newcritics

I hate the Grammy Awards. Actually, my loathing for industry awards ceremonies more or less extends to the entertainment industry’s whole nauseating annual orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism from the Oscars to the Emmys to the Tonys to the Obies.

But among industry awards ceremonies, the Grammys remain the worst–the least likely to reward the most creative work, the most likely to reflect the gap between fans and industry pros (When Steely Dan won best album in 2001 for its Two Against Nature–a decent record which in no way reflected the zeitgest and which should have been trounced by The Marshall Mathers Album–the consensus opinion was that voting by recording engineers had pushed the album over the top.)Â

For a generation the Grammys were as strong an indication as any of the generation gap between boomers and their parents, and of the rear guard action the parents were fighting to keep the barbarian hordes of boomer culture from over-running the citadel. In 1965, when Like a Rolling Stone exploded pop music as we knew it, A Taste of Honey by the Tijuana Brass was record of the year. In 1977, when the Sex Pistols re-invigorated rock and roll, Debbie Boone was Best New Artist (the other nominees: Andy Gibb, Foreigner, Shaun Cassidy, and Stephen Bishop). And in 1982, when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five showed how potent hip hop could be with The Message, the record of the year was Roseanna by Toto. No hip hop album was nominated for album of the year until The Score by The Fugees in 1997 nearly 20 years after Rapper’s Delight helped hip hop break out of it’s Bronx origins, and almost a decade after Straight Outta Compton turned hip hop into an industry dominating commercial force. (My dates here reflect that actual years of release, the Grammys are awarded the subsequent year, so A Taste of Honey was actually won the 1966 Grammy.)

Sure, as generational change has come to the record industry, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science has tried to be cooler. And in recent years some awards have better reflected the state of the art (OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was clearly album of the year in 2004). Still, the Grammys remain a lagging indicator at best, manipulated by voters to reward icons or send messages (Ray Charles’ awful late career duets album won album of the year in 2005, and the Dixie Chicks’ utterly forgettable Taking the Long Way won last year).

This year’s Grammy nominations, announced this past week, are much better representations of the state of contemporary music than were the nominations of my youth (Some Girls was the only album ever cut by the Stones to receive so much as a nomination for album of the year nomination–no Sticky Fingers, no Exile on Main Street, no Beggar’s Banquet, no Let it Bleed). But in part that superior representation reflects the explosion of categories in which awards are now given. This year 110 Grammys will be awarded in categories that include, for example, both “Best R&B Album” and “Best Contemporary R&B Album”–though the distinction between the styles escapes me. The Spanish-language categories include best Latin pop album, best Latin alternative album, best Latin urban album, best Latin tropical album, best Mexican/Mexican-American album, best tejano album, best banda album and best norteno album. This granular parsing of styles allows NARAS to give everyone an award, or at least to give everyone “Grammy-nominated” marketing copy.

But it’s this narrow slicing of music categories that illustrates the biggest problem the music industry faces–much bigger than the problem of MP3 file sharing. The sheer explosion of available music styles means there is no center anymore. There’s no music that we share as a culture.

As Bob Lefsetz writes:

The powers-that-be have lost their hold on America’s consciousness. It’s not about theft, it’s about listeners going their own way, into nooks and crannies, to something more satisfying than the mainstream crap foisted upon them by the major labels.

The star model is history. Burned out by not only vapidity, but choice. People do like music, just not what those who used to be in control want them to like.

Lefsetz makes the mistake of looking at the market through the lens of his own biases. He writes:

The biggest hit of the summer, according to mainstream media, is Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. But most people have never heard it.

I don’t know where Lefetz lives, but Umbrella was ubiquitous for six months all over the metro NY area where tens of millions of people heard it regularly. It came closer to a shared hit than any record since OutKast’s Hey Ya. It should win record of the year, although I’m hoping for a crash and burn acceptance speech from a strung out Amy Winehouse whose Rehab was also nominated (say what you will about the girl, she keeps it real).

Lefsetz’s characterization of mainstream pop as increasingly crappy is ahistoric. Mainstream pop isn’t any more crappy than ever, in fact it’s far lest crappy than it was in, say, the early 1950s when How Much is That Doggy in the Window? was the state of the art. However Lefsetz is correct in noting that in the million channel media multiverse, your mainstream and my mainstream might never intersect.

As Bob writes:

The Grammys are a mainstream show for a country that no longer is mainstream. And that’s why they’re irrelevant. The Grammys are about consensus. Whereas arguing with your buds over who’s good is now passe, you just ignore what doesn’t appeal to you and play in your own backyard, which you created.

Bob’s right, of course, but I can’t help but feel like we’ve lost something that once helped hold us together, or which at least held some of us together against some of them, a sense of pop culture as part of our shared identity, not just a smörgÃ¥sbord of product available for our choosing.

As it turns out, many of my favorite records of the year wound up on the Grammy list–Springsteen’s Magic is nominated in the rock album category, Brad Paisley’s 5th Gear in the best country album category, Joe Lovano’s and Hank Jones’s Kids in the best jazz category. But my favorite record of the year, Bright Eyes Cassadaga, is nowhere to be found on the NARAS list. And the best records I heard this year were archival releases–never before released concert recordings from dead jazz musicians: Sun Ra’s Disco 3000 Milan Concert, Mingus at Cornell 1964, and Don Cherry in Denmark in 1966. Maybe it’s time for a new category.