For fans of good and original music, especially popular music, tonight's Grammy Awards promise a truly punishing double-edged assault.
On one front are the children's brigades, far too young to properly modulate the lusts of which they sing. We may tap our toes to the Backstreets and Britneys and Christina Aguileras and 'Nsyncs, and they may placate our restless 11-year-olds, but do they really number among the greatest musical artists of our time? Can the Backstreet Boys's I Want It That Way really be one of the best pieces of music recorded all year?
And then, on the other side are the Frankenstein monsters. With the aid of Botox and liposuction, we can revive the exciting stars of our youth (many of whom we never gave Grammys to, for they were too risqué back then), grind their hard edges down, and prop them up on stage for safe middle-aged enjoyment. Here's Santana, whose musical innovation occurred 30 years ago, when he added the doodling guitar solos of acid rock to the Latin hits of Tito Puente. With a 25-year-old singer and a top-40 sound, he's become a billion-seller. And here's Cher, once a strange staple of prime-time TV, shape-shifted and rendered into the sort of music that comes out of a Pontiac Camaro. Can this really be described as the most important pop music of our time?
Of course not. What it is, as we all know, is the top-selling pop music of our time. A cynic would simply say that the Grammys are nothing but a measure of album sales, a broadcast reprise of the platinum-album presentations that take place in record-company offices all year. That's the case with Canada's Junos, most of whose award categories are based on sales.
But the Grammys are supposed to be blind to commerce.
"We shall judge a record on the basis of sheer artistry, and artistry alone," the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences says in its 43-year-old Grammy credo. "Sales and mass popularity are the yardsticks of the record business. They are not the yardsticks of this academy."
The academy's yardsticks, soiled from years of exposure to muck, are well worth examining.
The thing that you must not forget, though tonight's cheese-doodle marathon might erase it from your mind, is that this is actually a reasonably good and innovative time for pop music.
If much of the nineties seemed mired in grunge-clone homogeneity, that has given way to a period of diverse novelty, albeit squeezed beneath the troglodytes and the 10-year-olds. This is best gauged each year in the Village Voice survey of American rock and jazz critics, the "Pazz & Jop" poll, which has historically done a much better job than the Grammys in measuring the artistic tides of popular music.
This year, the poll gave top honours to a group of artists -- Moby, Magnetic Fields, Flaming Lips, Rage Against the Machine -- whose names are unlikely to be uttered in tonight's broadcast.
Some artists appear on both charts -- TLC's engaging soul harmonies and Beck's spirited pastiche appeal to both the Grammy jury and the critics -- but in the main, they might as well be separate planets of pop.
It has always been thus: Year after year, the Grammys have managed to miss or ignore the most significant developments in pop music.
When Bruce Springsteen was making his most original music, the award went to Rick Springfield (Springsteen's on the list this year, in the Frankenstein category).
When the Beatles were interesting, Mancini got the prize. The Rolling Stones have never been honoured except in the lifetime-achievement category, and Bob Dylan only for one of his mid-period religious albums. And so on, ad infinitum.
How can this be, when the Grammys are voted for by record executives, producers, arrangers and artists, who ought to know from music?
To understand, you have to look back, way back, to those blank-slate years after the Second World War, when the radio was alive with strange fads. The artfully written tunes of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter still held a certain sway, and a place in the hearts of record executives, but the prosperous GIs and their footloose children had other things in mind.
First came the polka fad, an enormous sensation (still visible at this year's Grammys, as Canada's Walter Ostanek and John Gora once again compete for the squeeze-box title). Then came faux-Italian music, and bossa nova, and a whole host of dance crazes that swept the nation. The conservative big-label record industry began to fear the worst: that this ethnic-music tour would eventually happen upon black music, and not the nice, spiritual kind, and white teenagers would disappear into its musky rhythms.
The record industry decided it was high time to head off this scourge, and in 1957, created its Academy to protect the solid, safe songs. As Billboard reported that year, the academy didn't want to be "a slave to the enthusiasm of teenage girls."
On one level, this is the biggest joke ever told: In its first year, three Grammys went to the Chipmunks, and teenage-girl tastes have always held strong sway (only displaced, in recent years, by the tastes of preteen girls). But this wasn't what the academy meant by "enthusiasm."
The likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis weren't even mentioned that year, or for most of the decade that followed, so the academy reflected the executives' fear of seeing their teenage daughters, loins afire, dancing to the dreaded sounds of rock 'n' roll. Ella Fitzgerald's Irving Berlin album won top honours that year -- a truly great record, but the sort of vinyl firewall that would not remain at hand for many more years.
Rock eventually did win the day, of course, but only after the big labels were able to rub it smooth. And so the trend has continued: Black music has generally only made the Grammy cut after passing through accepted mass-market filters such as Quincy Jones (who has won 25 Grammys, second only to Sir Georg Solti), and the most scene-setting pop artists are given thick buffers of, say, 20 years between their peak influence and their Grammy recognition. When rock raged, the awards went to the likes of Olivia Newton-John, The Fifth Dimension and Marvin Hamlisch.
Behind the murky ideologies of taste lie two serious structural problems that plague the Grammys.
For one thing, voters are not expected to have listened to every recording in each category -- thus voiding the whole notion of a jury of experts, preventing impressive but underexposed acts such as Magnetic Fields from getting an airing, and placing the Grammys in the same category as those dubious people's-choice awards.
And unlike awards such as the Oscars, where directors vote for directors and actors for actors, all Grammy voters are allowed to vote in all categories. As a result, pop honours tend to go to those artists whom classical and jazz record executives have heard of. And if Springfield sounds a lot like Springsteen, then you vote for the first one on the list. The results have been equally dire in the non-pop categories, where pop judges cast their votes glibly: Diana Krall has a very nice voice, but there is an ominous sense that her presence among nominees is not so much because of her jazz innovations (her style and song list would have been safe and conventional 40 years ago), but because she made an eye-catching appearance in last year's broadcast, and therefore was noticed by the huge crowd of pop voters.
At the pre-Grammy gatherings Los Angeles this week, there has been one new and encouraging refrain: This could be one of the last real Grammy awards. Many music-industry figures believe that the Internet's freewheeling music-distribution system, still young and unproven, could be on the verge of unseating the entire record industry. Music will reach listeners, and money will reach musicians, without the thick buffer of big-business record companies. If that happens, Grammy votes will count for little, and after 43 years, the record industry's bland-taste firewall will finally collapse. Few will miss its annual feast of disappointment.
WILL WE BE ROBBED?
As the rest of the world watches the slick musical spectacle unfold on television, a small pack of Canadian journalists will huddle in a windowless room beneath the Staples Center in Los Angeles, calculators and fact sheets in hand, measuring the depth of their country's humiliation. Will Celine get robbed? Shania? Diana? Sarah?
Whenever awards are handed out, Canada plays the role of a customs clerk: Place of birth? Thank you. Anything to declare? Never mind that the national birthplace of pop stars is a subject of interest only to tax authorities and angle-starved journalists. Faced with the sandblasted monolith that is the Grammys, nativism at least provides a narrative. Nativism also offers a fitting backdrop to the constant, historic theme of the Grammy awards: disappointment.
Herewith the complete list of Canadian artists directly or indirectly up for Grammy awards:
ALBUM OF THE YEAR: When I Look in Your Eyes, Diana Krall SONG OF THE YEAR: You've Got a Way, Shania Twain and "Mutt" Lange BEST FEMALE POP VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Sarah McLachlan for I Will Remember You Alanis Morissette for Thank U BEST POP COLLABORATION WITH VOCALS: The Prayer, Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli BEST POP ALBUM: Mirrorball, Sarah McLachlan BEST FEMALE ROCK PERFORMANCE: Possession, Sarah McLachlan BEST FEMALE COUNTRY VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Man! I Feel Like a Woman, Shania Twain BEST COUNTRY SONG: Come On Over, Shania Twain and "Mutt" Lange BEST JAZZ VOCAL PERFORMANCE: When I Look in Your Eyes, Diana Krall BEST POLKA ALBUM: Yearning for Polkas and Waltzes, Walter Ostanek Follow Me, John Gora and Gorale BEST INSTRUMENTAL ARRANGEMENT WITH ACCOMPANYING VOCALIST: The Prayer, arranged by David Foster for Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli BEST MUSICAL ALBUM FOR CHILDREN: Dreamosaurus, produced by Cathy Fink (with Marcy Marxer) BEST ALBUM NOTES: Rob Bowman, The Last Soul Company BEST CROSSOVER ALBUM: Take the A Train: The Canadian Brass Play the Music of Duke Ellington BEST CLASSICAL VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Ben Heppner for German Romantic Opera BEST SHORT FORM MUSIC VIDEO: Freak on a Leash, co-directed by Todd McFarlane BEST INSTRUMENTAL COMPOSTION WRITTEN FOR A MOTION PICTURE: The Red Violin, music by John Corigliano. BEST OPERA RECORDING: Ades: Powder Her Face featuring Winnipeg's Valdine Anderson as principal soloist BEST INSTRUMENTAL SOLOIST PERFORMANCE WITH AN ORCHESTRA: Martha Argerich, piano for Prokofiev: Piano Concerti Nos. 1 and 3 & Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 3, performed with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit