So... How About Those Grammys?

Two music posts in a row? So, sue me. Anyway, this one won't keep.

I do find it weird, how I've started paying attention to the Grammys. As I said in the opening paragraph of my first post about the awards, back in March 2021, despite having been a major music fan since my earliest adolescence, it really wasn't until just a few years ago that I really even noticed they were happening.

Now, though, they seem to have become a part of my personal, annual award cycle, along with the Oscars and... well, that might be it, actually. BBC Sports Personality of the Year, maybe? That always seems to leech itself into my consciousness somehow. And a few game awards, I guess, although I generally couldn't name the winners the day after I heard about them.

Anyway, the Grammys are a thing I notice now and even if, for all kinds of reasons, they definitely aren't anything anyone ought to be taking seriously,  I do like picking them apart and complaining about them, which always seems to me to be the main point of awards. Also, I did a post about the nominations when they were announced in November last year, so I probably ought to say something about how it all turned out.

Better than I expected, not as well as I'd hoped. That's the short version. I'm afraid it's the long version we're getting, though.

I  was very happy to see "What Was I Made For?" win Best Song Written for Visual Media. I wasn't unhappy for it to pick up the award for Song of the Year, either. It's certainly one of the songs of the year. The sheer fact of there being three songs in the nominations for that category about which I could unironically say the same is a lot more surprising to me than which of them won. 

Of the three, I'd have gone for A&W because of course I would. Much though I love Vampire, I didn't even think it was Olivia's best song of the year. That would be bad idea, right?

It doesn't pay to look into the categories at the Grammys too closely. Not if you value your sanity. Still, I would like to know what the difference is between "Song of the Year" and "Record of the Year". I asked Bard, which gave me an answer that sounded convincing but didn't back it up with any sources, so I asked Bard's big brother, Google Search, which pointed me straight to the official definition on the Grammy website.

The difference, in short, is that "Song" is a songwriting award and "Record" is a technical award for production, engineering and mixing. Bizarrely and counter-intuitively, neither is a performance award, so when Bard told me Song of the Year "Focuses on the lyrics and melody of the song, regardless of how it's performed." (My emphasis.) it was a lot closer to the truth than I imagined.

All of which makes the Grammys even dafter than I thought they were. I'm pretty sure most people, hearing something's won award for "Best Song of the Year", would give most of the credit to the artist. Of course, in this case, the artists, writers, performers and producers are the same two people, so I guess the point is moot, but it is notable that Billie Eilish was up for Best Pop Solo Performance for the same song and didn't get it.

That went to Miley Cyrus with Flowers. Now, Miley's a big favorite Chez Bhagpuss. We think she's great. Flowers is a tidy tune and she sings it well. Seriously, though. That's a better performance than Billie's? I don't think so. Nor Olivia's. Possibly not even Taylor Swift doing Anti Hero, which isn't one of my favorites of hers, either. Surprisingly, this is Miley's first Grammy so I'm guessing maybe it was just her turn.

Speaking of production, as we were a paragraph or two ago, Jack Antonoff won Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for the third year running. I have very mixed feelings about Jack Antonoff. He can be really annoying and Bleachers, bar that one song I like, are quite poor, but he keeps producing truly great albums for multiple artists (And co-writes them, too.) so I have to respect his very significant and quite possibly supernatural talents. Still, they're going to have to give that award to someone else next year, surely...

On the topic of repeat winners, Taylor Swift walked away with both Album of the Year and  Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights. I own Midnights and it's fine but it certainly isn't better than either Guts or Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Also, once you win "Album of the Year", is it even possible for the same album not to win any other "Best Album" category in which it's nominated? 

I actually thought Boygenius would win. Not because I think "The Record" (So meta!) is the best - I haven't heard it, on which topic more to come - but because it very much looked like it was going to be Their Year. The indie supergroup won "Best Rock Song", "Best Rock Performance" and "Best Alternative Music Album", which in itself would make a solid foundation for a five-thousand word essay on "What's Wrong with the Award Categories at the Grammys".

I mean, come on! First, are Boygenius even "Rock"? Second, if they are, why was the album nominated for  an"Alternative Music" award, when there's a perfectly good "Best Rock Album" award? (Won this year by everyones' favorite feel-good band, Paramore.). 

For that matter, if the Boygenius album is "Alternative" (And it must be by Grammy reckoning, since that's the award it actually won...) and if Guts is "Pop Vocal", the category in which it was nominated, why are songs from each of them competing for the "Best Rock Song" award? Is someone at the Grammys literally going through albums and picking out songs that don't fit the overall musical style there so they can put them in for awards in the category where they feel they belong?

As I said, though, that way madness lies. just accept it and move on. In this case, to Best Music Film, which went to a movie I have seen, amazingly enough. The winner was Moonage Daydream, an impressionistic and thrilling compendium of David Bowie's career, or at least some of it. It's an excellent movie. I highly recommend it. It also released in 2022, which was when I saw it, so what it's doing in the 2024 Grammys is anyone's guess.

Joni Mitchell won Best Folk Album, which I think is probably the Grammys saying thanks for not dying, something I'm sure we all heartily endorse. Joni, of course, is right back in fashion, her influence evident in whole sub-genres of new music. It's wonderful to see her performing once again. Not that I've ever seen her live myself, more's the pity. 

Lou Reed, an icon of equivalent stature, only no longer with us, sadly, failed to pick up either of the awards for which he was nominated but two other acts that have featured here on the blog did collect, albeit for very unlikely categories.  

Wet Leg got the nod for their remix of Depeche Mode's Wagging Tongue, which was nominated in the arcane category of "Best Remixed Recording", although the award appears to go to the remixed artist not the one who did the remixing, which seems like giving the championship belt to the guy on the mat not the one who knocked him down, but there you go. Even more abstruse is the gong collected by up-and-comers Dry Cleaning for their debut album Stumpwork. It won "Best Recording Package". Your guess...

"Best New Artist" went to someone I've never heard of - Victoria Monét - although since the first video of hers I checked out has 33m views I think we can safely say that's on me. Very nice smooth R&B. Would listen again.

Other than that, I think I'll keep my own counsel, except to say the Grammys' understanding of "Americana" is very different from mine. Also, I wonder if Lana's proposed "country" album will get a nod in that category next year? Place your bets now.

Finally, a follow-up on that promise to say more about my lack of experience with Boygenius. Unfortunately, I can't really explain it. On paper, I should have been all over them from the moment they appeared. I like all three as individual performers so why would I shy away from them as a collective?

Search me but I have literally never heard a single note or watched a second of video from Boygenius in what seems like the brief time between their arrival, fully-formed, five years ago and the recent announcement that they're going on indefinite hiatus, something that co-incides rather awkwardly with their triple coronation at yesterday's award ceremony. 

These things, naturally, have their own momentum. Now that I've gotten this far without ever hearing the band, it's become more important that I carry on avoiding them than that I find out what all the fuss was about. It's a bit like that episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, only more stupid and less funny.

One day, I'll hear something by them by accident and then I'll be able to go back and enjoy everything I've missed but until then, I'll send them my congratulations and leave it at that. 

And that's all I have to say about the 2024 Grammys. Thanks for all the talking points, Grammy organisers. Same time next year? Well, I guess nothing I say will stop it happening so, yeah, sure...

"What Are We Doing Here? I Dunno. But Here We Are!"

I had absolutely no intention of following one music post with another. That would just be cruel. I also had absolutely no intention of commenting on the Grammys this year. I did it once and I think I got away with it but there's no sense tempting fate.

However, sometimes circumstances conspire and things happen that simply can't be ignored. This is one them.

Bizarrely - or perhaps not, if you follow my methodology - there's no tag for Wet Leg on this blog. There really should be, since I keep writing about them. (And there is, now.) A search query finds ten posts, just about all of them including a video. Anyone would think I liked them or something.

I first wrote about the band on July 22 2021, the same day I discovered them by way of a post on Everett True's now-dormant blog How NOT To Write About Music, a problem Everrett seems to have solved pretty handily by just stopping. I have no plans to follow his lead in that regard but I thank him once again for introducing me to the band he originally, if wildly inaccurately, assumed to be "some corporate-funded suck-ass rich kid duo from the Midwest of America".

As everyone now knows, they are not. They're from the Isle of Wight. At the time, that was pretty much all anyone did know about them. As they've risen to international fame, more has been revealed, including much that contradicts and confounds some of the more romantic myths about how the band was formed. They do not, after all, appear to have fallen quite so green from the tree as once was thought.

Still, they have no real form before the astonishing reveal that introduced their laconic, affectless, whimsical motorik drone to the world in a video now revealed to be the Best Alternative Music Performance of last year - in the eyes of the Grammy electorate, at least. Even if it actually arrived the year before. 

The band seem as bemused by the whole thing as, frankly, I am. I mean, to be nominated for the Mercury is one thing, even if you lose, but I always think of the Grammys as an exceptionally American institution. I'm kind of surprised to find any UK acts in the nominations at all. 

Added to that, when you consider the other UK artists who also got recognized this year, specifically the ones against whom Wet Leg were competing, you're looking at bands who've been around for years; bands with global profiles: Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine. And the rest of the nominees included Bjork ffs!

Not that the video for Chaise Longue doesn't deserve to be included in its category, where the list of nominees was strikingly similar. It's one of the best pop videos period, let alone the best "alternative" and not just of last year but of all time. The song, too, is a classic. I hope its creators remain as fond of it twenty-five years from now, when it's undoubtedly still going to be the one number from their back catalog they'll still absolutely have to play at every gig.

It's a big assumption, that Wet Leg will still be a thing going into the second half of the 21st century but these days no-one ever stops and one signature tune everyone remembers and can yell along to is pretty much all you're ever going to need. Of course, having just won what's probably the biggest award in popular music for making the best album in their weight class, first time out, no less, chances are they'll have more than one song to remember them by, come 2050.

Right now, though, I imagine the whole thing seems like a fever dream. When Rhian Teasdale made the first acceptance speech, for the Performance award she made no attempt to conceal her disbelief. With glorious understatement she observed "This year has been so surprising". For all of us, Rhian.

It's puzzled me for a while, the way every news report, review or opinion piece on Wet Leg refers to the band as a duo. It seems odd to relegate the other three musicians to the role of sidemen. It was heartening, then, to see drummer Henry Holmes take the mic for the second award and even more heartening to hear him describe the band as "one big, fucked up family." 

Given the exceptional level of fame and success this DIY project has achieved in just a couple of years, I suspect they're going to need that level of emotional support as they build what could and most likely will be a long and successful career. My closing comments from a year and a half ago, when I expressed doubt that the promised "string of releases", planned to follow Chaise Longue would ever materialize, look pretty silly now.

To add an element of realism to this otherwise positively surreal story, Wet Leg did not win the biggest award they were up for last night. While they dominated the relatively niche "Alternate" categories, they were unsuccessful in the much more prestigious, non-genre-based "Best New Artist". That was taken by Samara Joy, a jazz singer of some repute, with whose work I am wholly unfamiliar.

A typically wilful and idiosyncratic selection by the electorate, some might say. I couldn't possibly comment. I'll let Chris deVille at Stereogum do that for me:

"You never want to rule out the chance that the Grammys will reward a jazz artist just to remind you they’re the Grammys. Young singer Samara Joy could feasibly pull an Esperanza Spalding, given that she’s unleashing her rich alto on music that feels like it was in the same ultra-respectable mid-20th century milieu where many in the Academy’s brains seem stuck."

Curiously, despite having been a very early adopter, a fan to the extent of having a framed copy of one of their seven-inch singles on my wall, I don't really listen to Wet Leg all that often. They may have won the award for best album but they seem to me to be an archetypal singles band, best suited to be heard booming unexpectedly out of the windows of a passing car as it cruises by with all the windows wound down or popping up, suddenly and joyously, on MTV or whatever passes for music television these days. A whole album's a bit too much of a good thing. I find listening to it all the way through feels a bit like eating an entire box of chocolates on my own, self-indulgent and ulitimately enervating.

Anyway, congratulations to them all and here's to whatever they'll do next. One thing's for sure; the world's going to be watching, now. 

So, no pressure there, guys...

At The Grammys

Despite having been a huge music fan almost all my life I've never paid even the smallest passing attention to the Grammys. It's not for any moral objections to the concept of competition in the arts. I'm down with awards in principle. It's more that until really quite recently the Grammys never got much traction where I live. Not with my peer group, the general public or even the media.

In my teens and twenties I bought all the music papers and magazines there were. They all held annual write-in polls and I filled them out and sent them off. Weeks later, when the results were printed, I pored over the winners and losers, fulminated about the injustice of my favorites being ignored and crowed when the people I'd voted for came out on top.  

Those polls, parochial as they were, seemed like a big deal at the time. Later, in the eighties and nineties, when television picked up on the theme with big events like the Brits and the Mercury Music Prize, I'd watch those on TV and talk about them afterwards, ironically in the case of the former, more seriously for the latter.

The Grammys, though? Nah, they never figured. The music papers in the seventies and eighties didn't seem interested. They'd report the winners in a small news story but I don't remember ever seeing a feature article on either the results or the ceremony, not even once. 

Partly I think it was because the nominees and winners seemed so incredibly old-fashioned. The lists of names that got printed looked like a snapshot of your parents record collection, or possibly your weird cousin's, the one who didn't quite move to the same beat as everyone else. And those were the names I recognized. Most of them were people I'd never even heard of and at the time I prided myself on the breadth and depth of my popular music knowledge. 

Sometime much later, probably during the decade or so when I wasn't paying much attention to anything other than mmorpgs, it seems the Grammys changed a little. Not an awful lot, just enough to make them look about as in touch as the Brits used to be. That's a low bar but at least it's there.

I still never paid much attention. It was easy not to. The Grammys still don't get much traction in the British media, something that, now I come to think about it, is slightly strange, considering how the Oscars have always received major TV and press coverage. 

A few years back, though, I started following Pitchfork and they do take the the awards seriously. By which I mean they report every single winner in every single category and post video of all the performances. I'm not sure whether the writers at Pitchfork actually care much for the results per se; they report the whole thing with enviable clarity and precision but no critical evaluation whatsoever. It's pure, factual news. 

I still can't pretend I care. I can see that the nominees these days are intended to be some kind of snapshot of current trends, which I'm certain sure wasn't the case back when I was getting my music news from the inkies, but like the Brits it always looks as if something has to have penetrated the popular consciousness pretty deeply already even to make it onto the Best New Artist shortlist (I mean, Phoebe Bridgers? Doja Cat? Megan Thee Stallion? How new is new?).

Without intentionally trying to come off as any more hipsterish than usual and bearing in mind that I am over sixty years of age, even I find most of the nominations a tad mainstream. Which made it somewhat disturbing for me yesterday when I realised that possibly for the first time ever I actually own two of the big winners of the night. What's more, I'd bought them as soon as they were released.  

At the time, if I'd thought anything about it at all, I might have flattered myself my choices reflected some kind of eternal youth. Now I'm wondering if it was an indication of the exact opposite.

The two albums in question are the winners of Best Album of the Year (Taylor Swift's Folklore) and Best Alternative Music Album (Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters). What's more, I actually had Folklore playing while I wrote yesterday's blog post. I was literally listening to the Grammy Album of the Year on the day it won.

That feels very weird.

It's significant and possibly even more concerning that both of the awards in question were for "Albums". Just typing the word makes me feel old. It surprises me a little that albums as a concept still exist, given the extraordinary changes to the way music is distributed and consumed in the 21st century but there they still are. 

Wreckless Eric, whose blog I've been following since his Covid19 scare last year, popped up with alarming synchronicity this weekend to make that very point: 

"I keep recording stuff but it’s not easy to find the motivation to assemble it into a coherent record, an album. And I’m not a fan of putting tracks up on Bandcamp or whatever as and when. I admire other people for doing it but it’s not my thing. I love albums - LPs - collections of material designed to sit together and be listened to in a particular order Something to be considered, not cherrypicked and discarded. I know it’s an old fashioned view but it’s where I come from"

The figures show that's not how most people experience music these days and yet the album persists. I suspect that even now it's a format that makes emotional and creative sense to artists and musicians, even those who were born in this century, more than it does, or maybe ever did, to the people who end up listening to it.

 Either that or it remains an effective marketing tool. One or the other.

This week is actually a really big one in my personal music calendar and that's all because of an album. Friday sees the release of Lana del Rey's Chemtrails over the Country Club. I have it on pre-order. I should get it on the day of release. 

Of course, I could just stream it and have it at the nanosecond of release but apparently I still have to have the physical evidence of its existence or it doesn't count. Meanwhile there are already people out there doing breathtakingly good re-interpretations. Art moves fast these days.

It's either her sixth or her seventh official album, depending whether or not you count the almost-eponymous Lana del Ray, which came out in January 2010 and then got pulled from all outlets, physical and digital, for reasons that remain unclear. 

I have a download of it and gallingly I actually had it in my Amazon basket back in 2010, when I'd just discovered Lana and was wondering whether to buy it. I dithered, it vanished. There's a lesson there.

There's also the album Sirens she recorded four years earlier under the name May Jailer but never released, which I also have safely downloaded, courtesy of YouTube, and the spoken-word album Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, which I own in both digital and physical format as well as in the form of a book of poetry.  

Her last official musical release, Norman Fucking Rockwell, one of the best collections of songs I've heard in fifty years of listening to music and one of my top ten (maybe top five) favorite albums of all-time, was nominated for best album at the 2020 Grammys, when it lost to Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? I'm not quite sure why I don't own that one, too. I love Billie Eilish.

So maybe my owning two of this year's winners isn't quite so surprising after all. Had things gone slightly differently, I might have been able to write a post very much like this a year ago. 

Even so, I really shouldn't care even a little bit about the Grammys, I realize that. It may have toned up its cultural attitude to try and look somewhat less dusty and befuddled but only because to do otherwise would have risked slipping into utter irrelevance. The Oscars have been attempting a similar makeover with equally limited success but I guess we have to give them both credit for at least trying (although I'm not sure one of this year's big winners, Fiona Apple, would wholly agree).

I do remember being quite miffed last year that NFR didn't win, although given what did my irritation was necessarily muted. This year I was annoyed to see that Jack Antonoff hadn't walked away with Best Producer (Non-Classical). I mean, what does a guy have to do?

It's all good fun, though. The whole point of awards is to take them seriously enough to fight over the results but not to take them so seriously the fights matter. I guess the Grammys are worth a quick glance for that, at least.

It's a step up for them in my book. I'm sure they care.