Overrated: The Grammys

Despite being accused of having what some may call a cynical view of many celebrations that take place from time to time on this earth, I generally enjoy award shows.  I like the jokes, the montages, the awkward moments when a presenter has had too much to drink or a winner just rambles on and on while most of the audience wishes they had the Sandman to clear the stage.  This love, however, does not extend to the king of the fraudulent award shows:  The Grammys.

This year's Grammys were admittedly better than years past.  Not only did Daft Punk take album of year (also my pick) but Taylor Swift was completely shut out.  The mass wedding ceremony was done very well, even if it did get a little awkward toward the end when Madonna came out wearing a massive white cowboy hat that was crying out to be relevant again.

But, nope, still gonna hate on the Grammys.  Why?  Because every year without fail, no Industry leading award ceremony kowtows more to the will of record sales and perceived self importance than the Grammys.  Whether it be Steely Dan taking home album of the year in 2001 or everytime Taylor Swift has ever won, no award ceremony is so manipulated by the industry it celebrates while somehow still managing to be so aloof.

Maybe I wouldn't mind it so much from the AMAs or the People's Choice awards, but the Grammys are meant to be the cream of the crop, they legitimize excellence within the realm of music.  It shouldn't just be about who sells the most records while also being the least controversial.

Case-in-point came in the in the Rap Album category when Macklemore and Ryan Lewis took the award for "The Heist".  Macklemore had a big year.  A viral smash with "Thrift Shop", being a the forefront of a social issue that many in the artistic community feel very strongly about (see: mass wedding ceremony).  The mega-hit album itself was beloved by many, including the overwhelming majority of the people watching from home, but it was also nearly universally passed over by critics in favor of Kendrick Lamar's debut, "Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City".  Kendrick had the critical appeal but he didn't have the masses or the soapbox.  What makes it worse, is even before the show, everyone KNEW Macklemore and Ryan Lewis would win, and with Kendrick being a black man, a "Does Grammy want Macklemore to win because it is rap that white moms in suburbia aren't afraid of?" Quasi-controversy already existed before Macklemore even won the award.

One of the most headscratching - yet typical - Grammy moments came in the Best Rock Album category, when Led Zeppelin won for it's live album "Celebration Day".  Led Zeppelin's place atop Rock n' Roll's Mount Olympus is beyond reproach, but a live album from 2007 featuring songs from the 1970s was really the best artistic and technical acheivement in rock music this year?  Really!?

The Grammys LOVE the safe and the popular.  Even in the face of logic.  Trying to please the masses trumps all else, and even though there may have been a few twitterites that watched the telecast in spite of living under a soundproof rock all summer, last night was no exception.

Oh yeah, and the cutting off of the final performance was total bullshit.

2013 Year in Review: Album of the Year, Random Access Memories

Robot heads, robot voices, 808s and a whole lot of guitars.

When one considers the album of the year, the music is not the only thing there is.  Maybe once this was the case, but it hasn’t been that way for a very long time.  It isn’t just how many tracks you can hum along with or how complex the time signatures are.  It’s about the social impact.  How much of a technical masterpiece it is.  What the album says, how it says it, and who it is saying it to.  How driven the artists behind it were to do something that makes people feel something, to make themselves feel something.

In that scope, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (RAM) was not only the biggest album of the year, but also the greatest.

It is ambitious, radio friendly, challenging, fresh, recognizable, and compelling.

It is the album that spawned the biggest radio hit of the year and it is the same album that features a nine plus minute track with a long voice over by Euro producer/DJ Giorgio Moroder.

It’s an album principally produced only by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo but features a dozen different artists from half as many genres of music.

It starts and ends with burst of visceral energy bookending its cold, brooding core.  Steve Hyden of Grantland deftly described it as “miscast” as an album of the summer thanks to its dance friendly mega-hit “Get Lucky”.  The album’s dulcet tone gives a feeling more that of sitting by a fire with a bottle of brandy in a solitary winter cabin during a blizzard than Forth of July at the Beach.  If you plan on listening to RAM, it is best to settle down with a glass of wine and your best headphones and set aside an hour and twenty because you won’t be doing as much dancing as you think.

This calculated melancholia is perfectly exemplified by the stellar “Doin’ it Right” and “Instant Crush”, the latter featuring Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas on vocals.

RAM features five different named artists on its track listing and several more uncredited ones that provided lyric or studio work.  There in lies one of the truly great accomplishments of RAM: variation.  Daft Punk was able to branch out and experiment while never doing anything that felt unnatural.  I would call it “taking chances” but they were in control the entire time.  They experimented with new sounds and genres and what they got was a great pop album that could still never be mistaken for anyone else.

There are many stand out tracks on RAM, but my personal favorite would have to be “Touch” featuring Paul Williams.  The eight minute mini-symphony ricochets from piano ballad to vaudeville-disco to techno space odyssey and back again and it feels completely natural.  The touchingly tragic tone of the song – with the child like refrain “If love is the answer, yeah, hold…hold on” – is nothing short of the heart of the album (coincidentally, 7^th of 13 tracks). 

It is a album that draws you in and can suck you down, but only just long enough to make the explosive release that much more pleasurable.  The most inspiring track on the whole album could very well be the final track, “Contact”.

Featuring an opening voice over recording from Apollo 17, “Contact” bursts with energy in a song built perfectly around a theme:  exploring the unknown.  Even without any words, you get the message loud and clear.

2013 Year in Review: Yeezus is Not the Album of the Year

When I first heard Kanye West’s latest album I was marginally underwhelmed.  It wasn’t as catchy, the rhymes weren’t as clever, and he didn’t produce it himself.  Even Kanye himself stated (many times) that music isn’t the main focal point in his career anymore.  But that was before I was told how great it was by every music critic on the planet. 

Everyone seemed to love Yeezus.  Even Noel Gallagher had to talk about how avant-garde it was (he called it “punk rock”).  Yeezus wasn’t just expertly produced and smartly written.  It was daring.

I remained unmoved.  Regardless of what I was reading, what I was hearing from Yeezus simply didn’t draw me in like other albums this year, or even past Kanye tracks.  The laughably bad (possibly trolling) video for Bound 2 didn’t help anything.  To make matter immeasurably worse for Kanye, the experts – aka people I’m friends with who listen to more rap than me – labeled Yeezus as a little tired and lackluster.  Kanye didn’t care as much about this album and it showed.

Still, I couldn’t choose an album of the year in good faith and not give Yeezus a few dedicated listens, so I bit the bullet and downloaded what Spin, Stereogum, EW, The A.V. Club, and Time all were calling the Album of the Year. 

Yeezus is certainly a good album.  The first four songs are about as strong as any opening four from an album this year.  “Black Skinhead” is the strongest all around track, but I have a personal affinity for “I Am a God”.  Kanye gauges his own ego (which has grown to comic proportions) perfectly and lays out his persona with some of the best rhymes on the album.  “New Slaves” has an incredible beat and sets the stage for an interesting commentary but Kanye fails to deliver with the lyrics, instead descending into safer, duller, “diss track” territory.  His intensity saves the track but you wish he could’ve thought of something a little more profound and little less petulant to say, “There’s leaders and there’s followers, but I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”… I hope that goes on your tombstone, Yeezy.

From there the album starts to drop off.  Most of it feels too subdued or uninspired only sparking quality moments, like flashes of good songs hidden within longer uneven ones.  “Bound 2” has a nice throwback feel to it for Kanye, but I fear it may be ruined for me after that ridiculous video.   Then there’s “Blood On the Leaves”.  Kanye samples heavily from the Nina Simone version of the classic song which just might be the most important song dealing with racism in America ever recorded and turns it into a break up song.  Now, I’m not an anthropologist, but I feel pretty strongly that there is many a paper that could be written about how the mere existence of this song demonstrates the differences in mentality of race and civil rights between generations in America (not to mention Kanye’s own messiah complex).

But even on the songs that don’t work you can still find the two things about Yeezus that work the whole way through: Kanye’s visceral intensity and the incredible production.  Kanye approaches the lyrics with a raw energy that most other artists would think unsustainable for an entire album.  It not only works for Yeezus, but it saves the album from sinking into monotony.  Praise of the production is a little more of a complicated affair. 

In the past, Kanye had been the primary producer on his albums.  It was one of the biggest reasons people routinely placed him among the best recording artists today.  In rap, the production credit is nearly as important as the name on the album cover.  So much of each track is shaped and built in studio.  A producer can turn great rhymes into garbage and mediocre rhymes into a great track.

Kanye wasn’t completely absent from the production process, but compared to his past albums it seems like he might as well have been.  Twenty Five.  That is how many producers Yeezus had working on it.  That’s not even accounting for producers billed as a group (Daft Punk, for example, was billed as one producer).  That’s more than two different producers for every track on the album!

Kanye and other producers described the process as something of a workshop setting.  A group of them would meet and go over different ideas they had for a track, many of them would be assigned a certain aspect of the track to focus on by Kanye.  Ironically, much of there work was reportedly undone late in production by Rick Rubin, who stripped down and reworked many of the tracks.

 This image perfectly captures either what Kanye actually sees when he looks in the mirror, or what he wants you to think he sees. But thats a whole 'nother blog post.

Yeezus is an interesting album.  To me it is study in what comes from jamming a room with expert musicians, songwriters, and technicians and forcing them all to make an album together.  The finished product is something that hadn’t really crossed over into mainstream music before.  It took influences from techno, rock, dupstep and hip-hop and assembled them in such a way that was radio friendly while still having an identity.  It wasn't wholly original but it was the first time it had been constructed as pop (which is not and should not be thought of as a dirty word in music).

It’s very impressive what Yeezus was, but I don’t know how daring an album can be when it has more producers than tracks.  It certainly isn’t “punk rock”.

Kanye and his band of producers made a solid album (and it is Kanye’s album) but it’s not his best and it’s not the best of the year.