We Americans tend to have a hard time finding things to agree upon as a nation. When rating Barack Obama’s performance in office, we have a tendency to be (more or less) split right down the middle. There’s little chance that we will get that ‘Jacob or Edward’ debate squared away anytime soon. Also, we can safely assume that no consensus will be reached as to whether or not American Idiot was an instant classic or an audible bucket of trash.
There are probably only two things that all American’s can get behind. The first thing is that everyone knows NASA sucks. The second thing is that everyone knows the Grammy Awards are meaningless. There isn’t a single person in this country that hasn’t had their feathers ruffled in some way, shape, or form, by the panel deemed the pinnacle of Judgy Music Mountain. In reality, the people who make up the Grammy Award panel, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, are just record industry big-wigs celebrating their own achievements.
When I was about two years old, the Grammy’s introduced the new Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance category. A good move in theory, but theories often lose weight when the theorizers don’t know what some of the words in the title actually mean. The panel clearly had no idea what metal or hard rock was since Jethro Tull, a band headed by a bearded flautist, won the award. Jethro Tull beat out Metallica, AC/DC, Jane’s Addiction, and Iggy Pop. The album that should have won was … And Justice For All by Metallica, but that was probably too scary for the old dudes to listen to. Jethro Tull certainly deserved a Grammy at some point in their long career, but they received a disputed one for an album which was one of their worst.
The above case is an example of the panel’s ignorance, but that’s not even what makes the Grammy’s irrelevant. The Grammy Awards exist to sell more records or to award the records that have sold better than they ever expected. The ceremony this past Sunday had some real debatable choices starting with the Album of the Year award going to Taylor Swift for Fearless. Granted, her competition was pretty lacking (my favorite album of the bunch was the newest DMB one…yeesh!), but that album was pretty terrible. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Taylor Swift (she won four awards!) is not country music; she’s pop music. She means the same amount to real country music as The Black Eyed Peas mean to real hip-hop. Speaking of those wastes-of-musical-space, The Black Eyed Peas won three awards, including Best Pop Vocal album and Best Pop Performance for “I Gotta Feeling.” I am completely serious when I say this: “I Gotta Feeling” has to be one of the worst songs ever written. There are eleven words (more or less) in the entire song and no one has been able to explain to me why Fergie felt the need to say “mazel tov.” If you’re the kind of person who listens and dances (non-ironically) to that song sober, I want you to stop reading my column right now. Although, I can safely assume that most people who like that song probably don’t do much reading in their spare time, since they have obviously never read lyrics before in their lives.
The entire reason the Black Eyed Peas were nominated and won so many times is the fact that they had sold over five million copies of their newest album. If awards are supposed to go to musicians or artists who displayed incredible creativity through great songs, then The Black Eyed Peas, Kings of Leon, and Colbie Caillat (really, that girl who got famous for no reason on MySpace? She won two awards? Have you heard that song “Bubbly?” It makes me want to jump in front of a train) would have gone home with nothing. The real best album of 2009 wasn’t Fearless, but either Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective, an album with so much creativity that it’s dripping out of its ears, or Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear, an album that shows songwriting can be layered and intricate yet still be incredibly catchy. Heck, Brand New’s attempt to sound like a heavier Neutral Milk Hotel with Daisy was better than any of those best albums of the year nominations. Those three albums weren’t nominated for anything while Beyonce received six awards, one for every million her recent album sold.
The music industry has been circling the drain since the Internet went mainstream, but I think that has less to do with piracy then the RIAA lawyers would have us believe. The Internet has made all music fairly accessible, even legally, and people are going to find all sorts of different music to like. Most of my friends don’t even listen to the radio since the radio industry and the record industry think that they are doing us a favor playing Colbie Caillat nine times in one afternoon. Why sit through that torture for an afternoon in hopes of hearing one good song when we could load up our mp3 players with music we actually like and plug it in to our stereos? Labels don’t know what people like and they probably don’t even care since they are marketing geniuses and can turn an album as bad as The E.N.D. into a multi-platinum smash just by constantly putting it on the radio for the people out there who think the radio is the only way to listen to new music. The music industry has aimed at a lower taste demographic for years, but that well will eventually dry out since it has become so much easier to enjoy better music. Perhaps, one day, receiving a Grammy award will mean something to a legitimate artist when people show they prefer legitimate artists. Until then, Nickelback will, sadly, be relevant.
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