What the heck?
It's almost impossible to know how to really take in the 2004 Grammies- when they presented "Record Of The Year" to the lone non-hip-hop nominee, Coldplay's "Clocks", you couldn't help but think the Grammies were going to shaft hip-hop yet again. Nothing against "Clocks"- it's an amazing tune, and the only real competition it had in that category was Eminem's "Lose Yourself"- but with the category filled with hip-hop songs and with a lot of hype surrounding the Grammies' recognition of hip-hop after all these years, the awarding of "Clocks" wreaked of stubbornness, that the Grammies, no matter how popular hip-hop got, would never ever recognize the creativity the genre possesses (albeit, most of that creativity doesn't get to the radio but then again, most of the creativity in any genre doesn't get to the radio). Then the Grammies flip-flopped and gave OutKast, arguably one of hip-hop's most creative acts in our generation, the prized "Album Of The Year" award for "Speakerboxx/The Love Below", which contains the infectious singles "Hey Ya!" and "The Way You Move". It should have been a delirious triumph, as finally hip-hop was being honoured. Instead, it was confusing- at first the Grammies were shafting hip-hop and then they turn around and celebrate it. One can't help but think this was staged, that the only thing the Grammies wanted was to avoid another fiasco a la Metallica's "Ride The Lightning" in 1987/88, where the year that heavy metal was supposed to be honoured was debunked due to Grammy conservatism and only got the honour it was due a year later after a huge uproar and embarrassment for the Grammy commitee. At least hip-hop was honoured, right? Yeah, but I wish I could feel better about it.
Of course, it doesn't really help that the Grammy Awards Show looked like it would recover from some embarrassingly dull performances and routines in the early going to be a show that would have been watchable, though not at all brilliant, if only it didn't bungle its greatest moment. The show began with Prince (Prince? I know it's twenty years since "Purple Rain" came out but both him and that movie are long since history so why should we care?) performing "Purple Rain" only for Beyonce Knowles to come on during the performance and hijack it with a Prince-led rendition of "Crazy In Love". Okay...The performance was cohesive and two did gel together, but neither of them seemed to care that they were up there, making the performance extremely dull. Several other performances- including The White Stripes' embarrassingly incoherent and off-balance cut of "Seven Nation Army", the horrible Beatles tribute featuring music's most overrated artists (Dave Matthews, Pharrell Williams and Vince Gill) and a bored-looking Christina Aguilera in "Beautiful"- continued along the "dreadful" route, as did many of the presenters, many of whom just went through the motions and read off teleprompters, with one exception- the presentation of John Mayer and Matthew Perry, which was pretty funny and entertaining. Perry, in his true Friends form, began by joking that Mayer wrote "Your Body Is A Wonderland" about him and that the Perry/Mayer musical group was done because "John's musical, I'm not".
Eventually we got to the night's first great performance (there were a mind-numbing 18 performances on the show), Martina McBride's heartfelt and captivating "Concrete Angel". The song itself is a little overdone as a single, but live it came to life in a whole new way, mainly because McBride actually felt like she wanted to be there and wanted to put her heart into the song, unlike several of the other early performers who couldn't care less. The Grammies could have taken off from there if it wasn't for some robots- whoops, I mean Jakob Dylan, Evanescence's Amy Lee and another lady (whose name I forget)- reading teleprompters in presenting the next award. The show then continued along at a horrifically dull pace, making the next half hour or so a test of endurance. It wasn't enough to make an Algebra test seem like a more entertaining option (like the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards) but it was still boring.
Then we got to the highlight of the night, the funk show presented by an energetic Samuel L. Jackson, a self-proclaimed "Minister Of Funk". It was a lively event stolen by a brilliant performance of "I Need Love" by Robert Randolph And The Family Band (the song came out last May and it's STILL amazing), who would wind up producing the most entertaining, liveliest and ultimately best performance of the night. OutKast's Big Boi (Andre Patton) also produced a lively moment with "The Way You Move", even though the only "live" part of the performance was his rapping and Sleepy Brown's singing. The event closed with a clunker, as George Clinton and his band seemed to be on completely different pages turning what could have been a good song into an incoherent mess.
Still, it did inject some life, which continued with a hilarious award presentation by Jason Alexander. Alexander, in top form, joked about Britney Spears' Las Veags marriage, saying "it was the best seven hours of my life" and that "my was really upset" (for those of you who don't know, it was a different Alexander that Spears married), delivering it with sincerity and expertly feigned sadness (and without looking at the teleprompter. That's skill right there). I wish I could have said that fellow presenter Snoop Dogg was just as captivating, but he was pretty robotic (reading right off the teleprompter) and stumbled a lot through his lines (yep, he's really given up on marijuana...). It didn't take away any of the new life injected into the show, but Snoop could have been better.
Up a little later was the Foo Fighters with Chick Corea with "Times Like These". Corea was amazing on piano, the band less so. They sounded like they were going through the motions over top the studio recording, as the only thing that felt "live" about the performance was Corea and Dave Grohl's singing. Maybe it was live, but the guitars and drumwork felt way too polished to have been "live". Then came The Black-Eyed Peas with a stirring and lively rendition of "Where Is The Love?", making a song that was a lot better than what went to radio. Then came the confusing mess.
It came time to present the biggest awards of the night- Best New Artist, Best Record, Song Of The Year and Album Of The Year, with Best Rock Song By A Duo Or Group somehow meriting inclusion in this segment (it's an important award, sure, but put it before this segment like the other genre categories are), with each one presenting the chance for hip-hop to finally get some recognition as the genre had plenty of nominees in each category. The first award was for Best New Artist, where Evanescence beat the heavily-favoured 50 Cent for the award. No complaint from me- other than T. Raumschmiere, Evanescence was 2003's Best New Artist, and "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'" was a horrible album anyway. Then came the aforementioned Best Record, with four of the five nominees being hip-hop acts. Surely this would be it, where hip-hop finally got recognition. Nope, Coldplay's "Clocks" got the award, and congratulations to them about it because they deserved it for that song, but with hip-hop being shafted in those two awards- especially with the odds tipped in their favour- it certainly appeared like the Grammies were deliberately debasing the genre like it did during the heavy metal and rock 'n' roll eras. Then came Song Of The Year and a nomination for Eminem's classic "Lose Yourself", surely the favourite in this category. Nope, time to give it to Warren Zevon, who did a pretty good song with Bruce Springsteen but certainly didn't produce adequate competition (let alone something brilliant- it's sad that he's dead but I personally don't think too highly of him like Johnny Cash's "Hurt" because there's far better country/folk material out there).
0 for 3...the prospects didn't look good for hip-hop. Then came Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin of OutKast) performing his humongous (and ultra catchy and brilliant) hit "Hey Ya!", which is sure to be a staple on the radio for decades to come. It was presented in a pretty funny routine by Jack Black, who set the performance in 2999, an age where music was dead but had a hope, with that hope being Benjamin, clad in Native garb and executing a stunning performance with lots of Native dancers and a picturesque jungle setting. It was one of the rare experiences where a hugely visual performance on an award show was actually captivating, and it injected a lot of life back into the show. It didn't really make any forget the Grammies' debasing of hip-hop because the act stung too hard for anything to help the show overcome it. Then came Album Of The Year, and considering the prospects, it didn't look like "Speakerboxx/The Love Below" would get the award. To my surprise, it did, but I didn't at all feel the jubilation I was supposed to: with hip-hop getting badly shafted before, was this merely a face-saving attempt by the Academy or an actual recognition of the hip-hop genre? Congratulations to OutKast for the award- they deserve it- but I wish it could have come under happier circumstances.
Maybe I should feel happy that hip-hop finally received its due in 2004. However, until I see it getting the same recognition year in and year out, I still won't believe that OutKast's victory was anything more than a face-saving attempt and that the Grammies still refuse to acknowledge the entire hip-hop culture. Oh how I wish things could have been different, but alas, the Grammies did it to themselves. Like they always do.
Periphery Notes:
-It was, as the Toronto Star's Ben Rayner predicted, a night full of tears, and the show ran into the "sappy" range. Don't get me wrong, it's sad that all those people died, but do we really need all those tributes? They grew heart-tuggingly annoying by the end of the night, certainly not something the artists would have liked in rememberance.
-At first, the Academy President's speech encouraging the U.S. government to use "mass spending" to aid musical programs in jeopardy due to government cuts was a much-needed and stirring remark, one that needed to be said and delivered with the gusto that gave the issue the urgency it needed. Then he turned it into a rant about how "downloading hurts music" and that the P2P generation "hurts music culture". Gee, could have seen that one coming... *rolls eyes*
-The epitome of "head-slappingly bad": Carole King, in an obvious attempt at being witty, said that without songwriters "we'd all be singing 'la la la' and without melodies it would just be speech." Naw...really? *shakes head*
-Okay, nothing against "Underneath It All" or No Doubt, because both are good, but how did it beat Matchbox 20's "Unwell"? Let alone get nominated? Isn't the Grammies supposed to honour 2003 music? Because "Underneath It All" was 2002, not 2003. I'm not sure what the commitee were thinking with that one.
-Yeah, he was forced, but Justin Timberlake took the "controversey" surrounding the Super Bowl fiasco in stride, apologizing sincerely (even if Timberlake's assertion that it was unintentional isn't really believable) and even finding the time to draw a little, tasteful humour out of it. Whether or not you agreed with what he did, at least Timberlake handled the situation well and didn't make the situation any worse than it actually was (oh, and kudos to P. Diddy for adding some more humour to the mix: he said that if he would have known, he would have done something even more outrageous so as to make sure that Janet Jackson wasn't unjustly attacked. LOL...what a guy).
Final Score: 2/5
-DG