I have a fever for the flavor of Grammy
All the news last night & this morning seems to revolve around The Grammys – not that it’s surprising, of course. But it had slipped my mind it was even on. I’m more of an Oscars/Golden Globes man myself, despite my obvious obsession with music.
I’m not one to piss and moan about award ceremonies too much. I’ve long ago come to accept that they’re all flawed concepts, so I just try to evaluate them on a pure entertainment level. I’m less likely to cry about who wasn’t nominated than I am to whine about a boring performance or really bad jokes (although those are to be expected as well).
From what I hear, if you tuned out after Lady Gaga’s opening performance, you basically caught everything interesting there was to see (besides Beyonce’s really awkward cover of Alanis – she’s just way too happy to sing something that angry). Even the second half of Gaga’s performance featuring her duet with Elton John was boring. That’s not a slam against Gaga. I’ve actually come to appreciate her in recent months (though I still really, really hate ‘Poker Face’). I’m just not one for duets, especially Grammy duets. I gather I missed a truly awful one later on when Taylor Swift tried to sing with Stevie Nicks. Talk about strange bedfellows.
The honest truth is, I fell asleep. Yup. Right after Stephen Colbert presented an award my lids became heavy and I passed out. So another typical year at the Grammys, then. I did wake up just in time to feel shame on behalf of all of humanity for trotting out Michael Jackson’s children in public yet again, though. I think I was delirious at the time because nothing they said really made much sense. Then there was that 3D thing, but I’m not going to try to make sense of that, either.
From what I’ve read this morning, everything went more or less as everyone thought it would. Green Day, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Kings of Leon all walked away with Grammys. What a shocker! I don’t think anyone needed to watch to know those outcomes. Maybe they didn’t know the categories, but certainly the names were easy enough to call.
Let’s face it, Green Day are one of the biggest crossover modern rock bands out there, having softened their California punk side long ago. Kings of Leon made their bid to be the new U2 (the comparison is tiresome, I know, but U2 did sort of set the standard for lighters-in-the-air arena rock anthems) and may have succeeded. Taylor Swift has dominated the pop charts this year, and seemed to be omnipresent in most every form of media. She’s just old enough to not make the Grammy voters uncomfortable in voting for her (*cough* Miley Cyrus *cough*). And Beyonce? She’s basically MJ’s successor as the Queen Of Pop. You can’t deny her skill behind a microphone.
The interesting thing is this year’s Grammys had the best ratings the show has seen for 6 years. More than 25 million viewers tuned in to see the festivities (by comparison, The 2008 Academy Awards were considered a ratings ‘failure’ for only generating 32 million viewers. Movies will trump music in the popular consciousness every time), so it’s clear they did something right in the eyes of many. Whether that something was the nominees, the booked performers or some other immeasurable ingredient is for someone who is better at evaluating these sorts of things to elucidate for you. All I have to offer is that maybe, just maybe, the year in music wasn’t as dismal in the eyes of the public as it seemed to be in the eyes of so many bloggers. Bloggers viewing the world myopically? Never!
Look, being surprised at Grammy consensus is like being surprised at blogging consensus. It’s a very predictable phenomenon. When you add up all those opinions and average them out to get your best of this or that, the results will lack spice. That’s why individual blogs are a great tool to find otherwise unheard of musicians, while a giant year-end summarization of blog trends isn’t. Group behavior is easy enough to predict, but individual behavior isn’t. Individuals can really surprise you. But we can’t all have our own music awards shows on TV, can we? So we settle for the next best thing, and start writing a music blog that no one reads. Hurrah!
I think I had a point when I started writing this, but I forgot it. The end.
Tags: green day, kings of leon, lady gaga, phoenix
The Grammys are so boring and pointless. Taylor Swift made the album of the year? Uh, OK.
thats a brilliant post sean
I think the Grammys were on here in Oz, but if so I didn’t see them. I was on Twitter though when people were going on about it so I had a vague idea about what was going on.
I didn’t know about the Beyonce cover though until I caught it on the Italian news this morning as I was flicking through channels. It was painful. What was with all the gyrating on stage? That’s the last song I’d associate with gyrating.
Yeah Agnes, I have no idea why she decided to do that odd dance. And her voice is so well suited to what she currently (and has always) sang, so taking on an Alanis cover seemed really strange. I mean, kudos to her if she’s a fan and wanted to pay some kind of tribute, but it was just really incongruous with what she’d just performed. It’d be like her husband going on stage and doing a cover of Scott Walker.