After a few years when the Grammys seemed at least partially tethered to planet Earth, they returned to form this year, seeming more like a crotchety old man waving his cane to warn those damned kids to stay off his lawn. Start with the schoolmarm-ish snub of Kanye West’s 808 & Heartbreak, advance to the bunch of ham & eggers nominated for Best New Artist (Zac Brown Band, Keri Hilson, MGMT, the Ting Tings and Silversun Pickups), and pause at the absurdly out of touch choices for Best Rock Album. AC/DC’s Black Ice, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood’s Live from Madison Square Garden, Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown, Dave Matthews Band’s Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King and U2’s No Line on the Horizon represent a lot of conventional wisdom, a lot of easy choices, a little musty nostalgia, and some serious detachment from where the action is in rock ‘n’ roll. It’s as if music can’t be good if it doesn’t fill an arena. Indie -get thee behind me.
There’s also a lot of pointless confusion in Grammyville, which seriously needs to pare down categories. It’s hard to figure out how R&B and Contemporary R&B differ, particularly when Beyoncé and Jamie Foxx are nominated on both sides of this line. And since Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” isn’t “Pop Instrumental” an oxymoron? Bob Dylan is both rock and folk, and Prince is rock for a year. Metallica – the band that defined contemporary heavy metal – is up for Best Hard Rock Performance, but not Best Metal Performance.
One source of this is ages-old – the ability of people who know little about the areas they’re voting on to cast votes. This tends to lead to a celebration of known names and “talent,” even when those artists and albums were culturally marginal that year. I’d love to think that Terrance Simien and BeauSoleil’s wins on the Cajun/zydeco category the last two years had to do with the albums’ merits, but I suspect it had a lot more to do with name recognition.
And I have to assume the plethora of overlapping, semi-permeable categories is motivated by some sort of sales bump that must accompany Grammy nominations, and an industry in decline will flail desperately to save what it has rather than embrace a new business model.
The only local question I’m left with isn’t one about Grammys’ sanity. Does the fact that the Best Cajun/Zydeco Album nominees are all Cajun say something about the health of the zydeco scene or the degree to which Cajun Grammy members outnumber zydeco Grammy members. I suspect the latter.
