I don’t even like Adele’s album much, but I’m streaming it now just on general principle. I’m so sick of the “Beyhive” (or the “Beygency”, as one of the greatest SNL bits ever called them). I’m sure her R&B-inflected dance-pop is just fine for people who like that sort of thing (I don’t), but to hear them grouse, you’d think she’s Gandhi, MLK, and the Pope rolled into one. Oh, and Jesus, eternally suffering on the cross. :rolleyes:
Whatever floats your boat (as some other doper famously once said) 
I made a thread about Bey awhile back saying that, for all the hype about her, people really don’t seem to care much about the individual songs. It’s quite odd, really.
I think Bey is the ultimate musical mediocrity of our age. Her songs have no hooks, no edge, nothing to say. They are so fucking dull. They have a zillion writers and producers and make no artistic statement and have no artistic perspective whatsoever.
BTW, who gives a fuck about the Grammys? There is no there there and hasn’t been for a long time.
I mostly agree with you, but a lot of people are going apeshit over her only winning two “lesser” Grammys. And critics constantly insist her music is a groundbreaking œuvre of rare genius, which really annoys me. Seriously? Or are they just afraid of the Beygency too? (If you haven’t seen that clip I linked, you are really missing out!)
Just watched. Very well done! Not to mention hilarious!
Yeah. It’s like Bey stands for some sort of symbol of–something?–that we’re supposed to praise and get excited about. But the music is secondary, if not tertiary. It’s bizarre.
It really is.
You’re all just not ready for this jelly.
I’m just glad she’s keeping busy since her appearance in Austin Powers 3.
People get angry about pretty much everything these days and woe betide those who have an opinion or break the lockstep of cultural orthodoxy. Of course, the other side of that coin is a tiresome need for some to dislike anything that has a whiff of appreciation by the great unwashed.
It is all pretty depressing. For myself, Adele’s music catches my attention even when played from a radio in another room, it stands out, it is appealing to me. A track was played from Beyonce’s latest album and I found it utterly dreadful and couldn’t change the channel fast enough.
There’s no great conclusion to be drawn from this other than I like one and not the other, but that is simply not enough substance on which to build a frothing outrage is it? It is never enough for some people to be considered “right”, they also demand that others are labelled “wrong”. It always smacks of a sense of inferiority to me.
The same is true of music, film, literature, art or anything based on subjective and personal emotional experiences.
The outrage was so weird I had to look it up and found that Beyonce has won** twenty-two **Grammy Awards. Twenty-two. (That does include awards won as a member of Destiny’s Child, but most are as a solo artist.) Gosh, it’s so upsetting that the woman who won 22 damn awards didn’t make it 24.
By way of comparison, the goddamn BEATLES won ten Grammys and five of them happened after they weren’t a band anymore. Only six human beings have ever won more Grammy Awards than Beyonce, plus a few (including Stevie Wonder and U2) are tied with her. Beyonce has more Grammys than Michael Jackson and Prince combined.
this kind of crap is why I think a “Calexit” might not be entirely bad. I’m tired of sharing a country with these self-absorbed, entitled celebrity *(redacted)*s.
You know, if she’d lost to Milli Vanilli or something, there might be a point. But she lost to Adele, whose album was released to huge critical acclaim, and who is a fabulous musician. There is no shame (and no racism) in losing to Adele and 25.
I think that’s actually an important point. A more relevant contemporary example might be, I dunno, if Iggy Azalea put out another dumb album.
If I said “I think Star Wars was robbed by Annie Hall for Best Picture in 1977,” that’s a valid opinion but the opposite opinion is extremely easily defended. Maybe it was, but you can make a really good argument Annie Hall was the superior movie. That’s basically the argument between Adele and Beyonce.
People are reacting as if they stiffed Star Wars and Annie Hall and gave Best Picture to “The Crater Lake Monster”
You know, I’m happy for you and imma let you finish but I can’t believe Beyonce didn’t win every award this year!
LOL
Beyoncé is the Steve Miller of today.
In fairness, something strange and potentially worrisome has happened at the Grammys over the past nine years. I went to look at decades’ worth of winners so as to potentially rebut the arguments of racism, and I found something I wasn’t quite expecting that I’m not going to just sweep under the rug now that I discovered it.
Looking just at what are arguably the top two awards, Record of the Year and Album of the Year: from 1984 to 2008, a healthy 17 of the 50 statuettes awarded in those two categories went to black artists. That is three times as great as their percentage in the US population, which makes sense because they have generally overrepresented their demographic numbers in popular music.
But oddly enough (and one would think coincidentally, given the fact that the music industry is not run by the “alt-right”), immediately after we elected our first black president (who brought many black artists to the White House), the Grammys started on its current tear of 18 straight white winners in those two categories. 18-0. Kind of weird. :eek: Hopefully just a random statistical run, like you will sometimes get when flipping a coin. But it starts to look bad, especially for younger people who didn’t get to see all those awards going to black artists in the quarter-century before this all-white stretch began.
I hope the streak is broken soon, although preferably by some other artist than Beyoncé.
That’s not a great example. Steve Miller was never the multi-platform celebrity and fashion icon Beyonce is. I’m struggling to really think of a good comparison; I am sure someone will come up with a better one.
It is certainly quite plausible that in 20-30 years, Beyonce’s body of work won’t be very memorable. I agree with a lot of posters that except for “Single Ladies,” she doesn’t have a lot of really memorable songs. Madonna was not, and is not, an especially talented musician by professional standards, but she has many, many memorable songs - I can probably recognize two dozen Madonna singles and I’ve literally never bought a single recording of hers. But, then again, who knows? It is not easy to ascertain what music will last and what music won’t. I’m sure once upon a time people said Elton John’s music was forgettable.
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But oddly enough (and one would think coincidentally, given the fact that the music industry is not run by the “alt-right”), immediately after we elected our first black president (who brought many black artists to the White House), the Grammys started on its current tear of 18 straight white winners in those two categories. 18-0. Kind of weird. Hopefully just a random statistical run, like you will sometimes get when flipping a coin. But it starts to look bad, especially for younger people who didn’t get to see all those awards going to black artists in the quarter-century before this all-white stretch began.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, that’s kind of weird. I can’t deny that. IT’s within the range of statistical possibility but seems unlikely.
As you say, it’s not like Steve Bannon runs the Grammy Awards, but one wonders if there is not a propensity to give the trophies to the African-American artists in the R&B and rap categories.
It is definitely an interesting scenario with Beyoncé that she is a mega-celebrity but very questionable in terms of judging strictly by her music. Whatever style of music is in vogue at a given point in time, I would like to think music awards would be judged on musical terms rather than on celebrity/fashion culture. And I’m not against fashion: I watch Project Runway religiously. But that’s a different art form which should stay in its own lane.
Yes, and “urban”. But are those categories so new? If so, it may have actually begun as an attempt to recognize more black artists but ended up ghettoizing them.