57th Grammy Awards In Review
Attending the Grammy’s is one of the most exciting events of a musician’s career. Whether they were invited there out of respect or because they were nominated, it is certainly a very eventful time for them, and us as viewers.
However with any awards show there always comes controversy, whether it is in the form of a snub, or Kanye West jumping on stage and snatching a microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands.
A lot has happened in the music world in the past year. Sam Smith stunned everybody with “Stay With Me”, his emotional single about his ex-lover, Meghan Trainor brought meaning back into pop music with her uplifting “All About That Bass”, Pharrell Williams went out of his way to make everyone “Happy”, and Taylor Swift parodied herself in the music video for her hit single, “Shake It Off.”
Many people have many different opinions on who should have won what, and I am going to tell what I think was right, and wrong, about the 2015 Grammy’s.
This year was the year of Sam Smith. As mentioned before, Smith had a breakout single in “Stay With Me” which led to the release of his debut album “In The Lonely Hour”. Because of these two pieces of work, Smith pulled in a very deserving four Grammys. He won in the categories Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Best New Artist.
Album of the Year was easily the most controversial category in this year’s Grammy’s. This is because Beck’s “Morning Phase” beat out the heavy favorite “Beyoncé” by Beyoncé. There was a massive uproar on social media because of Beck not being known to many high school students, however everyone should know that he was very well deserving of the award, it just did not have the mainstream popularity of Beyoncé’s album.
Being an extremely massive Rap fan, I felt very wronged when it came to the Hip-Hop/Rap categories, because Grammy’s for those awards went to works of high popularity, but lower quality.
In Best Rap Album, Eminem won for “The Marshall Mathers LP 2” (MMLP2), however I believed this to be him winning because of his past work, not his present. “MMLP2” only really had one good song on it, that song being “Rap God”. Eminem is regarded as being one of these best rappers of all time, but anybody who knows what they are talking about will tell you that his past two albums, “Recovery” and “MMLP2”, have just been mediocre at best. In my mind, ScHoolboy Q’s “Oxymoron” or Childish Gambino’s “Because The Internet” were much more deserving of this title. Because “The Internet” was easily the most complete rap album of the year, it was so good and weird that it didn’t even sound like an album and calling it an album wouldn’t be doing it justice. It is more than an album; it is a work of art. And “Oxymoron” had no faults; every song was just as good as the last. “Oxymoron” was easily the most consistent rap album of the year.
Two other rap categories in which I feel the Grammy’s got it wrong were Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song. The award went to Kendrick Lamar for his song “i”, and that was just a bad call. The song itself has very good meaning behind it, but there were better choices. “i” sounds like multiple songs that were clipped together. Drake’s “0-100/The Catch Up” and Childish Gambino’s “V.3005” would have been much better options because of the combination of their sheer quality and popularity. “0-100/The Catch Up” was sonically one of the best songs of the year; it had an amazing sound to it.
Eminem also won the Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, for his song “The Monster” that featured Rihanna. While this was an extremely popular song that had a good mix of a catchy chorus and decent rap verses, every other song on the list in this category was much better than it. The winner should have been either “Bound 2” by Kanye West featuring Charlie Wilson or “Studio” by ScHoolboy Q featuring BJ The Chicago Kid. Both songs had a great combination of immense popularity and monumental quality, which make them more deserving of the Grammy.
Many people thought that Iggy Azalea and her mainstream agenda would tear the Grammy’s up and win every single award. Thankfully, she did not. She didn’t win a single award this year and she wasn’t deserving of a single one. Many people thought that this year would be a repeat of Macklemore’s reign of terror at the Grammy’s last year. Her music, and Macklemore’s music last year, were not even deserving of nominations, let alone actual Grammy wins.
Those are the Grammy’s that I felt were deserving, or more of the time not deserving, of winning the most coveted musical award.
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