— When will.i.am shouted, “Welcome to the future!” as he and the rest
of the Black Eyed Peas cavorted with a blur of dancers through a medley
that sounded like a military cadence mixed with an ad jingle at the
52nd Annual Grammy Awards Sunday, he wasn’t only spouting a cliche. His
bulletin announced that pop music’s winning game is changing, and that
the only way for the music business to survive is to jump into the
pandemonium.
This year’s telecast and the awards it celebrated
showed how the recording industry is definitively moving beyond albums,
and even songs, as the basic unit by which music is both sold and
affects our lives. Instead, music is increasingly enhanced by visual or
dramatic elements that deepen or even change its messages; it
intersects with other art forms, like dance and fashion, to form more
complex statements, and benefits profoundly from the active engagement
of fans. These perennial realities have now thoroughly transcended the
idea that the literary, privately absorbed version of music —
exemplified by the vinyl records that played on the gramophone that is
the Grammy symbol — matters the most.
The night’s performances connected to
musical based on their album “American Idiot”), Cirque du Soleil
(Pink’s gorgeous “Glitter In the Air,” which featured the soulful rock
star doing an aerial routine with silk ropes), opera (
It’s not that memorable songs were overlooked. Plenty of artists were rewarded for good old-fashioned songcraft, including the
rockers Kings of Leon, who nabbed Record of the Year for the yearning
“Use Somebody,” and country jam specialists the Zac Brown Band, who
took home Best New Artist and performed a rousing, if overly patriotic,
medley with the venerable piano man
But these days, the real payoff comes for artists who can augment their musical efforts with other accomplishments.
the president of the Grammy sponsoring organization the National
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, noted in his speech that if
fans are no longer willing to pay for albums and singles — the creeping
reality in the age of the illegal download — the quality of music may
precipitously decline. He’s wrong, however. Instead, music is
transforming, becoming thoroughly interwoven with other forms of
expression and with daily experiences, as fans hear and love it in
myriad environments.
The most telling statement of the night, in fact, came from comic
who told the crowd that the Grammy awards were “the highest honor that
the music industry can bestow, other than your song being covered by
the cast of ‘Glee,'” the popular television show about a high school
choir. Today’s most powerful songs often reach listeners as
advertisements — the specialty of the Peas — in YouTube video tributes,
as with
And more than ever, today’s biggest stars are those
who embody powerful archetypes so well that a misplaced note or two may
be kindly overlooked.
That last situation applies to
who continued her winning streak by taking home Album of the Year for
“Fearless,” a recording that has seemingly won every available prize in
the last year. Swift, 20, is a songwriter; she thanked her record label
for “letting me write every song on my album” while accepting the award
for Best Country Song for “You Belong With Me,” her ditty about boys
who make passes at girls who wear glasses.
But as well-crafted as is that hit and her other
platinum-selling tales of suburban high school life, it’s Swift’s
persona that really sells. This smart young woman comes across as a
perky living American Girl doll, and that appealing version of
traditional young womanhood, not her music, is at the heart of her
stardom.
Her singing certainly can’t be credited. Appealing
enough on record, it always seems to let her down live. Swift gave a
strikingly bad vocal performance at Staples Center Sunday, sounding
tinny and rhythmically flat-footed as she shared the microphone with
the distinctive
match or support Nicks as they worked through a medley of each woman’s
hits stood in stark contrast to the evening’s other pairings,
particularly soul man Maxwell’s sensitive response to
That number, which opened the show, embodied pop’s
excitement in these days of mixed media and wildly multiple meanings.
After a fantastical start that took the brazen performance artist’s
“Monster Ball” tour staging to a new level, she and her forebear in
glitter pop sat at dueling pianos adorned with fake body parts and sang
their flamboyant hearts out. The theatrics of this spot meant something
— Gaga and Elton presented themselves as freakish but self-determined
mutants created by fame — and the music was powerful.
Another artist who reached for such heights was
who broke a Grammy record by winning six awards, the most for a female
solo artist in a single night. The R&B singer showed her rock side
by combining her own hit “If I Were a Boy” with
Making this suprising leap while surrounded by storm-trooper-style dancers and wearing a dress seemingly made of black armor,
was “music plus” — plus risky theatrics and absorbing passion. This was
the sound of the future. It was welcome.
—
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