Completely Random Thoughts 22: Da Grammys

Okay so, earlier this week the nominees for the 2011 Grammy Awards were announced and (on the recommendation of a reader), I thought that I’d briefly take a look at the nominees in the Reggae category and give my thoughts on them and the award in general because I haven’t really done any thing like this yet and I do very much have a few strong opinions. First of all, however, the nominees for the 2011 Grammy Award for the Best Reggae Album are:

• “Before The Dawn” by Buju Banton
• “Revelation” by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
• “Isaacs Meets Isaac” by Gregory Isaacs & King Isaac
• “Legacy: An Acoustic Tribute to Peter Tosh” by Andrew Tosh
  
• “One Pop Reggae” by Sly & Robbie
  
• “Made In Jamaica” by Bob Sinclair and Sly & Robbie
  

My thoughts. If you read my work to any degree, you’ll know that I almost never say such things, but in my opinion, of he six nominations, four of them are BAD albums. I mean they’re really bad. The only two which aren’t, Buju’s mediocre and increasingly worsening ”Before The Dawn” and Sly & Robbie’s ”One Pop Reggae” compilation, which was pretty good but probably not good enough to make my (or one else’s) “Best Compilation” list for 2010, certainly aren’t GREAT by any means. But are you really surprised?

The most obvious thing that came to my mind when I saw the nominations, even though there’re six of them, is PREDICTABLE. There is nothing here which comes as a surprise really because the ‘template’ for Grammy nominations has been pretty much defined over the years, we may not be able to predict which albums are going to nominated (or we may in some years), but you definitely know which TYPE.

There are the popular elders such as Burning Spear, Bunny Wailer, Scratch, I’ll place Sly & Robbie in there as well and a few others who’re going to be nominated almost every time they do something kind of new. There’re the Marleys and while ”Distant Relatives” didn’t pick up a nomination this year, all I need to do to make the point is say that last year, Stephen Marley completed a ridiculous act of winning the same damn award twice (two years apart) with one album. There’s the popular number - Meaning Shaggy, Sean Paul and whoever else is popular at the time - And then there’s Buju who, despite arguably being one of the most controversial artists in the world, regardless of genre, has the distinction of having his last four studio albums have been nominated for the award and whatever else he makes next will also be nominated. And you know it.

That’s it! If you do not fit into one of those categories, most likely you aren’t going to get nominated and most unfortunately that excludes probably 99.999999999% of relevant Reggae artists. It also excludes our most relevant of labels, VP Records [pictured], to a large degree. Say what you will about the label (because you will anyway), but if you know enough of them to complain, chances are good that you know enough to be disappointed in who has NOT been nominated for the Reggae Grammy.

By my research, no album which was a VP only album and didn’t fit into one of these categories (the only exception has been Shaggy) has been nominated for a Reggae Grammy since 2003 when, SHOCKINGLY, the label had three different albums selected [”Ghetto Dictionary: The Mystery”, ”Still Blazin’” and ”Anything For You” by Bounty Killer, Capleton and Freddie McGregor, respectively]. Not so shocking was the fact that none of them won of course, because Scratch hadn’t won a Grammy yet. And before that, there haven’t been many either and it is just SO fucking strange that you have the award which goes back to 1985 and have a dominant label which has only had a handful of albums mentioned throughout that time.

"I could burp for 45 minutes continuously on a record next year and still get nominated for a Grammy"

Specifically over the last few years it’s pretty much gotten ridiculous. How in the world Queen Ifrica’s ”Montego Bay” was not named last year is a mystery which probably has no common sense explanation. The same goes for releases from the likes of Tarrus Riley, Duane Stephenson and Etana over the last few years. These are artists whose international images haven’t been tarnished (and obviously that isn’t a problem because . . . Yeah. Buju) with controversies and seemingly they would be very fitting names to have brought up (especially when you consider how nice it would be to have not only NEW talent winning that award, but a female as well). And while I’m certainly not trying to overrate the impact of this award on people like you and me, I believe that this is a sign of something which is one of the main reasons why I, personally, like to pay the vast majority of my attention and the attention of this blog to CURRENT artists who are in or very near their primes, because this is one of the grand perceptions - That in Reggae Music ‘older means better’.

"Just 35 more years!"

This year in particular, removing my own feelings (because as much as I love it, Naptali’s album simply isn’t winning a Grammy and that’s fine, I get it), how can someone like Romain Virgo not be a PERFECT candidate for nomination? This youth presumably can be around making music as he does for the next HALF-CENTURY or so, and perhaps in the final decade or two of that, he’ll be old enough to ‘qualify’. Big deal. There’s Duane Stephenson, SANCHEZ, Luciano, Spragga Benz, Lady Saw and who knows who else would be on a list of names who would seem to be, for one reason or another (besides just the overall quality of their projects), very good choices for nomination and all of whom released albums which have been better received than ALL of those which have been nominated this year. The Reggae Grammy is simply ’backwards’ and ’backwards thinking’ and it pretty much always has been. In my opinion it is a slap in the face to our music. I cannot imagine that in a year when artists such as Eminem, Jay-Z, TI and Lil’ Wayne released albums that the Grammy for Best Hip-Hop Album would be settled between the likes of . . . Biz Markie and Bushwick Bill. And that’s certainly not to put those artists down, but it is to show the difference in the methods of thinking and perceptions between the two (and after checking, both Jay-Z and Eminem are nominated this year, and Eminem won last year and looking over the winners and nominees in the Rap category, they are much much more current to my knowledge than in Reggae).

Hip-Hop, and probably every other genre, has a contemporary award (I’m sure they have more than one also). Reggae essentially has a lifetime achievement award, with room for *special circumstances* (I.e. people named Buju and people who have platinum albums).

{Biggup reader Stephen}
{And for whatever it's worth, I think "Isaacs Meets Isaac" is going to win, but I haven't been correct on a Grammy prediction since "Welcome To Jamrock" won}