THE TIME HAS COME FOR BLACKPINK AND MICKEY

As Time prepares to announce its 2022 Person of the Year, the magazine has named BLACKPINK (YG/Interscope) Entertainer of the Year and Mickey Guyton (Capitol Nashville) Breakthrough Artist of the Year, a new honor.

BLACKPINK has had a lot to celebrate in 2022. The K-pop quartet's sophomore full-length set, Born Pink, became the first album by an all-female Korean group to land at #1 in the U.S. It also debuted at the apex of the Top Album Sales chart with more than 75k copies sold, the seventh-biggest sales week of any album this year.

"BLACKPINK has managed to become the biggest girl group in the world precisely by allowing its members to be solo stars in their own right," wrote Time's Raisa Burner. "The group may be bigger than the sum of its parts, but each of its parts is bigger than most other pop groups’ combined efforts.”

Texas native Guyton released her debut studio set, Remember Her Name, in September 2021. It was nominated for a 2022 Best Country Album Grammy, the first time an album by a Black artist was so honored. The title track, meanwhile, received nominations for Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song.

Guyton performed the national anthem during Super Bowl LVI and hosted PBS’ July 4 celebration from the Capitol Lawn. Despite her personal achievements over the last couple of years, however, Guyton acknowledges that more progress needs to be made in terms of diversity in country music.

"I had so many country artists behind the scenes reach out to me, wanting to have conversations on what they could do and how they could be more of an ally," Guyton told Time. "A lot of them did start finding musicians of color for their bands. There’s a drummer named Elizabeth Chan who played with me who you now see at every country-music awards show. Also, there are a lot more Black country artists who've loved the genre but didn’t think there was a space for them migrating to Nashville and trying to have careers. But if you study the country-music charts, they’re against women and people of color.”

The 2022 Time Person of the Year will be revealed on 12/7. Read more at Time.com. In related news, the 2022 HITS Person of the Year is once again the delivery kid from the dispensary.