I'm not sure how you can in the same breath say Bruno Mars is okay while at the same time saying the grammys are trash, considering he won album of the year last time out.
I actually looked at the list of past winners prior to the last few years, and it's not totally disimmilar to what the Oscars used to be fifteen years ago... some stuff that's obviously not great but is popular, catchy, sort of defensible and clearly not complete garbage (Adele, Daft Punk, Mumford & Sons), the occasional really good artist with mainstream recognition (Arcade Fire), and the occasional out-of-left field pick (Beck, Herbie Hancock). In no case did they actually get it right in terms of artistic merit other than arguably The Suburbs.
It may not be a perfect analogy but there is an analogy there, I think. And to extend it to this conversation, I don't think anyone's suggesting that some obscure experimental artist would win the grammy in anyone's ideal world, but more that the picks would look more like what Pitchfork considers its top five albums of the year, rather than mainstream radio friendly hits.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|