Won't Get Fooled Again

The Who, 1971

It's a cynical song. It's one of the few instances in rock history where cynicism is expressed as catharsis. It's about the failure of the Sixties revolution. Their hearts were in the right place, but they had no plan. Townshend sees that the struggle isn't going to be resolved in simplistic terms - so he "smiles and grins at the change all around," recognizing that people's hearts are changing. But is that enough? Is will enough? Shouldn't we be educating ourselves on how to change things from a realistic perspective? Daltrey's scream is one of frustration, but also a catalyst for change where simple flower power failed. Most revolutions are loud. Peace 'n' love 'n' flowers won't work. To believe so would be foolishness. And you shouldn't be fooled again either.

New Facebook group!

Bob Costas: The Emo Years

52nd Grammys: My night in tweets

• Elton John & Lady Gaga have a beluga caviar fight backstage and don't bother to clean up.
  


• Music industry doesn't get Stephen Colbert.
  


• "21 Guns" by Green Day sounds a lot like ELO's "Telephone Line" in this context.
  


• Colbert on Susan Boyle: Music biz "has been saved by cat lady with sensible shoes." There will be no better line tonight.
  


• Taylor Swift feigns surprise at winning Best Country Album.
  


• Beyonce leads robot army as final resort in her battle to get you to put a ring on it.
  


• Beyonce channels Alanis Morissette. Robot army appears to be channeling Laibach.
  


• P!nk arrives in time to heal lepers and divide loaves of bread.
  


• P!nk takes part in most abstract Bed Bath & Beyond advert ever.
  


• P!nk takes part in most abstract Bed Bath & Beyond advert ever. UPDATE: Waterbed leaks.
  


• Grammy venue tragically catches on fire; sadly, P!nk is the only auto-sprinkler functioning.
  


• will.i.am performs loving tribute to The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.
  


• Black Eyed Peas robot army appears to be less agile than Beyonce's robot army. Probably mercenaries.
  


• Black Eyed Peas and Beyonce robot armies to begin collecting your urine samples in the morning. No cheating, stoners!
  


• I do not want to hear Eric Clapton sing about "getting off" on anything.
  


• OK, maybe music industry gets Stephen Colbert after all. (after Colbert wins Grammy for Comedy Recording)
  


• Is it technically possible for Auto-Tune to win Producer Of The Year?
  


• Camera lingers lovingly on Jay-Z in audience watching biggest Auto-Tune orgy of the night. Smart camerapeople.
  


• Jamie Foxx, T-Pain & Slash performing every song ever recorded at the same time. There's "Bill Bailey" now.
  


• I vote for Bon Jovi to perform Side One of "2112". Bring it, populist! (after CBS offers viewers the chance to choose what song Bon Jovi is going to perform at telecast, via text message)
  


• Alice Cooper finally wins Best Rock Album for Love It To Death!!! About time! Ah.... nuts.
  


• Zac Brown clearly has no need for a robot army.
  


• I think I saw somebody roll sushi with Taylor Swift's guitar once.
  


• Yes, that's Waddy Wachtel playing on "Rhiannon."
  


• That's it, Taylor! Make Stevie play the tambourine! That'll show 'er!
  


• Slow down, Lionel Richie. Oops, forgot, you can't.
  


• Where am I supposed to get 3D glasses at this time of night? AM/PM? (after TV prompts viewers to "put on 3D glasses" for Michael Jackson segment)
  


• Without 3D glasses, this whole Michael Jackson segment looks like UHF television circa 1978. Kinda nostalgic, actually.
  


• Doug Morris, Captain Tomorrow, gets Grammy recognition. Duty now for the future, Dougie!
  


• I vote for Bon Jovi to perform Opeth's "Blackwater Park" in its entirety!
  


• Bon Jovi seems to sing a lot of songs about who his songs are not for. Is that what you kids call "meta"?
  


• I kind of wanted to see Placido Domingo give an award to Andy Samberg, but well.
  


• Portnow just oozes charisma, don't he? Snap-crackle-Neal!
  


• Adam Sandler comes underdressed to Grammys, until you see absolutely everybody playing with Dave Matthews Band.
  


• Lady Gaga's head crashes into iceberg.
  


• Okay, all kidding aside, that Jeff Beck tribute to Les Paul was pretty fantastic. Now back to joking.
  


• Quentin Tarantino is about to sell me a ShamWow.
  


• Lil Wayne's T-shirt: "Listen To Lil Wayne." This is why I love Lil Wayne. (Remember the "Listen To Slayer" T-shirts?)
  


• And with no Kanye interruption, this night is over. Oooh, Gaga looks pissed. That ain't no poker face. G'night.

Explanatory statement before I get to my favorite album of the 2000’s

This is probably more obvious than a Nickelback record, but it bears repeating: "Best album of the 2000's" is not necessarily the same as "my favorite album of the 2000's." I mention this because my favorite album of the 2000's is showing up on absolutely none of any publication's catchall lists of the greatest albums of the 2000's. Not even in any top 100's.

I'm neither proud of the uniqueness nor embarrassed about the isolation reflected in that fact, because among my close circle of friends which numbers in the scale of legions, very few have ever expressed complete devotion to either of the two albums being routinely touted as the greatest album of the 2000's. Nobody I know on a more-than-surface basis feels overwhelmingly strongly about either, unless they haven't disclosed said devotion to those albums to me, which I suppose is a fairly reasonable possibility. If they did worship those albums I wouldn't be surprised, but nobody has yet.

(Those two albums, incidentally, are Radiohead's Kid A, the legend of which I at least get, and The Strokes' Is This It?, the legend of which I don't get. More on that in a bit.)

Pop music has drifted past its need for consensus. Most everything has been defined. I don't know if other musical idioms, like classical or blues, ever got so ubiquitous that there was no need to separate the wheat from the chaff, or even to have ability to tell the difference. I wasn't alive when the Greil Marcus of the Renaissance period called Beethoven's Ninth "overstated and lumbering" and everything hence started being defined quantitatively as opposed to its worth or value, so I don't know.

But we seem to have gotten to that point in rock and pop music. Choices have become so plentiful, and remarkably easy to obtain, that nowadays (well, really I've felt this way for about 10 years) an album that dependably defines and plays within the aesthetic requirements of its idiom could get a 3½ star review in Rolling Stone. Case in point: uh, the last Nickelback album.

Which is more of an explanation about why I think the star- or point-rating system of criticism is a crock. It's now a requirement of popular criticism, and an inevitability of our stride towards a culture of accounting, but that doesn't make it any less of a crock. Obviously it's a summary judgment that panders to our ADD, where we just look at a number next to a review and think we have it all sussed out. But editorially it can also be a very temporary quotient that, no matter how carefully we assign it, forces a value that very often turns out wildly fluid. Example: RS originally gave Nirvana's Nevermind 3 stars out of 5. It's now viewed as the greatest album of the '90s. (But not my favorite.) Reverse example: they gave Springsteen's last album the full five, even with the inclusion of what's far and away his worst song ever ("Queen of the Supermarket"). Whatever the reviewers had to say about each album may have made more sense to future generations if there wasn't a number stamped next to it. If you assign a review of Reign In Blood to someone who doesn't specialize in metal, they may give it only a C-. If you assign one of Ooops! I Did It Again to someone who believes superpop culture is essential to understanding the anthropology of a given society, they may give it an A+.

A cultural critic -- whether it's music, film, theater or restaurants -- is now expected to be an adjudicator, which is the near-opposite of being a critic. Even if a critic hates something, he or she has to dive into it and try to gain an understanding of what they're experiencing. If they don't understand it right away, maybe the process of writing through it will teach them something. Or it will confirm their own value system. Either is fine. They have to reflect upon the act of their experience with the piece, and that is always hard to sum up with a number.

Adjudicators attach a quantitative value based on predefined conditions, all of which can be scaled. You have to wonder if pressured critics will eventually just dispose of the listening and throw the number out there based on a press release. (In the dubious case of the Blender reviewer who dismissed a Black Crowes album he didn't hear, that appeared to be the tactic.)

This is why art critics are our last true critics, though I suspect they're being marginalized by this system too. It's hard to throw a star rating on a piece of art, though someone must have tried it by now. How many stars did the Venus De Milo get? 'Cause it's, um, somewhat flawed, unless Venus was supposed to be a junkie for whom rehab was no longer practical.

Anyway, what this means to me is that the honors bestowed upon Radiohead and the Strokes (and even the runners-up like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Jay-Z's The Blueprint) feel at least a bit like symptomatic reflex based on data. This isn't a surprise, of course, what with all the machines and robots we run into at Starbucks these days. But for overwhelmingly sensitive and sensual humans like myself, it can cause in a brief case of cognitive dissonance. Am I just perverse for not emblazoning those albums in my psyche, the way we've done with Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side Of The Moon or Never Mind the Bollocks? Whether we like those albums or not? Is Boston's debut album the greatest one ever made just because it produces instant sense recognition more than any other? (Or maybe that's Suicide's first album. Can't recall. Malt liquor.) Should we pat on ourselves on the back for bucking critical consensus or be troubled by our deviation?

My favorite album of the '00s produced a very specific experience that I revisited time and time again. When I hear it I relive it; when I remember it I feel an indentation. It is probably an isolated incident. But it's what defined the decade for me, personally. Your mileage may not only vary, it may in fact be kilometers instead of miles.

I do not think, if given an Olympic scoring card and threatened with radiation by theremin, I would call my favorite album of the 2000's The Best Album Of The 2000's. In that case, I'd go with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It redefined the notion of a working rock band, was expertly made, and even told the suits a thing or two about what makes music popular. I heard it again this morning and it still surprised me.

But if I were filling out a ballot for best album of the decade for a publication? I'd put my favorite at #1. In my mind, nothing surpassed it. And if you're asking for my opinion, that's my opinion. It's outside the jurisdiction of mathematics.

I at least understand why Radiohead's Kid A is in the mix. It remains the weirdest #1 pop album in American chart history. It didn't "fly in the face of convention," it went to another sphere altogether where they don't even have conventions. Or assemblies for that matter. When you go back and listen to it you can hear how it informed the subconscious of the decade that followed it; how it telegraphed a troubled future in a way nobody else really could.

The Strokes' Is This It? is a fine record, but did it invigorate a movement or just a moment? See, I can't tell whether what arose in its wake, what bands chose to pursue because they heard it (like all those kids in Manchester who saw the Sex Pistols that one night) reflects what's good about it. It's been 8 years and it still only feels like spectacle in transit. Maybe I should go back and listen to it again. Yeah, I think I will. I don't think that'll change my mind entirely, but maybe I'll pick up something I missed the first ten times.

The Strokes defined a decade's countenance, maybe, but Radiohead's Kid A defined a subtext. I will always vote for the subtext. The subtext usually gets back to something eternal; it reflects an aspect that's been around for centuries in some manner. A countenance reflects the physical shape of a moment that might not mean as much in 20 years. You can nip and tuck a countenance. You can't Botox a soul.

I'm gonna evangelize for my favorite album of the decade. In the process I might find out something I didn't know before. I'll write about why I think it's the greatest album of the decade, but you might hear it and think it's bunk. Three stars tops, maybe. And you might be entirely correct. A Smiths defender once wrote "You are perfectly within your rights to hate this band," and by confirming and validating that reaction, he found himself having to outline why he thought the Smiths were great. I'll bet he learned something he didn't know about the Smiths too. Paired with his apologist acknowledgement, I'll bet one or two Smiths haters said, "Okay, all right, I'll go back and see what I missed the first time." Maybe they still hated the Smiths. But that's fine, they at least went back and tried to see what they missed.

Good music criticism should always – always – result in the reader wanting to hear that album to see what the fuss is about, even if the critic's viewpoint is unfavorable. It should create interest in hearing the record for one's self. It should never prevent the listeners from wanting to hear the album and placing it in the context of their own lives.

I don't mean "pay" for it, of course. Steal it or something.

That's a joke for you record industry people out there. Hello, record industry people.

So that's that. With that out of the way….

My 10 favorite albums of the ‘00s: Nos. 10 thru 2

I was going to do longer reviews of these records but I'm short on calendar. So I thought I'd shove these out Quarter Pounder style and focus all my energies on writing about my #1 album of the decade. I am fairly sure my choice will be something of an underwhelming disappointment to you all, but I promise to try and defend it. You know, like I do with Hall & Oates.

But here are the other 9.

#10: The Drift, Scott Walker

I've only been able to get through this album twice. That qualifies me as one of its biggest admirers. This completes the wildest arc of any popular musician in history, even if he was only popular in England.

#9: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Flaming Lips

I think even Wayne Coyne wasn't prepared for how beautifully vulnerable he was on this album, for the first time in his career, possibly. Yoshimi solved the problem of humanity's place in a mechanistic world, and even had room for a nice little harvest festival at the end.

#8: The Deep Blue, Charlotte Hatherley

Can't really explain my love for this album, except it sounded perfect then and still does now.

#7: SMiLE, Brian Wilson

Proving once and for all that it's possible for a great rock album to indeed be symphonic in the right hands, and that Mike Love is incapable of critical analysis.

#6: Kid A, Radiohead

I first heard it while clearly out of my mind on cough syrup and knew instinctively that everything was about to change. The cough syrup buzz went away and the album still stood up. Can't say the same about Dark Side of the Moon.

#5: Under The Skin, Lindsey Buckingham

Recorded largely in hotel rooms where Bucks had to keep it quiet, thereby inadvertently showing how good he could be when being intimate. There's a new father angle to this album that I also responded to.

#4: Night Falls Over Kortedala, Jens Lekman

Probably the last album to truly surprise me to the point where I was giddy about it.

#3: Want One, Rufus Wainwright

My getting through the summer of 2003 unscathed was probably entirely because of this particular release.

#2: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco

The story of this album's initial record-label rejection, popular acceptance and critical acclaim is well-known. But it also unlocked a code of language for intimacy in the post-modern-grunge-everything era the same way Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home did in the '60s. Sadly Wilco's the only one that can use it, but maybe we won't have to suffer through the same singer-songwriter parade as we had to with Dylan. And it's still a beautiful album.

Saving awards shows with Kanye West

"I'm just ashamed that my hurt caused someone else's hurt - my dream of what awards shows are supposed to be." – Kanye West to Jay Leno, 9/10/09, after interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the VMA's

You know what? I agree with Kanye West. Awards shows aren't what they're supposed to be. They're not what they used to be.

You can never expect to recapture the excitement of old-time awards shows. The ones that were made in the '50s, you know? When everything was new. They still taped all the awards shows with just two cameras in those days, and mixed them straight to mono. You'd see a guy going up onstage, just bleedin' through his acceptance speech, pouring it out with every acknowledgement. Sure, some people didn't like it – the Nobel Peace Prize people thought that contemporary award shows weren't even real awards, just the crass deconstruction of more sophisticated ceremonies into populist tripe. But those old-timers knew something. They knew that awards shows would live forever.

Some people – boomers, mainly -- think that there haven't been any original awards shows since the '60s. They cling to their memory of a bygone era and over-sentimentalize their merely being present at the time. "If you remembered Jefferson Airplane's acceptance speech for Best Album at the Bay Area Music Awards*," they'll say, "then you weren't there!"

Of course, the '70s threw awards shows into chaos, what with the advent of mirror balls at the People's Choice Awards, and the somewhat horrifying memory of Bert Parks wearing extra-wide lapels at the Los Angeles Music Business Discovery Awards (LAMBDA). I think a lot of people are a little embarrassed about how they looked at these '70s awards shows, and what entrees they ate at the dinners. Even then, purists were afraid that the awards show business was killing awards shows.

And when hip hop came along, my God! That was the last straw for a whole lot of old-timers, because people would expect rappers to get up and make acceptance speeches in their natural speaking voices, and it turned out they were the exact same voices they used on their records! The mystery was all gone!

Nowadays, awards shows aren't so spectacular or unexpected anymore. Any kid with a decent home studio and some leftover bowling trophies can create a good awards show and distribute it over the internet. You don't even need ushers anymore. In fact you may not even need seats. I have long feared the day when awards shows would be conducted with everyone in attendance standing up. I think that day may be upon us.

So give Kanye a break, kids. Lots of people are afraid the awards show industry is dying. That's why we need to keep on making original awards shows, with innovative categories and contemporary graphics. Because without quality awards shows, all the music we listen to would only be appreciated through audience response, consumption and support.

And Bert Parks would have worn that awful tuxedo for naught.

*(Yes I'm aware the Bammies did not exist in the '60s. Just play along.)

I have to write the annual Album Of The Year Grammy prediction.

I know you're expecting it. If you're not expecting it, you should be expecting it, by God. This year, though, I don't really wanna write it. For one thing, I haven't written that much lately. I've been shackled to a crossbar for about six months now with a non-stop supply of Steel Reserve Malt Liquor and tiny Mexican candies, and I must say, the stagnation's sort of grown on me. At first I was all like, "oh, shit, gotta keep producing," but now I'm all like, "why can't I make more than 10 user-created teams in Madden? What the hell is wrong with you fascists at EA Sports?" I have also lost two waist sizes but I'm trying to get one of 'em back. Also, I do crosswords.

But then they announced the 52^nd Grammy Award nominees tonight, and having been reminded of my 3-year-strong streak of success in predicting the eventual winner at an obscenely early time, I was jostled into consciousness by one of the several numbers-runners I am proud to call my clients. They know how the touch of steel turns me on, and I like the way they call me "bandito." When I'm shackled to the crossbar.

So let's do this.

This year is trickier than the last two years. In the 50^th and 51^st Grammy Awards for Album Of The Year, we had two very old veterans, Herbie Hancock and Robert Plant (w/Alison Krauss), who squeezed into the category, and by doing so absolutely ensured they would win, because the Grammy folks love it when they confuse Album Of The Year with Lifetime Achievement. Of course, it calls the awards' currency into question, and leads to accusations of the Grammy Awards being out of step with contemporary tastes, but that's always been the case anyway. If Granddad's gonna insist on wearing the salmon pastel shirt, might as well give him a pair of velour sweatpants to go with. What're you gonna do?

They must've formed some emergency committees this year, though, because there isn't a Lifetime Achievement possibility in these five albums. What we do have, however, is a surplus of divas. If you count Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, then 80% of the Album Of The Year nominees are grade-A, certified diva-licious. And they dominate the top 3 categories of Album, Record and Song of the Year. These are the most diva-loaded Grammys ever. All my gay friends are going to have to do Grammy parties this year.

So here's what you got:

Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King, Dave Matthews Band
The E.N.D., The Black Eyed Peas
The Fame, Lady Gaga
Fearless, Taylor Swift
I Am…Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé

Before we do anything else, let's deflate the unholy union of frat-boys and hacky-sackers right now: Dave Matthews is not going to win this. Apologies in advance to astral physicists and men who identify themselves as "Scooter," but it ain't happenin'. GrooGrux is the token rock entry, and a shocking one at that, when you consider that it shows up here at the expense of U2 and Green Day. (U2 was as safe a prediction as one could have made for this category in the last few weeks. My theory is "Get On Your Boots" probably sank it in the end.) If your album isn't nominated for Lifetime Achievement reasons, then you need momentum in the form of supporting nominations to even have a chance of winning AOTY. Matthews has one other nomination. I'm not sure what GrooGrux is doing here. I envision a horde of white men at NARAS making a Custer's stand for slap-bass and drum compression and insisting on its nomination, threatening everyone else in the room with framed platinum albums of Toto IV if they didn't go along.

(SCORE UPDATE: This year's Toto IV joke appeared at word #634. The over-under was 750.)

You can also probably count Lady Gaga out as well. Out of this lot, The Fame is probably my favorite album, personally. Lady's interesting, and not just because of the rumors that she was a hermaphrodite, which I think have been denounced, but I'm not willing to go to the expense to ensure. "Bad Romance" is a great pop song (but it's not on The Fame). She plays piano quite well. There's a kink to her that's genuine. She's emblematic of contemporary culture at its most future-looking. (In that it looks like it's futuristic, not that it's revolutionary.) Time will tell whether her persona can last and/or evolve, and I think Grammy voters might decide she's too temporal to enshrine her yet. Plus, if I have my facts right, this is the first straight-through electronic/dance album to ever get nominated (I don't count Madonna's Ray Of Light), and the Grammys have kept the dance floor at arm's length since Saturday Night Fever bullied its way to winning in 1979. Hopefully they will let Lady Gaga design the ice sculpture at the after-party, which I'm hoping will be a nude study.

Even after holding sway over the singles charts for the approximate length of the Mesozoic Era, the Black Eyed Peas still have a problem with being taken seriously. Most people I know are somewhat annoyed with them. I don't really know why, but that's because I don't pay much attention. I do know that they ripped off the Basement Jaxx font for the lettering of the front cover of The E.N.D., and that's not going to curry any empathy from the all-powerful typographer bloc. The E.N.D. feels like it was a hit because it had to be, not because anybody wanted it to be. I feel bad saying that, because I don't know exactly what it is about the BEP's that people find off-putting. I mean, I don't listen to them, but they seem perfectly nice to me. Not as nice as Mos Def, but nice enough. Well, anyway. I'm ruling them out too, until 2026 when they get the Lifetime Achievement nod for The A.C.H.I.N.G.J.O.I.N.T.S.

That leaves Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. I'm very confident Album Of The Year will go to one of those two. Damn, I just wish there was an old dude to make this prediction easier. I understand it was supposed to be Allen Toussaint this year, but I guess Dave Matthews bumped him off too. Good Lord, will he stop at nothing?

There are lots of compelling pros and cons for both Beyoncé and Taylor. Number One, they're both unfailingly loved by large segments of the population. Probably the most telling moment of how nice they both are happened at the VMA's, when Beyoncé ceded her acceptance speech to Taylor to make up for Kanye West's infamous disruption of Swift's acceptance speech. Let's be honest here: Kanye's dunderheaded, clumsy, rude and contextually pointless interruption of Taylor's moment may have been the best thing that could have happened to Swift. In the aftermath she showed poise and class, and made no open retaliation against Kanye, until the socially acceptable time for it: when she hosted Saturday Night Live. And Beyoncé showed the right amount of embarrassment, and then displayed no small amount of class and dignity when she invited Swift onstage.

Them's two classy broads. Man, the things I'd do with them and a couple of glass display cases.

So, from that forged alliance at the VMA's to mortal opponents at the Grammys, and pretty evenly matched ones at that. Kanye was right in that Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" was a hugely iconic music video, at exactly a time when iconic music videos are almost never made anymore. Taylor Swift is steamrolling through the media without alienating so much as a parking attendant. There isn't so much stigmatizing over her being a "crossover" artist. Carrie Underwood isn't so lucky in that regard, right now, although she's just as nice as either of them.

Both of them stretch themselves artistically – well, as much as millionaire pop stars do these days, anyway. Beyoncé has more nominations than anyone else this year. I Am…Sasha Fierce was conceived as her alter-ego project, and at least beat the crap out of Garth Brooks' Chris Gaines character. Swift writes her own songs and plays guitar, and whatever creative areas she may fall short in can be offset by the reality that she's only 19 friggin' years old. That's the age I learned how to open beer bottles with my teeth.

There are your two choices. If you're doing a win-place combo I'm more than satisfied to leave you with those, except the Grammy people never mention who came in second, so I have to make a choice. In doing so, I'll explain the biggest obstacles to both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift winning the award, because one of them kind of plays into Grammy history and gives one of them the edge.

First off, with the Beyoncé album – nobody got it. That is, nobody got the alter-ego concept. It arrived with some faint air of disappointment; not because the music was bad, but because there was a somewhat complex pretense to it that never really played out as it should have in the media. Do you know the difference between Beyoncé and Sasha Fierce? I don't. One of them has an accent grave, but when I've swallowed this much moonshine I can't tell which.

With Taylor Swift, she's just so young, and her media dominance so sudden, that voters may saddle her with the opposite of Lifetime Achievement, which can be summed up as "let's see where you are in ten years, sweetheart." You have to figure that some voters are going to want to see her prove a little more before she gets the Big One. They denied Donny Osmond and Rodney Allen Rippey, too.

So to call this one, we're gonna have to go all the way back to the mid-'90s, right at the moment when the Grammys were facing one of their frequent credibility problems. Between 1991 and 1995, Album Of The Year went to Quincy Jones, Natalie Cole, Eric Clapton, The Bodyguard soundtrack, and Tony Bennett. That's a five-year span of albums with absolutely no influence or relevance over their own times, let alone now. Giving Album Of The Year to those albums rubbed certain people who read the papers (back then news came on pieces of paper) the wrong way, so they decided to form a posse and try to make the '96 winner something that at least sounded contemporary, and at best relevant.

What'd they choose? Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. Not my cup of tea, certainly a bit dated now, but at least it sounded like it was recorded in the general era of its eligibility. It took chances with its shrill comeuppance and depictions of oral pleasure in movie theaters (or maybe it was live theater – nah, that would be too obtrusive). Morissette was a reformed child performer whose skills in serious music were, at the time, unproven and untested. She was dangerously young to be winning Album Of The Year, but the Grammys had to compensate.

Herbie Hancock and Robert Plant/Alison Krauss won the last two years – both with much better albums than any between 1991 and 1995, but you can still hear the snickers from the parking attendants. "Lifetime Achievements… no cultural relevance… your velour slacks are ready at the dry-cleaners…" So they're going to be very gung-ho in January to give the young, naïve, lip-pursing 21^st century a big, sloppy, lecherous reach-around.

Taylor Swift's Fearless wins Album Of The Year on January 31. Book it.

I'm going back to my crossbar. It's French Revolution night and Pierre's promised me a Cadbury if I wear the stirrups. Happy holidays.