‘Ms Jackson’ by Outkast or ‘Fallin’ by Alicia Keys.
If anything, the fact that U2 ended up winning so many Grammys might have been one of the last times that rock felt relevant on that stage, and the rest of us have been paying for it ever since. U2 didn’t need to become one of the biggest bands in the world three times over, but if the rest of the world was awarding tunes like ‘Beautiful Day’ as one of the greatest rock and roll songs ever produced, it’s no wonder that everything started to get folded into whatever hip hop was doing around the same time.
