Rap It Up

The Grammy Awards nominations just came out, and white male artists were shut out of Album of the Year, which shocked a lot of people. 

Quite frankly, I don't know why anyone was so surprised by the fact that none of us honkies got nominated for Album of the Year.  The truth of the matter is, white men in popular music have been marginalized by mass taste, and the Grammys are trying to reflect mass taste.  It doesn't matter if a white man makes a superior album (and today's fans and critics will tell you that he can't).  Today's pop audience likes music that makes you want to dance, and we white men aren't good at that sort of thing. We're good at making music you can play air guitar to, or writing boring artistic songs (as Britney Spears would put it) about the meaning of life.  But today's pop audience wants nothing to do with that.  And unless one of us is a cute guy named Justin, they want nothing to do with us.  I don't know how Ed Sheeran got anywhere.

The 2018 nominees for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences' most prestigious award include Melodrama by New Zealandic singer Lorde and 24K Magic by Bruno Mars.  If either one of those LPs wins, I'll have no problem with that.

But here's the problem I do have: The other nominees are rap albums - Childish Gambino's Awaken, My Love!, Kendrick Lamar's DAMN and . . . 4:44 by Beyoncé 's husband, Mr. Shawn Carter.

The preponderance of rap records in the Album of the Year Grammy nominations for 2018 is nothing short of a calculated insult.  Never mind race or sex here.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has not only embraced rap with fervor, it's also told us rock fans that our music doesn't matter.  It's also telling us to get over the fact that rap is the dominant form in pop today and deal with it.  We can complain all we want that rap isn't real music, but we're going to be told to keep our damn traps shut because we're obviously racist.  

One guy on Twitter pretty much set the tone of the attack on anyone who dares to suggest that rap isn't music. "White racists are shook that no white men got nominated for AOTY [Album of the Year] at the Grammys this year. They have the nerve to ask how 4:44 was nominated. How was Beck nominated? How did he win AOTY over Beyoncé?"

How was Beck nominated for Morning Phase back in 2015?  How did he win the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy over Beyoncé?  Maybe it was simply a better album, you twit.  I'll wager that Morning Phase is even better than 4:44 because Beck uses real instruments and actually sings his lyrics.  And to respond to the inevitable point that Beck uses electronics and rap verse in some of his songs . . .  yes, and those are my least favorite Beck songs.  The only thing more painful than listening to a black rapper is listening to a white rocker trying to rap.

I can't deal with people like this anymore.  I am sick of seeing dislike for rap always being explained as a racist rather than an aesthetic issue, and I'm tired of seeing rock acts dismissed and written off for being anachronistic and antiquated.  (One online article I recently read made fun of the current crop of rock bands by talking about how lame they are.  I almost threw a garbage can at the desktop monitor!)  The asinine political correctness in popular music that celebrates rap as a shining, innovative example of America's rich musical "diversity" and the dismissal of complaints about rap as some sort of bigoted "rockism" is unnecessary, misguided, exclusionary, and unbearable.  And if NARAS is going to celebrate rap as music while diminishing rock, then, as far as I'm concerned, they're as wrong to celebrate rap as they usually are when they award the Best New Artist Grammy - an award that has gone to folks like Debby Boone, A Taste of Honey, Milli Vanilli, and, of course, Chance the Rapper.

Oh yeah, Beyoncé's husband got eight Grammy nominations in all this time.  He's bound to go home from the Grammys with something.

In many ways, this is a victory for Kanye West, who's known for sticking up for Beyoncé on her behalf and for hip-hop/R&B in general.  After he interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 when she won an award he thought should have gone to Beyoncé, he was dissed for being a jerk because he interrupted a woman, and Beyoncé herself took the stage with Swift to show that there were no hard feelings.  But when West interrupted Beck's Grammy acceptance speech by momentarily getting onstage with him, Beyoncé and her husband were laughing and applauding wildly in response to the gesture. Although West apologized after charging that Beck was not a real artist, he got what he wanted.  Rock music, whether it's alternative rock performed by a white guy like Beck or traditional rock performed by a black guy like Gary Clark, Jr., is no longer thought of as artistically or culturally relevant.  Kanye doesn't just want rock to fall by the wayside, he wants to push it there!

There may be a new alternative-rock station in New York City, but it's merely one battle won in a war that continues to be waged.        

Who Cares About the Grammys?

So how do I think the Grammys will turn out?  I don't give a twit.  Because rock and roll is pretty much left out of the major nominations, what with all the rappers and the popsters and the good ol' country boys dominating everything.  Here is the list of nominees for Album of the Year:

25, Adele
Purpose, Justin Bieber
Views, Drake
Lemonade, Beyoncé
A Sailor's Guide to Earth, Sturgill Simpson

Obviously, Adele is the only artist here that I'm interested in, and I would love to see her win this award.  But I know that Beyoncé is going to win it, if only because Kanye West will disrupt the ceremonies if she doesn't.  I say, give the award to her to shut him up.  And she'll probably win Best Urban Contemporary Album for the same LP as well.   But Beyoncé picking up the Album of the Year prize would be better than seeing the the Album of the Year Grammy to go Drake or . . . Justin Bieber?  How did he get in here?  If he wins, I hope Kanye does take the stage in protest.  As for Sturgill Simpson, I don't know much about him . . . I know he's a country singer, and he doesn't have a chance anyway.  Suffice to say that I am not a big fan of contemporary country.  

And here are the Record of the Year nominees:

"Formation," Beyoncé
"Work," Rihanna, Drake
"Hello," Adele
"7 Years," Lukas Graham
"Stressed Out," TWENTY ØNE PILØTS

Again, I'd root for Adele if I cared about these awards, but the other mononymic performers will be in a dead heat for this one.  As for Lukas Graham and TWENTY ØNE PILØTS . . . never heard of them.  Shows how much I know about current music when I listen to a college-indie station play current artists that don't sell a lot of records, assuming they sell any.   Beyoncé will likely get this Grammy too, over Rihanna and Drake.  And Beyoncé will likely win Song of the Year and Best Video for the same song.

If rock didn't have its own award categories, it wouldn't win any Grammys at all anymore.  But at least Beyoncé wouldn't be nominated for anything there, right? Wrong.  Her song "Don't Hurt Yourself" - considered a rock song because Jack White is featured on it - is up against "Joe" by the Alabama Shakes (at last! a current band I've heard of!) David Bowie's "Blackstar" and Disturbed's astonishing cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence."

And she'll probably win that too.

It's obvious, though, that, even if Queen Bey weren't a factor, hip-hop and electronic pop are in vogue and rock is so out.  Beck's Album of the Year win for Morning Phase may very well have been the last time a rock album won a Grammy award without having to be in its own special category.  Which means that even though Kanye West - who has a problem with rockers like Beck winning anything - isn't up for a lot of Grammys this year . . . even if he doesn't get an award tonight, he's already won.

Forget it, rock fans - our time is up.

Note to Beyoncé fans who think I'm putting her down and are ready to leave hateful comments telling me to go to hell and giving me directions . . . I never said Beyoncé is not a good performer.  I merely note that she's not a rocker.

Foreign Music Affairs

In a music world dominated by so much American hip-hop and dance pop, I was certainly surprised to find out that The Suburbs, an ambitious album from the Montreal band Arcade Fire, had won the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy. Yes, I have heard Arcade Fire's music. Their work is very sharp an acerbic, with a lot of heart. That's why I can't believe they won the Album of the Year Grammy. Alternative rock bands from Canada aren't supposed to win such prestigious mainstream awards. Even though band founder Win Butler and his brother William are in fact Americans, just the fact that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences would nominate a band from across the border is news to me. I got to thinking that the only non-American pop act anyone cares about these days is Canada's Justin Bieber. It turns out, in fact, the the United States is one of many countries where The Suburbs hit number one on the charts.

The British haven't done so badly at the Grammys in recent years either. Although it was taken for granted that Robert Plant and American Alison Krauss would win the 2009 Album of the Year Grammy for Raising Sand, because the veteran Plant is popular with NARAS voters, I wonder how many people saw this coming at the 2009 ceremony - soul singer Adele winning the Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal awards on the basis of her single "Chasing Pavements," a song with a title that doesn't make sense in American English. (The word "pavement" is Britspeak for "sidewalk;" Adele was comparing the pursuit of a broken relationship to chasing an empty sidewalk.) It's also worth noting that two British bands that have been lucky to click with American audiences, Coldplay and Radiohead, have also been Grammy winners, with the record sales to back them up.

The past decade has been a mixed one for non-American pop acts, especially the Brits. The veteran rock critic Dave Marsh, noting the domination of American acts on the U.S. charts in the mid-eighties with the Brits were represented by poseurs such as Duran Duran or grizzled veterans such as Phil Collins, declared at the time, "British rock has never been so irrelevant." Wonder what he thought of the first decade of the new century? For awhile, unless he was Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, a British rocker couldn't get arrested in America. British bands like the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand were winning accolades in their homeland even as their names drew blanks here; in America, Arctic Monkeys may just as well have referred to missing links and Franz Ferdinand may very well have been the Austrian archduke whose assassination sparked World War I. (I'm kidding, of course; Americans know next to nothing about evolution or world history.) And were we really paying attention to Amy Winehouse for her music?

The Arctic Monkeys supposedly released one of the greatest albums of all time (so a U.K. music poll insisted) when they issued Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in 2006. We Yanks responded with a collective "Yeah, right" by getting that album no higher than number 24 on the Billboard charts. And Franz Ferdinand's 2005 album You Could Have It So Much Better didn't have it much better than 378,000 copies sold in the States in its first three years on release. (Their 2004 debut album only got up to number 32 here.) But Coldplay and Radiohead have kept the flame alight (another British word there) for British pop in America, and Adele seems to be poised to succeed on a much bigger scale than Amy Winehouse could ever have dreamed, now that her second album is coming out. ("Chasing Pavements" only got up to number 21 on the Billboard singles charts, but that could only be because too many Americans didn't know what the heck she was talking about.)

I've complained about the sun setting on the British musical empire here before, and I'm under no allusion that U.K. performers are going to reclaim for rock and roll American audiences lost to rap and Lady Gaga. Nor do I even believe that even British dance popsters could succeed in America on a big scale. Or, for that matter, British rappers. Hip-hop by nature is vulgar, narcissistic, and ill-mannered, which is why we Americans are so much better at it. But the recent accomplishments of British performers, coupled with those of their Commonwealth brethren in Canada (I'm not talking about Justin Bieber here), proves that, despite the nationalistic way of thinking Americans have gone back to with regard to popular culture, there's still an audience here open to non-American popular music.

Even if we still insist foreigners have to sing in English to have a hit here.

Wonder how long it will take Adele to stop writing songs with titles like "Chasing Pavements?" :-O