Notes on the 50th annual Grammy Awards
February 11th, 2008 by Mosi Reeves in Music news
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES: Herbie Hancock wins Album of the Year at the 50th annual Grammy Awards.
(Photo by Kwaku Alston)
Every year, we get excited about the Grammys and the Oscars in the weeks before they’re held, and then complain about them the night afterward. But out of the two, I think the Grammys have it tougher. When it comes to film, people love their niches — art flicks, action movies, teen comedies, whatever — but manage to agree on a few great movies. Unfortunately, music is hobbled by generational, cultural and even racial divides. Worse, each group claims to have the best musical taste, and has little tolerance for anything else.
It’s rare when everyone agrees an album is good, which seemingly happened with Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black last year. An indicator of its vast appeal was the wide range of media that gossiped about her well-chronicled drug problems: websites and blogs, tabloid glossies such as Us Weekly, music magazines such as Rolling Stone, and even mainstream publications such as the New York Times. Black and white, young and old audiences bought Back to Black, and everyone took interest in her musical and personal life.
That’s why Winehouse dominated the 50th annual Grammy Awards last night. She won five out of the six awards she was nominated for and nearly swept the major categories, picking up Record of the Year and Song of the Year for her “Rehab” single and Best New Artist.
Winehouse’s sole loss came in the Album of the Year category. Although many observers were surprised when Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters beat Winehouse’s Back to Black and Kanye West’s Graduation, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. When it comes to the Album of the Year, the Recording Academy, which hands out the awards, tends to opt for two choices: a multiplatinum hit that draws a diverse audience or a late-period work from a legacy artist. Hancock’s win was something akin to a lifetime achievement award for a jazz legend. (My colleague Andisheh Nouraee calls this the “Steely Dan award.” Steely Dan’s Everything Must Go famously beat out West’s The College Dropout at the 2004 Grammys.)
In its best years, the Recording Academy strikes a careful balance between the legacy artists who have sustained the music industry for decades and the trendy artists who keep it relevant. The problem was, there were precious few artists who managed to win both critical and commercial success in 2007. Kanye West, Feist, Amy Winehouse … who else? For the most part, music fans veered between coarse, mass-marketed pop by the likes of Rihanna, Chris Brown and Soulja Boy and cultish indie fantasies by M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem, Panda Bear and Justice. For the most part — Rihanna’s “Umbrella” drew a Record of the Year nod, and Justice somehow managed to lose in three separate dance music categories, including Electronic Album of the Year, for the cleverly titled †(a cross symbol) — neither really fell into the Recording Academy’s purview.
Much like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Recording Academy subsists on the equivalent of prestige pictures, finely crafted recordings that are both impressive and portentous. However, AMPAS has grown smart enough to occasionally cite critically adored movies that don’t fall into the two major criteria of well-made popcorn flicks and pretentious prestige films. It’s a way to win the respect of tastemakers who celebrate a film’s overall artistic worth, not just its commercial value.
It would make sense if the Recording Academy finally began nominating critical darlings such as M.I.A.’s Kala in the Album of the Year category alongside the Hancocks and Winehouses, even though it has never really done that in the 50-year history of the Grammys. But if the Recording Academy finally works up the courage to move in that direction, it probably won’t be out of kindness. Record sales continue to tank, and fewer albums seem capable of pleasing both mass audiences and music critics. Out of the 10 top-selling albums of 2007, only West’s Graduation earned an Album of the Year nomination — and it was 10th on the list. (The nominating period for the 50th Grammy Awards ended in October 2007; Alicia Keys’ As I Am was released in November.)
I’m not one of those bluebirds who thinks the music industry will collapse and perish. Eventually someone will figure out how to fix the business. But it may be many years before that happens. In the meantime, the Recording Academy will still have to give out some awards.
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