When's It Gonna Be My Turn?

A couple of years ago I surprised myself by writing a post about the Grammy Awards. The opening line set the tone: "Despite having been a huge music fan almost all my life I've never paid even the smallest passing attention to the Grammys." The gist of my argument was that things had changed just a little, to the point where I could find something of interest in the coverage of the event, albeit mostly to argue about the decisions involved.

I was more surprised than anything to find I owned two of the eventual winners: Best Album of the Year (Taylor Swift's Folklore) and Best Alternative Music Album (Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters). I thought at the time it might indicate some cultural shift, that being my preferred explanation, although the worrying possibility also existed that it might mean my tastes were moving further towards the mainstream, with worrying implications for my carefully curated self-image and much-valued hipster cred.

Reassuringly, the next year, when I came to look into the possibility of a follow-up post, I couldn't find anything in the 2022 Nominations list worth writing about. The Best Album list did once again contain some recordings I owned - Olivia Rodrigo's first album, SOUR, Billie Eilish's Happier Than Ever and, inevitably, Taylor Swift's evermore, as well as Halsey's If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, oddly relegated to the Best Alternative Music Album category - but in the event none of them won and to talk about their inclusion would really only have been to repeat what I'd said the year before.

As for the 2023 nominations and winners, the less said the better. There's nothing on there I own and precious little I've heard and although there are some performers I respect on that list, I very much doubt there are many I'll be listening to any time soon.

This week, when the nominations for the 2024 Grammys were revealed, I felt the dial had swung back some. Enough to make another post viable, at least. As Pitchfork put it in their assessment of the slate, "The Recording Academy are a predictable lot. We’re reminded of this every autumn when a similar cross-section of ultra-popular and comfortably respectable musical artists are anointed as Grammy nominees." And yet, as the article went on to suggest, we may need to redefine our concept of "ultra-popular and comfortably respectable" if this is what it looks like now.

Of the eight "takeaways" listed in the linked Pitchfork piece, the one that most interests me is the second, headed "Welcome To The Indie/Pop Prestige Zone". It's undeniably a fact today that artists and performers who would have been considered niche or genre acts in the past or, at best, what used from the mid '60s through the '90s to be known as "Album Artists", now take their seats, albeit sometimes uncomfortably, at Pop's top table.

This can sometimes be hard to parse. In my head canon, Lana del Rey is filed right next to Lou Reed.  I see them both as driven, solipsistic songwriters, gifted with an immense abilty to communicate their complex and disturbing inner lives through imagistic language and elegaic melody. Neither necessarily comes across as a natural performer and neither has a great vocal range but both phrase a lyric as subtly as Sinatra, while displaying a peerless ability to convey meaning with an inflection. Still, you wouldn't call them "Pop". Except now we do. Well, Lana anyway.

Lou Reed was rarely successful commercially and certainly no-one ever thought of him as a pop star. He had a couple of freakish hits but anyone can do that. As for recognition by the Grammys, in a career lasting half a century he was nominated twice and won once - for an episode of the American Masters TV show about him, not for anything he actually recorded or performed. 

Lana, by contrast, after not much more than a decade as a recording artist, has already been nominated eleven times, although she has yet to win anything, so I guess Lou would say he was ahead. Yeah, he'd definitely say that.

Lana is also commercially successful in a way Lou rarely, if ever, was. Her eighth album (Officially.) Do You Know There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, currently nominated for Best Album at the Grammys, is just clinging on in the official UK Top 40 Albums of the Year by Sales list, at number 37. In my opinion, it's a difficult and challenging album but apparently I'm wrong and it's pure Pop.

And that's the point, or one of them, at least. In 2023, after a lifetime of listening to popular music, what passes for pure pop these days seems to me to be at least as nuanced and demanding as at just about any time I can recall. There have always been spiky, subtle, awkward presences in an and around the charts, alongside subtle, tricky, indefinable pranksters, performance artists, slumming intellectuals and bar-room philosophers but the swell of the mainstream has rarely felt as dangerously deep and swirling as it does today.

Lana's A&W just snagged a nomination for Best Song of the Year. Wouldn't you just love to be able to go back a few decades and play it to an earlier awards panel? With its devestating tonal and musical shifts and ever-present dark subtext, it's surely about as far from a traditional pop song as you can get without moving into another subgenre entirely. 

Contextually, the song is novelistic and bleak. The title, reduced from its full version as a sop to radio programmers everywhere, is shorthand for "American Whore". Wikipedia summarises the lyrical content, drily, thus:  "Del Rey addresses the "experience of being an American whore". The singer tells a story of a woman who has been relegated to "sidepiece" meeting a man at a hotel for sex. But she also touches on themes of loss of innocence, rape culture, and drug use."

It won't win, of course, but something I like almost as much almost certainly will. The Best Song nominations this year are breathtakingly good, including what could easily be among my own list of favorites from the last twelve months. Competing with A&W are Olivia Rodrigo's Vampire, Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero, Miley Cyrus's Flowers and Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For, all of which have either featured in music posts on this blog or were at least considered by me for inclusion. 

The other nominees are all of high quality and with two of the remaining three also being by women (SZA and Dua Lipa), seven out of eight of the artists in consideration this time are female. Pop music has always had a huge female demographic in its audience but now it seems that's finally being reflected in performance and, most crucially, in creation.

It would be simplistic and quite possibly some kind of inverted patriarchal appropriation to suggest the deepening and stretching of the range and boundaries of what we currently call Pop is solely down to women speaking to women but something's going on and whatever it is, I like it. Whether it signifies a long-lasting cultural change or just something for TV presenters to look back on in twenty years time with confused, indulgent smirks, like Britpop or 1980s hairstyles, remains to be seen. Never underestimate the ability of the established order to re-assert its privelige. Or the priveliged to re-assert the established order,  Either one.

I hope it's permanent. I certainly believe the degree to which all popular media - music, movies, television, comics, books, you name it - have been smartened up rather than, as has frequently and utterly inaccurately been claimed, dumbed down, is an irreversible process (For a given value of  reversability, of course.) Once you trade up it's hard to go back, as anyone who's moved out of a shared house into a place of their own will fervently attest.

As for Lana's chances this year, which is obviously the aspect of all of this I'm most personally concerned about because yes, I am still twelve years old, as the popular snappy comeback has it, I won't be placing any bets but they look promising. While she certainly won't walk away with the gongs for either Album or Song of the Year,  "Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd" is double-nominated in Best Alternative Album, where she has a great shot, and A&W is also in contention for the oddly-named Best Alternative Music Performance.

Add to that a nomination in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category alongside featured artist Jon Batiste for the magnificent Candy Necklace, and it could be Lana's year. I mean, it probably won't be but we can hope, right?

Let's convene back here in February after the ceremony, which takes place in the highly disturbingly-named Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, either to congratulate or commiserate. Or maybe if it goes badly I won't mention it at all and just go back to believing the Grammys don't matter. 

Which, I hope it goes without saying, they don't. 

Just keep telling yourself that...

 

A note on the AI used in this post.

The header image was generated at NightCafe using DreamShaper XL alpha2 at the default settings (Resolution: Medium, Runtime: Short, Weights 50/50.) The prompt was "Lou Reed giving Lana del Rey an Award at the Grammys. Norman Rockwell style".

(I tried DALL-E 2 only to discover likenesses of celebrities are not permited there. They did at least give me my credits back.)

The second image was generated using the same model and settings from the prompt "A young Lou Reed and Lana del Rey drinking champagne at the after-party Polaroid snapshot 1970s. Out of focus."I spent a lot of credits trying to get this one the way I wanted it, without a great deal of success. Believe me, that is a young Lou in comparison to all the ones where I didn't specify his age. It's also dangerously authentic-looking. I can see why the more powerful AIs are wary of replicating famous faces.

The images I really wanted, I wasn't able to persude any of the AIs to produce. I was hoping for a magazine cover, specifically the mid-70s Punk, which famously used cartoon versions of its cover stars, drawn by the magazine's creator, John Holmstrom, showing the two stars celebrating their award triumph, but I couldn't get any of the models to go anywhere near it. I'm seriously thinking of paying for one of the more powerful versions now.

Finally, it took me a while to notice but just about all of the images use Lou and Lana's likenesses for most of the background characters. Both the pictures in the post have a central figure that's an amalgam of the two stars. It's disturbiing, to say the least.