Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Stick your gramophone up yer...

If you haven't noticed, the Grammy's are coming up next week. I couldn't care less about the awards since they're almost always out of touch and meaningless when it comes to the music that really mattered in the past year

The 2005 Grammys are more of the same. While there are some good nominations in there, it's pretty clear that the most deserving in specific categories will not have a chance to win. Heck, some of the best artists of the year haven't even been nominated!

Take Franz Ferdinand, for example. Here's a band which is the perfect thing for the Grammys to latch onto. Not only are they critcally acclaimed, they're very, very popular. But alas, they're only nominated in 3 categories, and those are pretty lame: Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Alternative Music Album, and Short Form Music Video.

Huh? The best rock band eligible for 2005 Grammys gets only that? How about Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year?

The Grammys have latched onto one good artist and that's Kanye West, but the sad fact is that he'll get blown out of the water by all the post-humous awards that Ray Charles gets.

This is the problem with awards shows, people who think they know music and the industry try to dictate what's good and not good. Sure, the opposite extreme of the People's Choice Awards is lame too, but seriously, when people who supposedly know music give nominations to Nelly, Maroon 5, and Los Lonely Boys over artists like Franz Ferdindnand and The Streets, there's really no reason to watch.

Except for the U2 act.

So I'll set my DVR to record the Grammys, but I'll be skipping through everything except the two or three acts which actually matter.

Oh, and another thing, the folks who run the Grammys clearly don't understand how to run their website either. I went over to grammy.com to double check on the nominations, I clicked several times on what I thought would give me a listing of 2005 nominations, but nothing works. One link opened up iTunes so I could buy the lame 2005 Grammy CD. One link took me to a description of their awards shows. Finally I gave up, went to google, and searched for the list. First link in the results? The 2005 Grammy nominees...on the Grammy website. Instead of putting 5 ads on their homepage, why can't they just put a nice big graphic which leads straight to the nominees??

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surprise, surprise, I have an opinion on this matter. The Grammys have less to do with high quality than any other awards in any medium. Just compare a critics poll to Grammy nominations/winners for any given year. And you're right, they should latch onto a band like Franz Ferdinand that is also very popular, but more often they completely miss the boat. The infamous initial Heavy Metal Grammy going to Jethro Tull, or the fact that Milli Vanilli won a Grammy, should tell you all you need to about this farce of an award.

-Anish

Atul Teckchandani said...

Dude! I was with you all the way until you knocked on Maroon 5. I want to drop what I'm doing and run the other way everytime a Los Loney Boys song gets airplay. But, I have had the Maroon 5 album in my main iPod playlist for the past year -- I'm still not tired of it!

Jigar said...

Ok, I'll grant that Maroon 5 has a non-zero amount of talent. Here's one that's hard to argue with: Hoobastank is nominated three times!