The 2011 Grammy Awards

As long as I can remember, the Grammy Awards always disappoint.

When I was a child, I would watch (keep in mind, there were very few outlets for music before MTV) the award show every year and each time I would walk away frustrated that my choice usually wasn’t selected.

I remember Debbie Boone, the Starland Vocal Band, and it always seemed that they’d give Stevie Wonder an award for something.

All of it led me to the point where I don’t put a lot of weight into what happens at the Grammy’s and I certainly don’t take it as seriously as the show would like you to believe it is. And while it’s cool to see a beneath the mainstream artist wins an award, you don’t really lose much sleep over it when they don’t.

But I was genuinely surprised when Arcade Fire won the award for Album of the Year. It clearly was an upset and virtually no one in their right mind would have thought they had a snowball’s chance in Saskatchewan of winning.

See how I made a nonsensical funny there?

There performance was good, but not good enough for “normal” people to rush out and buy The Suburbs. In fact, even Barbara Streisand wasn’t quite sure if the band was called The Suburbs and their Album of the Year was called Arcade Fire. And call her old and out of touch if you’d like, but we all know it was Kris Kristofferson that looked like he had just arrived from a 5-day camp out in his car, fueled by nothing more than Tic Tacs and distilled washer fluid.

What’s even more hilarious than the easy picking senior sect were the immediate tweets from celebrities that pondered “Arcade who?” I’m sure there is a bunch of people under the age of 18 who are asking the same thing about Rosie O’Donnell and Tawny Kitaen.

I liked Cee Lo’s get up for “Fuck Forget You” as it reminded me of Captain Fantastic era Elton appearing on the Muppet Show. I had no idea why Gwyneth Paltrow was singing with him, and then I learned that she was in some country music movie. I was surprised at her singing ability, but then I remembered that she did some movie with Huey Lewis, which completely turned me off to her singing ability.

Speaking of singing ability isn’t it time for us to completely ignore Christina Aguilera by now. Seriously. Shut the fuck up.

Bob Dylan was awful, What else is new? Move on, people.

My wife thought that the band’s that came before Dylan were silly looking and over-excited. I said it was good television, and it would create some nice record sales for them. Sure enough, both Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers posted some nice sales gains because of their spirited performances.

I liked Lady Gaga’s egg thing, but my kids were bummed that Katy Perry didn’t win anything. “Fireworks” is a popular favorite around our house, causing my three-year-old to burst out in Elaine Bennis fashion and my son to stoop to silly levels in an attempt to snag some of the attention away from her.

They also like Justin Bieber, but apparently, the Grammy voters don’t. I think it’s hilarious that his fans took to Tweeting nesting things about Esperanza Spalding, with some girls going as far as to deface Spalding’s Wikipedia entry.

I thought Eminem rather sucked and I was utterly convinced that the Starland Vocal Ba…er….Lady Antioxidant would win everything. They seemed so nice, clean, and white-typically great barometers of Grammy voting. I had no idea about the song, but my wife sang every word of it. Go figure.

In closing, this year’s Grammy’s was everything I expected it to be-a predicable pat on the ass to those artists who still play by the rules and manage to eek out a few record sales. Seriously, the Lady A folks went out of their way to thank their label, their managers, and to “country radio” for playing their music, acting like this was 1990 when all of those things really mattered.

They don’t anymore, and neither does the Grammy’s. It’s an irrelevant event, reduced to a Sunday night showcase of mediocrity.

And while the world is abuzz on Arcade Fire’s curious case of sudden mainstream notoriety, the rest of the Grammy’s played like any other Grammy Awards show for the past half-century.

Arcade Fire Hits Number One! Big F*ing Deal!

Can we stop talking about Arcade Fire’s number one chart entry now?

Seriously.

I’m glad at the achievement and am impressed by the numbers for the first week and all, but if people really believe that this is going to translate into superstar figures then they need to only wait to see the chart entries from this week.

It’s pretty obvious that sales charts for recorded music albums is pretty irrelevant, and that high chart entries is nothing more than a chance to have about a weeks worth of bragging rites.

After all, for anemic weekly sales totals of 5,000 can more than likely get your band an entry into the top 50. It’s a sign that people no longer give a shit about albums-a point which breaks my heart, to be honest-and that the long player format is turning into a relic, a victim of record label greed and of artists inability to compile 30-40 minutes of worthy material-or to sag 30-40 minutes of decent material with 20-30 minutes of additional garbage.

For me, the big story of Arcade Fire’s week (aside from the actual music, of course) is their ability to sell out a pair of shows at Madison Square Garden. The performance was shown on the web (directed by none other than Terry Gilliam) and it also showed a very competent band that was able to transition from the theatre to the arena.

It seems that none of the spectacle-the grandiose build-ups and team-sized membership-is lost on the large stage. The vast space of the arena appears to be nicely suited to the band as early as their last tour would set up shop in the foyer of their theatre shows to play exit music for the leaving patrons.



Those gigs, it seems, will now be mentioned with the same affection of The Police’s first club tour of the U.S., the Velvet Underground’s Plastic Inevitable performances with Warhol, or maybe Springsteen’s first club tour of the U.S.

Because behind the hurdy-gurdy, the precocious heartbreak of Win Butler‘s emotional frailty, and the continuous dramatical dynamics lies a band that appears to know the playbook front to back. Their perceived ignorance of the spotlight and even Merge’s aw shucks act at not thinking too much about sales tally is just as contrived as smashing an acoustic guitar on Saturday Night Live.

My guess is that Win and the gang were looking more at Springsteen’s work at bringing up the E-Street Band from the bars to the arena than we give them credit for.

And you know what? More power to them!

Because we need to start feeding the arenas of the future with bands that can actually pull it off.

Think about it: besides Radiohead and the Dave Matthews Band, who else will there be packing those huge open spaces?

Don’t give me that “arena shows suck” bullshit; that elitism won’t fly and if you’ve never been awestruck by the shear communal bonding of an awesome arena show then you really need to get off of the computer right now and get out into the real world more often.

Or talk to your counselor about your debilitating fear of people.

I hate people, crowds, douchebags, and shitty concerts as much as the next guy, but when it all goes right, there’s a sense of community bonding that simply transcends nearly everything else. There is no politics, work-related bullshit, problems with the significant other, money woes-it’s all about the love of the music And when the music contributes its part, all of that other garbage goes by the wayside for at least an hour-and-a-half.

Sure, you can feel similar feelings at a club or theatre show, but there’s something about looking at a crowd of 10,000 people and thinking, “Holy fuck, we’re all in this thing together!”

I’ve been to enough shows now that I don’t think I’d be able to put a list together that does justice to all of the great bands that I’ve seen live. What I would need to do is separate them, from clubs, to theatres, to arenas, and then the list would be fair.

Based on that, I would easily put Springsteen in the top ten, and I’ve seen him with both the E-Street Band and without. There was no fancy light show or choreographed routines; just straight up rock music performed by a guy who seemed to understand that many people in the crowd paid a big sum of cash to get in the door.

He spoke to the crowd on their level, with jokes and the occasional self-deprivating comments. From what I heard, Win Butler used similar strategies at Madison Square Garden, joking about a Hakeem Olajuwon blocking a shot of John Starks in the Garden from ’94, prompting a chorus of boos from the Knickerbockers faithful.

We already knew that the Arcade Fire was proficient enough to sell records-both Funeral and Neon Bible are at or close to gold status in this age of shitty record sales. So the notion that the band was already going to have a high charting album was old news.
The real story was is how Arcade Fire had translated that success into an arena sized show that worked and paved the way for other bands to follow suit.

Because any band can make the charts nowadays. But it takes a special one to put asses in the seats.

The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

How easy is it to totally dismantle The Arcade Fire’s notable talents? Fairly easy, when you consider how they’ve managed to go from virtual unknowns to receiving kudos from David Bowie and David Byrne, hanging with Bono, tactfully lugging their equipment to the lobby of majestic venues to play encores while the crowd’s filing out, and to smash acoustic guitars on live television (albeit with some difficulty) while promoting an already heavily-hyped sophomore release. These things make it easy for non-believers (and several subscribers) to watch with a secret desire to see these Canadians fail miserably.
Perhaps the band foreshadowed the backlash for Neon Bible when they penned “Nothing lasts forever that’s the way it’s gonna be/There’s a big black wave in the middle of the sea…for me” (“Black Wave”), or perhaps it’s the prose of a band that’s struggling to find its footing after the surprise success of their debut.
Whatever their headspace is at this point, Neon Bible ultimately points to the sullen reality that their own neurosis is merely a reflection of everyone else’s neurosis too; from contemplating a second album to the deeper subject of living in a world of fear (“Don’t want to work in the building downtown/I don’t know what I’m gonna do/Cuz the planes keep crashing over us, two by two”-“Antichrist Television Blues”), the album perfectly captures the trepidation that is the Bush II years.
9/11 and the anxiety it created in America is written all over this record. From the paranoia in the aforementioned “Antichrist Television Blues,” to the realization “I don’t want to live with my Father’s debt/You can’t forgive what you can’t forget….I don’t want to live in America no more” (“Windowsill”), every apprehensive word is beautifully complimented with epic arrangements.
The Arcade Fire don’t offer a lot of solutions to these bitter years, so don’t go looking for answers here. Instead, they provide a very clear assessment of the curious mindset of our times (“You take what they give you/And you keep it inside” -“Intervention”) while meticulously heading towards the boiling point in their organic instrumentation without spilling over the top. This manages to create a whole other level of tense emotion, something that wouldn’t have been achieve if frontman Win Butler would have finally gotten to the point where he, ahem, decided to violently execute his acoustic guitar.
The remake of “No Cars Go” manages to sidetrack what would have been a perfectly sequences album; it’s a strange inclusion to begin with and it sticks out like a sore thumb. The only rational I can come up with for including it was to bring a sense of relief to an otherwise predominantly bleak album.
What the Arcade Fire should have considered was how beautiful their dismal landscape was to begin with. And if fans (and enemies) can get past the unattractive hype that’s led up to the release of Neon Bible and get around the unsightly themes that the record is based on, they will find a release that may very well be a contender for album of the year.