AVENGED SEVENFOLD singer M. Shadows says that attending this year's Grammy Awards would be a "waste of time and money" for him and his bandmates, despite the fact that they are nominated in the "Best Rock Song" category. AVENGED SEVENFOLD received its first-ever Grammy nomination this year for the song "The Stage", the title track from its latest LP. After the band revealed via Twitter earlier in the week that it was not planning to be at this weekend's event, SiriusXM's Eddie Trunk reached out to M. Shadows to get more details on AVENGED's decision to skip the Grammys. Confirming that his group was not going to be present at the January 28 awards ceremony in New York, M. Shadows said in a text message to Trunk that although the move was "not really a protest per se" against the Grammy organizers, he and his bandmates were less than pleased about the fact that "Best Rock Song" was added to the categories that aren't televised during the performance-heavy broadcast. "Fuck 'em," the singer said. M. Shadows then revealed that because AVENGED is currently on tour, his band would have been forced to spend around $150,000 on flight costs and hotels for the musicians and their wives from South Dakota to New York and then to Oklahoma in order to make the event. "And then they go and pull the 'Rock Song Of The Year' award from TV and put us in some side venue no one gives a fuck about? Fuck that waste of time and money," he wrote, according to Trunk. M. Shadows added that the rock genre gets "no respect" from the Grammy organizers. "I mean, how marginalized has rock become when 'Rock Song' of the year can't get two minutes?" he said, according to Trunk. Also nominated for Best Rock Song are METALLICA's "Atlas, Rise!", K.FLAY's "Blood In The Cut", NOTHING MORE's "Go To War" and FOO FIGHTERS' "Run". In a December 2017 interview with the WRIF station, M. Shadows said that "the whole point" of being nominated for a Grammy is that "you wanna get noticed by people and seen on TV. It helps everybody when the bands can get bigger," he said. The winners of the 60th Grammy Awards will be revealed on January 28 in a two-part ceremony, with the majority of the 84 awards handed out in a non-televised event that afternoon while a dozen or so are doled out on the CBS awardscast that evening. AVENGED SEVENFOLD is currently on a North American headlining tour with BREAKING BENJAMIN and BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE.
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