Art Attack – Everyone loves to hate the Grammys
John Rankine
2/5/2014
“But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece.
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don’t care – we aren’t caught up in your love affair.”
LORDE
Two French robots, a Goth teenage girl from New Zealand and a white rapper with a funny name, were the main winners at the recent Grammy Awards, and America is not happy.
The robots are understandable – they’re French, and looked a little creepy accepting their awards dans les helmets. Daft Punk won four Grammys, including Record and Album of the Year. The post Eurotrash, Godfathers of Electronic Dance Music produced last summer’s mega-hit “Get Lucky,” filling dance floors of clubs, weddings and Bar Mitzvahs everywhere. Despite the crossover success, many Americans despise EDM and hate that it garnered Grammy’s top honor.
Seventeen-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka, Lorde, picked up Grammys for Best Pop Vocal and Song of the Year for her international hit “Royals“ – a song critical of the Kanye/Kardashian-style excess in the music biz.
Most Americans are afraid of, and thus don’t like or understand, foreign teens styled ala Morticia Addams, with black ink-stained fingers, spewing lyrics wise beyond their years. Taylor Swift will do just fine. Swift fans saw red after her album Red, nominated for four awards, failed to win anything.
Many in the hip-hop community are upset that a white boy, not straight out of Compton, walked away with Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song (Thrift Shop), Best Rap Album (The Heist), as well as New Artist of the Year, beating out rap heavyweights Kanye West, Drake, Jay Z and rapper du jour, Kendrick Lamar.
Like the Blues, birthed in the plantation fields out of black oppression, Rap similarly came up from the streets of inner city America. African Americans understandably do not want to see their culture and art-form whitewashed or Pat Booned like they witnessed in the 1950s.
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, two white kids from Seattle, are no Elvis, but the three solid hits from their winning album were some of the catchiest, silliest and poignant pop on the charts last year. Maybe Grammy voters found it refreshing to hear rap not steeped in homophobia, misogyny or male hubris. Apparently you get zero street cred if you self produce a rap record without help from a major label and without a single “nigger” “faggot” or “bitches” in the lyrics.
We love to diss the Grammys. No one has taken the awards show seriously since Lionel Richie beat out Prince, Springsteen and Tina Turner for the top prize in 1985. Trashing the winners is an inevitable American tradition.
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