Grammys make statement with Arcade Fire win
The Grammy Awards are among the strangest of awards shows, especially in the last handful of years. As the music industry has struggled to adjust to that all-consuming entity “The Internet,” its shows continue to get louder, more elaborate and full of more and more awards.
For the most part, the Grammys haven’t taken a chance to make a statement in quite a while. Last year’s Album of the Year, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless,” was emblematic of its moment, a cushy-comfortable, pop-country album that celebrated an earnest new star. A list of other winners reveals respectable, if safe, choices –- Dixie Chicks, U2, Ray Charles, OutKast.
That’s what makes Arcade Fire’s win on Sunday so startling — “The Suburbs” is far from your normal Grammy fare. It’s a sprawling, intimate, thoughtful meditation on what it means to live in the suburbs and how the suburbs have affected a shift in collective thought. If that weren’t enough, Arcade Fire is an independent band, and the Grammys are often perceived as a way for the industry to award the industry.
Coupled with a Best New Artist win for relatively unknown Esperanza Spalding over the likes of Mumford & Sons, Drake and Justin Bieber, the Grammys definitely used the 2011 ceremony to try and make a statement to relevancy — or maybe it was a plea.
Maybe they recognize that as much as the industry needs its superstars –- its Lady Gagas, its Katy Perrys, its Justin Biebers -– it needs to stand up and recognize not only “good music” but music that exists outside of the label hierarchy that’s produced through unconventional means.
That’s not to say the Grammys didn’t have their fair share of typical wins –- Lady Antebellum’s conventional “Need You Now” won Record of the Year over Cee Lo Green’s “F**k You,” Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” won Best Pop Performance and Eminem’s “Recovery” expectedly triumphed in Best Rap Album.
From Lady Gaga hatching from an egg to perform her new single “Born This Way,” to Dr. Dre and Eminem performing together, to Gwyneth Paltrow laying across a piano and singing with some Muppets, the show definitely did its best to retain a sense of spectacle and audacity.
Taken all together, the performances and the winners represent a hybrid as curious and indefinable as the contemporary music landscape itself. While seeming to favor the big, top-40 acts in nominations — showers of praise for Gaga and Bieber, among others — the lack of wins for teen icon Bieber and more independent acts like The Black Keys winning awards speaks to the constantly shifting space of the music world.
Maybe the Grammys are trying to become relevant, or maybe this was a fluke for a mostly conventional organization. Either way, it feels good for those who believe in something other than Auto-Tune.
That’s Entertainment.