MUSINGS: The Fire in The Suburbs: Indie Music's Victory at the Grammys (w/ Podcast)

By Jack Delano, November 1940 / via Library of Congress Flickr

Below is the article, which is followed by a short podcast at the bottom of this post.

The following are actual quotes from Twitter reacting to the winners of the 2011 Grammy Awards this past Sunday.

"How can this group get album of the year when they didn't even have as many top 10 as Gaga. Did this group even have a number 1 hit?" (source)

"@thegrammys Fuck you! WHO THE FUK IS ARCADE FIRE? STOP RIGGIN THIS SHIT.... U LOST MANY VIEWERS..LOOK AT THE REACTIONS U LOST ALOT" (source)

"The Grammy's [sic] are fixed, like straight up; how are all these nobodys [sic] winning? And why is everyone from Arcade Fire hideously ugly? #appalled" (source)

"Esperanza Spaulding's [sic] twitter account isnt even VERIFIED thats how much of a nobody she is!!11k followers, thats it, & she won a grammy??!" (source)

"The fact that Arcade Fire are winning over people who have actually made an impact on the music industry is really fucking annoying." (source)

All the above were collected and found on whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com.

The issues at hand here are so great in number that it's nearly impossible to approach them all without dragging on a long discussion: kids raised in the autotune/Twitter/Facebook/MySpace age, bias, close-mindedness, mainstream mass marketing, good vs. bad, opinion vs. fact, etc. As a result, I'll try to stick to just a few points here.

MUSINGS: The Line of Talent Between Entertainer and Musician

sometimes it feels like we're just going in circles/photo via Nevver

I missed the majority of last night's broadcast of the Grammys, but I very briefly live tweeted the last hour or so that I managed to catch. Apparently, I didn't miss too much and, once again, the Grammys came off as a popular awards show biased towards a select group of artists and bands. It can claim to be a ceremony celebrating the best in the business, but really it has a narrow scope -- even if it does include top-notch performers/artists like Jay-Z and Beyonce.

Are the Grammys really a ceremony honoring the most talented musicians or the most talented entertainers? It certainly helps if you sell a lot of albums. I'm starting to realize that the majority of people in this country are more in tune with praising those that entertain us rather than those that intrigue or excite us. Of course what is entertaining can excite us, but does it stimulate us the way art does? Has our country gradually drifted towards celebrating the talent to entertain rather than the actual artistic talent of the artist?

Case in point: If you stuck The Black Eyed Peas in a room full of instruments (that they'd have to play...oh, and there was no autotune around) and, say Midlake, in the very same room, who do you think would impress you more? Is that unfair to the Black Eyed Peas? It's not fair to pit two groups from opposite genres against one another and it's also not fair to pose such questions with a bias towards one genre. Then again, are the Grammys really fair when you think about all that's overlooked and what is actually celebrated (though they did honor some guitar greats last night and gave an entire frame of the "In Memoriam" slideshow to Vic Chesnutt). Maybe I'm being too stringent on what defines talent. But according to the official Grammy website, the Grammys are unique because they "are the only peer-presented award to honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position." Uh huh.