Right now, the United States is neck-deep in the midst of a war that everybody but the most die hard Republican apologists (I don’t mean mainstream conservatives, I mean that nutty 28% of Americans who think God buried dinosaur bones on the planet to test our faith) was based on faulty information. Whether you want to lay the blame for that solely at the feet of the President and his boys, or spread it around to the numerous other people inside the country and around the world who reached the same erroneous conclusion, I think the Iraq War was indicative of a deeper problem inside our society : that mental disorder that tends to turn us into herd animals whenever the stakes get really tough.
Groupthink isn’t just a bunch of people who mean badly tricking the rest of the world. Very few people would have gone into Iraq knowing what the consequences would be, and a lot of very smart people gave it the go ahead – not because they were stupid or mean, but because they didn’t want to risk being the one person that was wrong. There’s a certain safety in numbers that way. If you messed up, everyone messed up, so what? So while there’s rarely anything wise about conventional wisdom, and the ones who defy it are usually the ones who get the real adulation, just being mediocre is exponentially better to most people than running outside of the herd and being wrong.
Look at the history of the Grammy Awards. If you take a few minutes and write out a long list of the albums that shaped your life personally, or the life of your generation, you’d be shocked – shocked to know how few of those albums received, or were even nominated for, Album of the Year from the Recording Arts And Sciences folks. The last decade’s awards have featured Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, Alison Krauss, Norah Jones, U2, Ray Charles, and the Dixie Chicks. I mean… seriously? I fully understand that “best” doesn’t always mean “breaking” or even “artistically significant”, but come on. It would be like the Oscar Awards only giving out Picture of the Year to… stupid…period pieces…
OK, bad analogy. But I think that for any yearly “best-of” list to be respected by the public, it has an obligation to accurately reflect the times – the nearly absolute exclusion of hip-hop (excluding “safe” critical favorites like OutKast and every Kanye West album ever) from these nominations has been shameful and ridiculous. When history looks back at the huge impact rap music had on culture, on business, on the world, since crawling into the mainstream in the late 1980’s, it’ll look back at the Grammy Awards and wonder, what were they thinking?
This isn’t racism so much as it is stuffed-suit-ism and fear of the new. When the world was learning how to rock in the 60’s, the Grammy voters were listening to Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. A Grammy-ized version of 70’s history would have you thinking that Stevie Wonder and Simon & Garfunkel were the dominant acts of the decade. Bob Dylan finally wins one in 1998 for Time Out Of Mind – way to only be a few decades late, fellas. They missed the boat on rock music, on hip-hop, hell, on country. And why? After 40 years, aren’t they a little embarrassed?
Eh. Better to be embarrassed that to stick your neck out and give some hardware to Milly Vanilly, better to throw roses at the Emperor’s feet than draw attention to his tiny little dong flapping in the wind. It’s an honor to be nominated, after all – throw Shady a nod to let the world know you knew he was there, then slide that trophy to a nice safe choice like Steely Dan. In a business where controversy creates cash, the Grammy voters are determined to do the opposite, forcing an artist to verify himself and his genre over a long period of time, as if a cultural phenomenon can be transformed into a shaky scientific theorem, and Lil Jon, like an infinitely crunker Paul Krugman, can twist in the wind for a little while until all this stuff he’s talkin’ about shakes out.
Music is a little different from movies in that a great story is timeless. The situations are the different, the characters change with the norms of society, but that central method of creating and resolving conflict is something that every generation can understand. Music is different. It’s more complex, doesn’t fit into an accepted structure. In order to grow, it has to define itself in a fresh way for each generation. As a result, bringing together a group of old farts to find the “best” of the year each year is an even more futile effort to capture the (ahem) zeitgeist of the moment.
If we find out tomorrow that either global warming or our ability to influence it is a big sham, a lot of people are going to have egg on their faces. There will be endless recriminations, we’ll point fingers. Who said what, and why did we believe them? Aren’t we all a bunch of suckers? Groupthink isn’t a single tragic incident. It’s a facet of human nature – since we can’t know everything, we’re sometimes inclined to listen to others for their knowledge, taking it in from a lot of comfortable sources until we reach a comfortable average. But music, even in the flaccid world of critical acclaim, shouldn’t be about that. The math says that In Rainbows is due. With rumors of Radiohead’s departure stirring, it might be the last chance for those voters to prove they “got it” a mere decade late. The theorem is proven, the lists have been made and Thom’s guys have consistently clocked in at number one.
But how amazing would it be for that bunch to break conventional wisdom, the four star general in groupthink’s lazy army, and jump a little ahead of the curve for once.
Give Weezy his muhfuckin’ Grammy.