Last Friday, The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences released its nominees for the 2002 Grammy Awards Ceremony to be held on Feb. 27 in Los Angeles. Doing so proved that, once again, record sales?not artistic innovation or quality?reign supreme in the annual selection process.
The nominees for the year reflect that, once again, commercially successful or gimmicky recording artists that manage to capture the attention (and pocketbooks) of popular radio stations and TRL are singled out by the “experts” as the cr?me de la cr?me of the industry.
Predictable and tepid multiple Grammy nominees for the year include Alicia Keys, who sold 4.1 million copies of her debut Songs in A Minor on the strength of the single “Fallin’.” Denver native India.Arie, Nelly Furtado, adult-contemporary darlings Train, T-Bone Burnett (the man behind the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack) and country-bluegrass veteran Alison Krauss, all snatched four nominations apiece. Surprisingly, the ATLiens themselves, Outkast, were honored with five nominations, including the coveted record and album of the year props for “Ms. Jackson” and Stankonia, respectively.
The most telling, and disheartening pattern this year, however, was the multiple nominations of aging Irishmen U2 for the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and the singles “Walk On,” and “Stuck in a Moment.” The foursome’s latest effort, both objectively and with respect to their previous works, is frankly piss. Both the singles and unreleased cuts are anomalously uncreative, dull, technically simplistic, and blur together with virtually every other song targeted towards the adult/easy-listening demographic this year. This is not to say that the nominated tracks are meritless. Rather, they are inert and belie the creative force behind the band, which seems to be resting on laurels and cashing in on its brand-name status with All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Maybe the boys felt that dedicating time to their movement for international debt cancellation was more important than songwriting on this go. Nevertheless, U2 racked up nods for record, album, song and rock album of the year.
Other contenders for record of the year include Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” Alicia Keys’ “Fallin’” and India.Arie’s “Video.” Nelly Furtado, David Gray, India Arie, Alicia Keys and cock-rockers Linkin Park will duke it out for best new artist. All bets are on Alicia Keys, who, to those unfamiliar with Stevie Wonder, was certainly the most authentic and novel act to emerge this year, with the piano chops and record sales to back it up. College radio may be rooting for Gray, whose White Ladder elevated the singer-songwriter’s celebrity with the hit “Babylon.” Unfortunately for Gray, the sad, white folk-rock train pulled out of the station sometime around 1973. The competition from Keys will likely be insurmountable.
Ryan Adams, the geriatric Aerosmith, Linkin Park and PJ Harvey will go toe-to-toe with U2 for rock album of the year. This may be an unnattainable feat, however, given the comforting accesibility, media clout and star power of U2. In a perfect world, however, PJ Harvey would be the one to pull it out. Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, is her most sophisticated and dynamic work to date and one of the most evocative and haunting homages to New York in recent memory.
Finally, “rap” album props will go to one of a pool of cash-infused young black entrepreneurs: Eve, Ja Rule, Jay-Z, Ludacris or Outkast. Outkast is the surprise exception this year in an otherwise uninspired offering from the Academy. Indeed, the intriguing polyphonic stylings of Stankonia, while commercially salient, blurred genres and forged new musical trails by seamlessly integrating soul, R&B, drum ‘n’ bass, jazz and good old-fashioned southernplayalistic rhymes, in what is possibly the most amusing and groundbreaking hip-hop record of the past two years.
This last category seems to prove the rule, that if a record is not commercially viable, it is not on the radar. Indeed, with the exception of Outkast, the “rap” nominees are linked both by commercial visibility and virtually indistinguishable styles. For the moment at least, it is the benjamins, not the innovation, that remains king at the Grammys.
