Pop Life

The first of the year has brought with it the usual round of excessive back-patting from the entertainment industry. Last week saw the airing of the American Music Awards and the announcements for both Golden Globe and Grammy nominations.

Awards shows in general are really just overblown marketing tools. That’s why they tend to occur in the early months of the year. There’s very little new product out, so the industry figures it can make one last promotional push for the previous year by handing out a lot of high-profile awards. All the same, the Grammys and Oscars are the oldest of these institutions and therefore hold a certain level of prestige. While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has certainly handed its fair share of awards to turkeys, it does deliver the obscure, Geoffrey-Rush-type win here and there. But this year’s Grammy nominations further exemplify what a ludicrous farce these awards have become.

The Grammys have been notorious for decades for their glaring oversights. It would seem that no matter what decade it is, the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) are the same old out-of-touch, tin-eared buffoons. Such influential acts as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and many more went unrecognized in their own time, only to be awarded many years later. Just as ridiculous are those times when NARAS tries to update the awards by creating new categories. Thus its now infamous blunder back in ’89 when it introduced a metal category, in which Metallica was trounced by Jethro Tull, of all bands.

Things aren’t that bad this year, but they are no less strange. Beck’s Midnite Vultures got a best album nod, which is nice but curious for the sales-conscious NARAS, considering that it was a complete commercial failure. The Eminem nominations are disappointing, if only because they suggest that the Grammys are only willing to recognize controversial talent when an artist sells 12 million albums. It’s nice to see Shelby Lynne recognized, but how much does the singer’s fourth major-label album really count in the Best New Artist category? I know she changed her image, but doesn’t that mean we’d have to nominate Madonna as a new artist every year?

Then there’s the completely inexplicable: Is it fair to nominate Britney Spears for pop vocal performance? If your voice is that electronically altered, I don’t think it can honestly be called singing. Just as bizarre are the nominations for Celine Dion with Frank Sinatra and Lauryn Hill with Bob Marley in the Pop Collaboration With Vocals category. I’m not sure that singing along with a recording of a deceased performer qualifies as a collaboration—especially when we know that were Frank Sinatra alive he’d sooner kick Dion’s Canadian ass than sing with her. And what exactly is the Pop Vocal Album category? Wouldn’t that technically be a cappella?

My favorite questionable Grammy move is Kid Rock’s nomination in the Hard Rock Performance category for his humble ode “American Bad Ass.” The song basically consists of the Kid rapping over Metallica’s “Sad But True.” Which means that if he wins, the award should really be given to Metallica for the “Hard Rock” in the performance.

You get the feeling these categories and nominations were thrown together at the last second with only the broadcast ratings in mind. This may be closer to the truth than we’ll ever know. It just makes me wish the Grammys honored actual musicians for exceptional work. The awards show would be a hell of a lot more entertaining that way.

Forthcoming

Radiohead and Björk came forth this week with details about their new albums to be released later this year. Radiohead’s Amnesiac, the follow-up to last September’s Kid A, will hit stores in June and will consist of songs and tracks recorded during the Kid A sessions. Apparently wanting to balance out Kid A’s obtuseness, guitarist Ed O’Brien claimed in a recent interview that Amnesiac will consist of more traditionally structured songs. Also apparently feeling guilty about the lack of band exposure accompanying Kid A, Thom Yorke promised rather coquetteishly on the Radiohead Web site to deliver “singles, videos, glossy magazine celebrity photo shoots, children’s television appearances, dance routines, and many interesting interviews about my tortured existence.”

Björk on the other hand will be releasing her first album in over three years. The hotly anticipated Domestika has been described as “grownup and distinguished.” I suppose that’s in contrast to the rest of her oeuvre, bursting at is with beer-swilling, cheeba-toking, Licensed to Ill-type material. Of local interest, Ms. Gudmundsdòttir apparently collaborated on the lyrics to a song called “Harm of Will” with Nashville native son Harmony Korine. Given Korine’s penchant for abstract storytelling and Björk’s Icelandic eccentricities, I’m sure the song is full of subtle self-restraint and clarity.