Whither Tradition?

When the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has waved the white flag of surrender, you start to wonder why you hold out hope for rock and roll to come back.

So who won the big Grammy Awards last night? I don't give a twit. Most of the the nominees this year were performers rooted in hip-hop and electronica, two pop forms I equate more with static than with music.  (Thank goodness for the "rock" category!)  Pop critic Tris McCall of the Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger sees this as a good thing - an acknowledgement by NARAS that popular music has changed and that the Grammy Awards should represent this. He sees this as a major sea change comparable to the late sixties when NARAS realized that rock and roll was for real and awarded the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the Album of the Year Grammy. In an article in yesterday's Star-Ledger, McCall argued that hip-hop and electronica have produced some of the most innovative music of the past decade while NARAS has tried to avoid acknowledging it, preferring to give Grammys to what he calls "traditionalist" performers like Adele and Mumford & Sons, who made albums that McCall said are worthy of the honors but "don't reflect popular music as it is experienced by listeners - and by refusing to acknowledge that the art form has changed, the Grammys undercut the authority of the industry they’re supposed to celebrate."

So what does this shift in award nominations mean? I'll let McCall explain it as he sees it:

"The Recording Academy has at last nominated a field of candidates for its top prizes that ratifies something most fans of music have long taken for granted: Hip-hop and electronic music are the twin cornerstones of contemporary pop. Traditionalists persist, but almost all producers looking to score hits are taking their cues from rap and club records. This is even true in Nashville, where mainstream country artists are increasingly borrowing recording techniques from hip-hop and actively seeking collaborations with rappers and club spinners." 

So, rock and roll is officially irrelevant by the standards of the recording industry. Since the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is an arm of that same industry, the big record companies seem to have suggested that with hip-hop and electronica dominant - and with even country and western singers drawing inspiration from hip-hop - there's really no need to acknowledge rock and roll except for nostalgic purposes.  Hip-hop is much more profitable, after all. :-O

Rock and roll performers, when acknowledged, still have much to offer; I've heard plenty of innovative music on the remaining alternative-rock radio outlets in the New York area that I listen to, and it's played on instruments you can't also play video games on. It has a lot more substance than the glossy, style-driven mainframe computer sounds that permeate the Top Forty these days. So what if it's "traditional?" At least rock and roll is something that's deeply rooted in the past, not some fly-by-night pop phenomenon kept going by cynical producers and venal A&R reps. The only reason that NARAS has stopped honoring "traditional" music is because it doesn't sell in appreciable quantities. Well, of course it doesn't, because record companies haven't given rock and roll performers much support of late.

"Traditional" music would do better on the charts if it were better marketed, if more record companies signed guitar groups now thought of as being on the way out (just like in 1962), and if rock radio stations didn't keep going off the damn airwaves. There are teenagers young enough to be my kids who love the Beatles - would we be celebrating them fifty years later if there weren't? - they like a lot of other "classic rock" bands, and the success of Adele and Mumford & Sons clearly showed a demand for "traditional" pop and rock that's mostly being under-served. I think there are a whole bunch of young people who yearn for more of the same, more rock of Beatlesque or "traditional" quality, and they want more of it. But if NARAS, who as recently as 2011 honored the contemporary Canadian band Arcade Fire for The Suburbs, has decided to pay more attention to its biggest cash cows - none of which are rock acts - then this could be game over for "traditional" rock and roll. And until "traditionalist" fans get more respect, rappers and electro-poppers will keep up their swagger while rock fans sit in the corner and cry wah-wah. 

Isn't it a pity? :-(

By the way, indie-rock station WFUV-FM has finally gotten around to playing British bands Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys. Sure took 'em long enough - those bands have only been around since, like, 2002!