Screw the Grammys

So the Grammys were tonight, and like I said before, they could have done a lot worse with the nominations.  It isn't every year that "Song of the Year" contains two genuinely good tracks, as it does with Gorillaz and Kanye West.  (It was also cool to see the live Gorillaz act open the ceremony--they had me for about three minutes there.)

But it was not without travesty.  Three such travesties:

--Mariah Carey with eight nominations.  I'm sorry, but you can either care about music or care about Mariah Carey.  There is no middle ground.

--The nominees for Best Alternative Album:

The Arcade Fire Funeral

Beck Guero

Death Cab For Cutie Plans

Franz Ferdinand You Could Have It So Much Better

The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan

Four of those albums are by established artists with their best work behind them.  I loved the Beck, and liked the Franz Ferdinand OK, but these are like giving Robert de Niro a Best Actor Oscar for Meet the Parents.  The fifth was the near-consensus album of the year among critics--the year 2004, that is.  (The Grammy year starts on October 1, so The Arcade Fire slipped in.)

--Speaking of critical consensus: there was as much of a consensus about the best album of this year as we could ever hope to see with Illinois by Sufjan Stevens.  It came out in the Grammy year, but it's nowhere to be found in the nominations.

All of this leads me to a conclusion about the Grammys--the people who vote on them, by and large, don't really listen to music.  Oh, they may work in the music business, or they may talk about music a lot, but they are certainly not the sort of people who seek out greatness or listen critically or even really listen to other people talk about music.  They overhear snippets, but they just don't care enough to process it to anything.  Most of the people who voted for Plans or GBMS have probably never heard them--they just remembered those band names.

(There's also the question of what constitutes "alternative".  Death Cab for Cutie is constantly being name-dropped on The O.C., Franz Ferdinand has been in at least half a dozen movie commercials that I've noticed, and the White Stripes are doing a damn Coke commerical.  It brings to mind the famous quote from Tom Waits, upon winning his Grammy in that category--"Alternative to what? Silence?")

Not caring about music doesn't make you a bad person--I married such a person, after all.  But just as nobody should care what I think about the baseball Hall of Fame or the All-Star ballot, it's pretty silly for the music industry to give out its supposedly greatest honor based on the votes of people who don't give a damn.

Comments

[Jimbo]

True, Sufjan getting 0 noms was suck... and it's not like the alternative acts were really THAT inspired (its hard to say that Franz's best work is behind them after their 2nd album though), but they certainly an alternative to Mariah Carey and Gwen Stefani (not to mention the likes of Staind and Trapt and the All American Rejects in the rock fields)... I say they should give away 3 best albums: 1 for platinum records, 1 for gold records, and 1 for albums that sold less than 500,000... that way something would get nominated that hasn't already been blugeoned into our heads.

[The J Train]

I misspoke (miswrote?) when I said their best work was behind them; what I really meant was that each of those albums was nominated not on its own merits, but on the strength of the bands' previous efforts.

[squashed lemon]

hey, I was thinking the same the voting reps, that this is 2006, not 2001? That list belongs in another era.

Don't tell me they are going to nominate Go!Team and steven sufjan AFTER they move to big record companies and start selling. (ie. they are not new indies anymore)

..time for the blogs to revolt and nominate our own best of year albums. (actually there is a blog compiling such vot already.)

I'll post once i find in my messy bookmark file.