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Folks Do Like To Complain About Other People's Music

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Category: Entertainment

Via: johnrussell • 8 years ago • 2 comments

Folks Do Like To Complain About Other People's Music

Grammy award nominations were released yesterday, so it is time for the rock and pop and rap music critics and experts to lament how "lame" the nominations are. This has happened every year since the late 60's or so.

The nominees for the major awards are not hip enough, or don't recognize heavy metal, or are a "sell-out', bla bla .

Rather than just acknowledge that there is no such thing as a Record Of The Year across genres, we get a lot of complaints. Maybe it is good for the awards show buzz though.

So, the academy once gave the Best New Artist award to A Taste of Honey over Elvis Costello; mistakes were made!

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/06/grammy-time-the-recording-academys-lame-nominations-chapter-2016/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Today’s announcement of the nominees for the Grammy Awards, to be given out Feb. 12 in Los Angeles, have some smart inclusions. Country singer Sturgill Simpson’s “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth” is a surprise best-album nominee, and The Avett Brothers are nominated in the American roots category. Radiohead and PJ Harvey and Beyoncé show up in various spots as well. (Beyoncé got nine nominations and deserves to win a few for “Lemonade.”)

So it’s not a total loss. But this round also has the usual Grammy nonsense — Justin Bieber’s “Purpose” as one of five Album of the Year spots, Blink-182 under Best Rock Album, alongside no Leonard Cohen, Wilco, Drive-By Truckers or Car Seat Headrest. Lame!

It’s not really hipness or up-to-the-minute currency that the Recording Academy needs. But when you title a category Best New Artist, it helps if the figure in question is genuinely new. Chance the Rapper has been well-known to music fans since 2013; if Grammy bylaws kept him from being nominated until this year, the bylaws need to be changed. Same with the invisibility of A Tribe Called Quest’s triumphant last album, which came out Nov. 11. (Why can’t Grammy voters find a download link a few weeks earlier like music writers do?)

This is, of course, the same body that largely slept through the Beatles and Bob Dylan during the 1960s. (Dylan got his first Grammy in 1980, for “Gotta Serve Somebody,” and was never once nominated during the 1960s or ’70s.) The same academy that gave A Taste of Honey the Best New Artist award over Elvis Costello, picked DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince over Public Enemy, and gave its 1980 Best Album award to Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” over Sinatra’s “Trilogy: Past Present Future” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”

The Kinks and Talking Heads and The Velvet Underground have never even been nominated. John Coltrane didn’t get a Grammy until he was dead. Same with Otis Redding; both won an ass-covering “Lifetime Achievement Award,” although the Recording Academy declined to recognize these achievements during these artists’ actual lifetimes. Patti Smith has never won and was not even nominated until the 21st century. And so on.

Eric Clapton’s mellowed-out, unplugged version of the overplayed “Layla” beat Nirvana the year of “Nevermind.” The Clash won a weaselly “Hall of Fame Award” — its first recognition by the august academy — more than a quarter century after “London Calling” came out and two decades after the band broke up.

The Grammy folks have responded to criticisms like this by trying to young up their list. So the same recording industry that overlooked Dylan and VU and Coltrane gave the 12-year-old Sam Smith six nominations and four awards in 2015. (OK he was actually in his early 20s.) But it’s a desperate, clumsy kind of last-minute correction, and the academy still isn’t getting things right. The Grammys has moved from grumpy, grandpa-style irrelevance to gee whiz, uncritical poptimism without stopping. It’s like Benjamin Button without a heyday.

Take a look, for instance, at the list that shows perhaps the sharpest list of nominees, the one for best alternative album. This year’s nominees are Bon Iver, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Iggy Pop and Radiohead. A great list, and Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool” is a thing of beauty.

But besides Bon Iver, all of these artists could have showed up on a greatest-hits-of-1995 list. Bowie and Pop could be on a greatest of ’75. Has the alternative-rock and indie-rock tradition really stopped dead like that? This is also a genre the Grammy folks have never seemed to get. The ironically titled documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke” could be remade as “2016: The Year the Grammys Woke Up to ’90s Alt-Rock.”