Predictably, lots of people have been criticizing the fact that
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss won five Grammys last night, over the likes of
Lil' Wayne,
Radiohead,
Coldplay,
M.I.A.,
Leona Lewis, etc. I've heard complaints like they aren't as "relevent," their album wasn't talked about as much, that thier win for Album of the Year was "anticlimatic," etc. I've heard from that Wayne's
Tha Carter III was really the "album of the year." Plus, it was the year's best selling record! (An arguement I doubt these same people would have used to defend, say, the
Titanic soundtrack.)
Full disclosure: I'm a Grammy voter, and I voted for Robert and Alison for all five categories that they were nonimated in. After last year when
Herbie Hancock won Album of the Year, the Grammys really do need to try not to seem totally out of touch. I like Herbie Hancock, but that was crazy. On the other hand, no one minded that
Amy Winehouse won a bunch of Grammys, and who knows, maybe in a few years she'll be the star of "I Love The '00s." I predict that the 2008 Grammys will be seen as pretty embarassing, but in 2009, they got it mostly right (
Bruce Springsteen's lack of nominations in major categories for "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" notwithstanding).
But here's the real deal: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss mainly let their album speak for itself. I think MTV must have had a story about Lil' Wayne every day for the past year. Wayne's a young guy: he does mixtapes. He collaborates with anyone who asks him to. He's young. He does drugs and courts trouble. He needs to do this to sell records, and MTV,
Vibe and everyone else need constant Wayne stories to make themselves seem "relevent." To a lesser extent, many of the other artists in the running for big awards kept themselves in the news cycle, or at least their publicists did it for them. They are part of a conversation that Robert and Alison stay far away from, by choice.
Robert and Alison seemed to do interviews as a favor for thier record label, Rounder (who did a incredible job with the album that other record labels and marketers should really take note of), and were happy to let
Raising Sand speak for itself. Of course, Alison collaborates with artists nearly as much as Lil Wayne does: but no one really wrote about the fact that she guested on
Yo-Yo Ma's new album,
Songs Of Joy and Peace, or that she put out a Plant-less DVD,
A Hundred Miles Or More, featuring other collabs with the likes of
Brad Paisley,
James Taylor and
John Waite. Yes, "Missing You" John Waite. I actually love the fact that she doesn't know (or care) that when you have a certain amount of cred and you work with Robert Plant that you don't also work with Yo-Yo Ma or John Waite. Robert Plant did occasionally entered the news cycle: mainly because he wouldn't reunite with
Led Zeppelin. If you want to talk about "cred," the guy turned down tens of millions of dollars (maybe a hundred million) to do that tour, to stick with Alison Krauss, and to do the music that he believed in, instead of trying to relive 1972.
If you had any awareness of popular music in 2008, it was impossible not to know that Lil Wayne had an album. Or Coldplay, Radiohead or Leona Lewis. You may have not heard about
Raising Sand. To find out about it, you had to look a little harder, you had to
listen. Same deal if you wanted to appreciate it: you couldn't just play a hook from a song, you had to actually listen to the whole thing. The fact that an album like that, that was made outside of any real commercial considerations, that didn't pander or beg to be noticed, made by adults who know their age, to win six Grammys (it actually won one last year) seems like a miracle in 2009. And one we should be thankful for.
The headline reads like a dream for a U2-hating critic. But it's true, Bono and The Edge have been working with Julie Taymor, who did the great Beatlesque film Across The Universe, on a Broadway musical version of Spider-Man. I only wish that that was the worst U2-related news of the week. But the new album, No Line On The Horizon, hasn't been getting great buzz, and worse than that, they're being accused of "taking money away from the poor" in their native Ireland because they moved some of their business operations to the Netherlands where there are easier tax laws. Bono and The Edge did discuss this a bit recently. I just hope that Bono doesn't also join a few other big artists (like The Eagles) who are speaking in favor of the pending Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger.
A lot of people groan at the idea of tribute albums. I'm not one of them. I enjoy hearing artists attempt to reinterpret someone else's work. When done well, it can be as creative an endeavor as writing a new song. 
