Popcorn Noises

Fake Outrage

I don’t think there’s much difference between the (ostensible) recording industry giving itself awards and, say, a widely-read magazine/blog putting out a year-end list of favorite albums. People should not treat them differently. Maybe the Grammys just produce a lot more talk because a lot more people pay attention to them, but I worry that since there’s a ceremony on TV where famous people get dressed up and make speeches people grant it more authority than they ought to. Sure, a handful of internet commentators might kvetch about the particular order of records on Pitchfork or The Guardian’s Best Albums lists, but for the most part there’s an understanding that these publications have certain taste bases and a certain readership that they cater to. They are not expected (by reasonable people) to fairly and accurately cover all contemporary music everywhere. The Grammys should be the same way. As I said last year when Arcade Fire won Album of the Year and all of Twitter pooped its pants, take a quick scan through the list of past winners and you’ll get a clear sense of the Academy’s taste. To me, it seems most of the time they cede the decision to vague popularity for genre awards, but they’ll enforce an ‘adult’ rock/soul/jazz sensibility for across-the-board ones. If you pay attention to the kinds of artists/songs/albums that tend to win those Grammys, the results of any one particular year shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

Also, the trend of vocal bemusement at any “indie” artist winning a Grammy—be it Arcade Fire last year or Bon Iver this year—is losing its humor fast. “Who ever heard of them?” go the rhetorical questions, as if visibility and record sales were somehow prerequisites of quality. There are these two lines of thinking—‘it can’t be good if it’s popular’ and ‘it can’t be good unless it’s popular’—that shape much of the gut reactions to these things and they’re both so incredibly wrong that it gets deep under my skin and makes my jaw tense up. We should not read a correlation, inverse or otherwise, into measurable popularity and perceived quality. The Academy is a body—like a person or a publication—with a set of tastes and if they’re shifting or expanding that taste, as any person or publication is apt and perfectly entitled to do, we can not hold it against them. The awarding of Grammys is an expression of taste and the public is owed nothing by it.