Grammy games

Where all (bestselling) music is equal

by Jon Garelick

The best Grammy Awards show I ever saw was in 1991. That was the year that Harry Connick Jr. beat Tony Bennett for "Best Jazz Vocal Performance," Kitty Wells won a lifetime achievement award, Aerosmith got a Grammy for "Janie's Got a Gun," Wilson-Phillips sang a number, NARAS president Michael Greene delivered a genuinely impressive speech about censorship and artistic freedom, and Bob Dylan, with Operation Desert Storm pending, performed an incomprehensible version of "Masters of War" before receiving his own lifetime achievement award from Jack Nicholson.

Then came Dylan's acceptance speech, as he scratched his nose and squinted at his plaque and coughed up a fur ball on the Radio City Music Hall stage: "My daddy, he didn't leave me too much, he was a very simple man and he didn't leave me a lot, but what he told me was this, he did say, `Son . . . ' " Tremendous pause as Dylan scratches some more and adjusts his dented fedora and stares at his plaque. "He said so many things . . . " Tremendous laughter. And then, without missing a beat, "He said, `It's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.' Thank you."

That's a whole sight better than Eddie Vedder's "I don't know why I'm here" from a few years later ("Spin the Black Circle," Best Hard Rock Performance, 1995). There was also the year host Garry Shandling announced that he liked Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle because "it's a good album to listen to with your bitch."

The music industry's Oscars are perhaps more entertaining than the movie-industry version because they're even more profoundly ridiculous. Am I wrong in seeing more commonality among directors and actors, producers and cinematographers, than I do among Snoop and Harry and Tony Bennett, Dylan and Willson-Phillips, and this year's nominees for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal: the Beatles ("Free As a Bird"), Gin Blossoms ("As Long As It Matters"), Journey ("When You Love a Woman"), the Neville Brothers ("Fire on the Mountain"), the Presidents of the United States of America ("Peaches"), and Take 6 ("When You Wish upon a Star" -- yes, that one, which Jiminy Cricket did so well originally)?

Music, it would appear, is the truly democratic art form, even at the commercial level of the Grammys, where virtually every nominee comes backed by a major label. (I didn't see any artists recording for Touch & Go, Kill Rock Stars, Matador, or Minty Fresh in my list of nominees in 89 categories.)

Arguments have always abounded that the Grammys are irrelevant and unrepresentative. They have suffered embarrassments throughout their history: Bob Newhart beating Frank Sinatra for Album of the Year (Button Down Mind); rock and roll getting ignored, from Elvis to the Stones and Beatles; it all reaching its nadir when Milli Vanilli got an award for an album they didn't even sing on.

But in the past decade, the Grammys have more than made up for past oversights, and they still reign above the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Awards as the big daddy. All the naughty boys of rock, from the Stones and Aerosmith to Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, have received their due. It's true that commercial viability is still the motivator, but hey, Tracy Bonham? There's a record that will surely go gold, but wasn't there enough platinum product around to keep her out of the running if they'd really wanted to? She's not a mere Best New Artist, either -- she's up for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance (for "Mother Mother," up against Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Joan Osborne, and Bonnie Raitt) and Best Alternative Music Performance (against Tori Amos, Beck, R.E.M. and the Smashing Pumpkins).

With Beck and Bonham in there, you can't say the Grammys are simply a platinum-card club. And things get even more liberal -- of necessity -- down at the folk and jazz end of the categories, where Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ("traditional" folk), Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Richard Thompson are all getting props (even though Bruce Springsteen will probably take Best Contemporary Folk Album for The Ghost of Tom Joad). So dry your tears for Robyn Hitchcock and Guided by Voices and Sleater-Kinney and Pavement and Stereolab. Their day could come, and then maybe it will be your awards, too.

Because that's the rub for me -- not the commercial underpinning, the glitz, the fact that Harry can beat Tony. It's that the Grammys operate at a level of objectivity that I can't begin to comprehend. Take 6 and Presidents of the United States of America (POTUSA)? Or the Frank Sinatra/Luciano Pavarotti duet of "My Way" going up against Sting, John McLaughlin, Dominic Miller, and Vinnie Colaiuta for "The Wind Cries Mary" from the RCA tribute album to Jimi Hendrix, In from the Storm? Should these guys be in the same category for anything? And my personal orbit of taste is probably farther away from Babyface Edmonds (12 nominations) than Chris Ballew is from Celine Dion. The big ballads that get the Grammy push are enough to make my skin crawl: Dion's "Because You Loved Me," the Tony Rich Project's "Nobody Knows," Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart," and Gloria Estefan's "Reach" -- ewww! Those insipid melodies!

But whether he's writing the tunes or only producing, Babyface has the magic touch. His tunes may be bland or bouncy, but he gives his singers the perfect context. On his multi-nominated Waiting To Exhale soundtrack, Whitney and Toni get to moan and sigh over a rainbow's spectrum of percolating rhythmic colors. Brandy gets a Sly Stone bass riff, and TLC get to strut their stuff, but smoothly. Babyface even gets credit for Eric Clapton's entry this year. "Change the World" (from the Phenomenon soundtrack) has the same little verse-chorus chord change that "Tears in Heaven" had, but Babyface babies it up with one of his angelic choruses to cushion Eric's thin falsetto. Babyface is young Quincy Jones, the producer who sold the world. At worst, his stuff is pleasantly innocuous; at his best he's some kind of insidious genius. (On his own The Day, released too late in the year for Grammy eligibility, he does Steve Wonder vocals until, lo and behold, Stevie himself shows up on "How Come, How Long" and steals back his show.)

If anything, the Grammys prove how divided the music still is. It's a foreign world to rock-and-roll kids, who come from a country where, as critic Simon Frith once wrote, "everyone is an expert -- everyone knows what makes their music significant, other people's music vacuous." It's a country where Sheryl Crow is despised as a phony even though she has one of the most enjoyable singles on the radio right now, where Garbage have campaigned against indifference for two long years before coming up with a hit single (the Grammy-nominated "Stupid Girl") and thus a hit album, where the Fugees are inexplicably the only big Grammy-time heroes in sight with credibility and nominations (though "Killing Me Softly" and "No Woman, No Cry" has made The Score a jagged little pill for me). Aside from aberrations like Dylan's performance in '91, a moment here or there for heroes like him or Wells, you sit and cheer for the home team. This year there isn't much for rockists to cheer about besides Beck and Bonham, and maybe the Pumpkins if you're not sick of them already. But we'll just have to take our lumps. Like it or not, the Grammys are more real than rock and roll.

CBS will broadcast the 39th Annual Grammy Awards presentation live from Madison Square Garden beginning at 8 p.m. on Wednesday February 26.