katherinestasaph:

tomewing:

desnoise:

rawkblog:

perpetua:

The funny thing about all these confused tweets is the way that they are basically the reverse of classic “indie” snobbishness. It’s just a bunch of people embracing their extremely limited range of cultural knowledge and expecting to be congratulated for it. The thing is, while Arcade Fire may not be as mainstream as other nominees, they certainly are mainstream. Everything in music culture is so niche now that those more famous nominees would get the same “who, what?” from people at a different end of the pop culture spectrum. (via whoisarcadefire via theoreticalgirl)

Completely true. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a Lady Antebellum song, guys.

I don’t know— “Need You Now” is a pretty huge hit, Dave. Jon Caramanica reviews Lady Antebellum in the NYT. Not my kind of thing, but… maybe there’s a better example? (Esperanza whatever?)

My solution, as ever: not watching the Grammys. It’s petty, but it keeps me happy.

The idea of cultural fragmentation has become something that’s half truism half excuse but I dunno how relevant it is here. Most of the angry Grammy tweets seem to be citing Gaga or Eminem. I would imagine you’d need to look quite hard, even in Rawkblog’s discerning readership, to find someone who’d not heard of them.

The initial point - it’s sad that people’s reaction to something they don’t know winning an award is defensiveness, not curiosity - is sound of course. But was there ever a time when an album winning an AOTY at the Grammys (or the BRITS, for provincial lil’ me) induced an “oh, I must check this out” reaction, if you’d previously assumed it wouldn’t interest you?

And I’ll admit it: my initial reaction to these tweets was “ha ha, look at these kids and their lack of curiosity.”

But then again, I’ve never heard Esperanza Spalding, and I haven’t gone out to look up everything she’s done despite all the praise and plaudits. So I can’t really talk. I suspect a lot of people can’t.

(Tangentially related: I wake up to a text from my mother saying “Jay Z was robbed.” I, wha, huh?)

Esperanza Spalding played in a Portland indie jazzy pop band called Noise for Pretend in the early ’00s. I really liked them, although I wasn’t so happy that they gave the (male) guitarist half of the lead vocals. I still highly recommend their 2002 CD, Happy You Near. There’s some lovely whimsical songwriting mixed in with quality instrumental chops. Saldly, Spalding seems to have gone into more straight jazz, which I like less than than the jazz / pop hybrid, and her songwriting has gone all serious.