an open letter to Stephen Johns, bless his heart
After careful deliberation, I am reformatting my argument about Ray Charles winning the award for album of the year. My point, however, is valid. History has shown us that the various award academies are easily seduced into using an award that is supposed to honour a single piece of work as an homage to an artist's entire career. This is fact, whether you want to agree with it or not is beside the point. Probably the strongest case I can make to support this is to ask you to consider Mr. Randy Newman of Toy Story fame, who wrote the academy award winning song "If I Didn't Have You", from the movie Monster's Inc, in 2001. Have I ever heard this song? No, I haven't. In fact, I don't know a single person who can recall the song at all - it was that forgettable. Newman was up against Sir Paul McCartney and Sting, among other artists; there was absolutely no reason why he should have won. However, he did. Why? Because he had previously been nominated for 15 Oscars, and hadn't won a single one. The man was getting old, and the academy made a tired move: they gave him the Oscar for a lousy song as a way of commemorating his entire career.
I'm not in a position to say whether or not this is "right". But I'm asking you to consider that major award academies commonly use awards to pay homage to actors and artists - not always on the basis of their movie or album. With this in mind, my revised argument is as follows: Ray Charles may not have given us what was the best album of 2004 by your definition. That's fine. I would whole-heartedly support you if you wanted to develop your own awards show. I've also heard both 'College Dropout' and 'American Idiot' and agree that they truly did something phenomenal for music. That being said, KNOWING that the academy is going to act in a specific way and frequently uses the award=you-died-and-look-at-how-great-you-were tactic, Charles deserved to win. He deserved to win this particular award. Your argument about Zevon is fine, but he wasn't even NOMINATED - his cd couldn't have won, so it's irrelevant. If you want to talk about who is nominated for awards, that's a completely different ball-game. We're talking about who wins them and in this case, Ray is having the last laugh. Green Day and West, I suppose, can always try again next year.
1 comment:
Brianna, bless your heart, you're still skirting the Warren Zevon issue. The point isn't whether he was nominated or not: the point is that he *should* have been nominated, at least if we take the obvious links between Zevon and Charles into consideration. I guess the point is this: Zevon was still writing raw, edgy rock n' roll music at the time of his death, while the bulk of Ray Charles' catalogue would be right at home on virtually every single middle-of-the-road radio station in the world. If we recognize the Recording Academy's inherent bias towards safe, inoffensive music, it should hardly be a surprise when safe, inoffensive music trumps new, exciting, groundbreaking music--especially if the author of that safe, inoffensive music is an American musical icon. But that doesn't mean it's the right call.
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