It's a fun list but their 'should have won' pick for 2000 is "Californication" which... it should simply not be.

That's a really damning exercise. Even in the few years that the nominations have been passable, the winning selection was willfully perverse. Comically white, in the figurative sense - as well as the literal sense, obviously. It only really clicked for me in the years since I started buying albums (mid 1990s) but by the early 2000s I was laughing out loud at the choices. I think the author's right about the problem with "playing catch up", but is underplaying the blatant racism and sexism.

I still can't get past that the current #1 song rhymes "Havana" with "East Atlanta." I'm thinking of giving up radio until it stops.

It's a bizarre exercise bc the author sticks to arbitrary and inconsistent views about what "could have won" so the alternative is best album that "could have won," leading to weird and weirdly inconsistent ideas like Tatoo You winning over London Calling (clearly the better album but not one which supposedly "could have won") but Straight Outta Compton winning over Faith (I was conscious of the grammys at the time and reasonably familiar with the RIAA; there is no possible way SOC could have won, or an album like it could have won, before maybe 2010. Maybe not now. Obviously it's the better album).

Also my God look at the nominees for 1991. It's no surprise that there was a mild cleansing fire of grunge in 1992.

It looks like being 50 or older is required for a nomination.

I'm not sure the WaPo's audience would pick the right-hand list over the left-hand. So in that sense this is a yuge exercise in trolling.

I'd rather have the right-hand list as my desert island disc, but I actually like a lot of the artists on the left-hand side that the author seems to dislike or even hate (Arcade Fire, for example, and nostalgically Paul Simon, or at least "Graceland.")

Also, since I don't seek out much straight-up pop, country, rap, hip-hop, etc. I only hear them when they infiltrate the alt-rock streams I normally listen to. Some of the artists he loves I can only barely recall listening to, ever.

I like Arcade Fire music, but the concept offends me.

I'm reminded of some wag suggesting that Sally Field's Oscar for Norma Rae was belated recognition of her work in The Flying Nun.

Cannot believe I wrote RIAA for "Recording Academy" above. Kill me now.

Also the Grammys are now probably underrated. Sure, the selections have been wrong or crazy for years, but *as a a show* it is way more fun to watch than the Oscars or, Lord help us, the Emmys.

4: I think you can reasonably quibble with the "...instead, in my subjective opinion, this is what should have won" part, but it's hard to disagree with the "this definitely shouldn't have won, WTF..." bit that comes first. It's almost comically easy to choose better, yet still commercially successful albums.

(Also, I think the author is using sales as a proxy for "mainstream awareness". The fact that they didn't and wouldn't have considered Straight Outta Compton is kind of the point? There's no reason it shouldn't have been considered. It wasn't some overlooked gem.)

11 He's using sales+some vaguely defined criteria of acceptability, which in practice seems to boil down to "Inlike black female r+b (sometimes white female country) singers and hiphop and hate old person rock more than the RA does." Which is an OK position but just make it explicit. Obviously many (most) album of the year choices are terrible, but remember who is voting - 68 yr old successful recording engineers who made their money in the 70s from a cut of the publishing, have a pretty nice house in the hills and a second wife, and still smoke a little weed now and then.

Could we let their second wives have a vote? They probably grew up 20 years later.

Also the shunning of Adele in this dude's list is preposterous. Of course Adele deserves at least one Best Album Grammy, as does U2 (for Joshua Tree). I don't like either very much but both are obviously top form mass market pop icons who will endire as much as the other people (Drake? Fuck you) he's citing.

I quite like Adele, but U2 was better before Joshua Tree.

Personally, I think the whole "music" thing is overrated, but I don't know what you could replace it with besides awkward silences.

some vaguely defined criteria of acceptability

But this necessary to keep it from becoming a snob-off. I think it does a good job picking stuff most people have heard of and might actually like.

12: Long, argumentative comment deleted on the grounds that it was incoherent, I am woefully hungover and you are right. He explicitly rules out 36 Chambers on the grounds that the Grammy voters can't be expected to predict the future, but he think Straight Outta Compton should have won. I know it's a bit more complicated than this (sales can be spread out rather than all-at-once; amount of press the album gets), but 36 Chambers highest chart position was #41. Straight Outta Compton got to #37.

17 is a good point. Maybe some kind of sales cut off, like "must have been at least a top ten at some point." Amazingly this includes things like Two Against Nature which the Academy seems to have picked against not just aesthetic but conmercial sense.

To 18, since when has coherence been a prerequisite for commenting here? Many people, including me, have had multinyear runs making no sense at all.

, but remember who is voting - 68 yr old successful recording engineers who made their money in the 70s from a cut of the publishing, have a pretty nice house in the hills and a second wife, and still smoke a little weed now and then.

As it should be.

1984 and 1985 really were good years for music.

Off the specific topic, but kind of in the general area of things that from a distance look like best-of lists, Kevin Drum has a post lamenting the slow death of blogging, with a longish alphabetised list of blogs he thinks are worth reading. Unfogged isn't on it.

Which you might say is tough but fair, except that Ty/ler Co/wen and the Vol/okh Cons/piracy made it in.

Why would it be? We've been an insular chatroom for at least ten years.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but I was pretty shocked that VC didn't even mention the Kosinski resignation at all.

I dunno, worked for me. Movie deals, whole thing.

An insular chatroom with heart.

22 Ugh, McArdle is on that list.
And LGM isn't. Is there a KD v. LGM feud I've missed?

I sometimes forget people who don't comment here still read it.

24: The toy Ogged and toy Kevin Drum in my brain have continued to be best buds since you wrote a guest column for him several lifetimes ago.

I guested for a whole week! It was a disaster!

I don't think anyone respectable and with a large audience still reads here, but even if they did, I don't think they'd want to admit it. Except for that former Treasury official/hedgehog impersonator.

Do you still get together for coffee and talk about how bad you were?

Truly peak blogging golden age.

I don't admit I read here.

A comment on Drum's post asks "Isn't it time for a blogger ethics conference?" so I guess commenting isn't quite dead either. Also, I note that Drum did not mention Calpundit.

31: Looking at the Washington Monthly archives, it seems fine to me, but nonetheless, I'm sure that's why he's not returning your calls anymore.

Maybe ogged never gave Drum his real name.

36.last I noticed the same and found it odd.

I sometimes forget people who don't comment here still read it.

Unfogged : blogging :: poetry : any type of literature with more readers than practitioners

Drum's commenters also say S/o/m/e/r/b/y is now pro-Trump. No word on his view of Chappaquiddick.

Maybe ogged never gave Drum his real name.

You know, I don't think I did / ever have. I still email him maybe once or twice a year, but always as ogged.

Oddly, Kevin Drum's real name is Bob McManus.

I feel bad even making that joke. Kevin Drum os a godfamn American hero, for real. It's hard to stay that sane for that long.

43 That would be odd indeed, what do you think accounts for the lack of anime posts on his blog?

I guested for a whole week! It was a disaster!

Nah, man, it was great. The Washington Monthly regulars never knew what hit 'em.

Didn't you blog about pie, or something like that?

And my Swedish swim instructor's great ass. #AllMen

But thanks, man.

47.1 Oh I remember that. Good times.

I've been listening to a lot of Postmodern Jukebox lately, and I was just able to articulate why: Production in big pop hits these days is garbage. A good example is "Umbrella", though it's a bit older. It is a good song, and Rihanna is a good singer, but the keyboard accompaniment is shitty, and her vocals are weirdly processed. (I like the backwards hi-hat, or whatever it is, though.) The Postmodern Jukebox version is goofy and up-tempo, but by having an actual arrangement with an actual band brings out the qualities of the song as a song.

I simply don't get how you argue that Queen is a legit winner despite not being nominated but London Calling is too cray to be a winer. And clearly The Game is a worse album than The Wall by any possible measure.

||OT: don't bother with "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri". |>

It hasn't even won yet.

I remember the comments when Ogged guest-posted being hilarious. They look they're all gone, though.

51 Seconded.

So what should have won the 2017 Oscars?

Get Out

That totally won for screenplay.

I didn't see Get Out, but the best one I did see was The Death of Stalin, without a doubt.

58 That was great but not up for any Oscars.

58 That was great but not up for any Oscars.

Well, if it has to be one from the shortlist: Arrival.

Frances McDormand deserves the Best Actor this year - the scene where she rips on a Catholic priest alone wins her that. But I've not see The Shape of Water which looks very promising. Dunkirk for cinematography.

The only movie I saw in the theater this year was the Star Wars one.

Honestly, the plot was silly but the soundtrack was great. Somebody should give John Williams an Oscar.

We went to Shape of Water last night. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

Which is to say, it should get some statues.

Good to know. It's not out over here yet...

49: I've found PMJ to be a bit hit-or-miss overall, but when they're good they're very good and bring out qualities of the songs that are not at all apparent in the original.

Something struck me looking at the article is the pace that artists were bringing out albums back then. E.g., Billy Joel is was nominated 4 times in the 5 years (1980-1984); Prince brought out an album in every single year from 1978 to 1992. The pace that commercial music is produced has slowed down so much, but I'm not really clear on why that is exactly.

62.last: All right-thinking people agree this is Deakins' year (for Blade Runner). He holds the record for the most cinematography nominations without a win.

Get Out was really good, but I think people are lettings its social resonance blind them to the fact that it's a pretty pulpy genre picture and is not at all the kind of thing the Academy goes for. (And people are acting like no horror movie has every included social commentary before! They do! All the time! It's just that they're not usually good at it!)

re: 69

Marketing cycles, maybe? It's an interesting thing.

But yeah, old school recording artists -- I don't know when you put the cut off on the end of that -- had a routine where they went in and bashed albums out, and if they didn't have the chops to go in and bash it out, they'd hire a bunch of jazz and country musicians* to bash it out on their behalf.

Even the Beatles, who basically could take as long as they liked, and had unlimited resources, were releasing albums every 6 - 12 months. Looking at their discography it's ridiculous. Help to Rubber Soul is 4 months. Rubber Soul to Revolver is 8 months.

I'd imagine the fact that musicians basically make no money now from recordings, and most of their incoming comes from touring also alters the dynamic. If your record is a loss leader for your tour, it makes sense to get as much touring as possible out of one album before you go and make another, even if you are perfectly capable of making albums much more often.

* this is basically 90% of all session musicians.

Session musicians have a lower alcohol content so they can work longer in the studio before passing out.

The session thing being why the same musicians won two years in a row with Toto IV, and then Thriller.

70: No one thinks Get Out is actually going to win. People are saying it should win, either because it's the best movie and/or because it would make a strong political statement.

I actually have seen somebody arguing Get Out could win, by getting a lot of 2nd and 3rd place votes in a wide-open field. I've only seen one other Best Picture nominee (Phantom Thread) and it was... flawed. But much more Oscar-y.

Carrie Fisher beat Bernie Sanders for a Grammy (Soul, Spoken Word, or Barbershop), so they must be doing something right.

Yeah, Phantom Thread seems much more like the usual Oscar bait.

69.2 I think Deakins is the favorite for this very reason.

75: actually I don't remember if anybody thought Moonlight had a chance. It certainly wasn't a typical Best Picture winner.

I guess Aimee Mann won a Grammy. Which means that everybody I saw in concert last year, won.

As i recall, Moonlight was considered a strong contender, but everybody assumed it would get bulldozed by the star-powered musical movie-movie (La La Land), which turned out to be the rare case of a movie where all of the "best" components (director, actress, cinematography) that don't add up to a Best Picture.

24: That's a funny way to spell "salon of legendary wit."

Insular chatroom on the streets, salon of legendary wit in the sheets.

82 new mouseover.

Long breaks between albums was the norm in the 90s and to a lesser extent the aughts, but I think we've gone back to shorter breaks.

Even the Beatles, who basically could take as long as they liked, and had unlimited resources, were releasing albums every 6 - 12 months. Looking at their discography it's ridiculous. Help to Rubber Soul is 4 months. Rubber Soul to Revolver is 8 months.

This is why the form evolved so fast, no? Not just because you need to come up with new stuff on a regular basis, but also because you're banging in the studio time, getting better, rather than just performing.

(Something I realised when I started ballet: practising is the point, in some important way. As I forget which sporting coach said, plenty of people want to win but I'm looking for the ones with the will to train.)

re: 85

Definitely partly that with the Beatles, yeah.

And definitely, re: the practicing, thing. AIHMHB, I read a comment from Sonny Rollins a while ago, which totally stuck with me.

He was complaining about the fact that being old and having a respiratory problem meant that he struggled to practice, and he said:

"I used to be a ferocious practicer, but I can't physically do that anymore. These days, if I can practice two to three hours a day, that's great."

The idea that a guy in his early 80s (at the time), arguably the greatest living jazz musician, and someone who had long ago reached the bleeding edge of what was physically possible on his instrument, was complaining that he could only manage several hours of practice a day ... it's both inspiring and humbling.

Also, that you don't actually get better (or create anything new) by performing. You might get hardened to being in public, but you only improve in the back studio with the marks from other people's shoes on the floor.

re: 87

I don't think that completely applies in improvisational art forms, where a lot of the thing you are practicing is a thing you can only really practice in performance. But I think, as a general rule, that's true, and even in improvisational art forms, you are building on blocks that you've acquired through deep, hard practice. So you need to do the backroom practice in order to be able to do the other kind of practice, which may well be something that's done in performance.*

* I am not a very good improviser, when it comes to proper jazz, so I can't pretend to be an expert. But I've been working on it long enough that I have a sense of what I'd need to do to get to be OK, and for me, the gap is definitely a combination of performance anxiety, and fundamentals that aren't deeply engrained enough to be second nature. And that needs the backroom grind.

I like Arcade Fire music, but the concept offends me.

"What if Fleetwood Mac were millenials?"

That's it, yes.

"What if nobody in Yes ever rotated out?"

71.last: I heard recently that one of the bands in the Mumford & Sons vein* was touring for something like 18 months on their last album. Setting aside always-touring bands like the Dead or Dave Matthews, that only ever used to happen for bands that hadn't made it (so were working bands, not recording acts) or megabands touring on megaalbums; ISTR U2 doing a few multiyear tours at their peak. But I think it's more the norm for bands that aren't selling out arenas around the world to nonetheless tour and tour and tour.

I do think it's hurt the music. I can't speak to the pace of things outside of the broad rock category (I listen to a decent amount of other stuff, but I don't know other genres in any historical depth), but IMO the slow pace of recording has caused significant stagnation in rock, combined with too many bands doing weird, inorganic-feeling jumps. Frex, this morning I heard the latest Decembrist song, and it's got synths and loops and such, and it doesn't sound like them evolving, it just sounds like them deciding, "Well, it's been awhile, time to do something new." I don't think that's the actual process, but there's no sense of development and, frankly, I think bands aren't very good at jumping from one thing to the next.

Not only would it have been jarring if the Beatles had released "Please Please Me", then "Help!", then "Sgt. Pepper", and then "Abbey Road", the albums would have been worse, because they wouldn't have been taking all the steps in between that trained them to be good enough to pull off "A Day in the Life".

*looking at their Wiki page, I don't think it could have been them exactly

Not that bands never made abrupt transitions back in the day; look at Neil Young, for crying out loud. But when you're never away from the studio for more than 9 months or so*, you're in a very different creative cycle, and each project has some relationship to its predecessor, even if it's conscious rejection. If you haven't recorded in 3 years, you're hardly even the same person anymore.

*also, too, it was the norm for artists to make singles and EPs between LPs, so even if you had 12-20 months between albums, you probably recorded something in the middle as well. Come to think of it, I wonder if the pace of recording, plus the ubiquity of guesting on each others' songs, helps hip hop and R&B acts to keep things going

It would have been nice if R.E.M. had followed up "Automatic for the People" with an album called "Let's see what the People want before we decide."

I still can't believe DMB released an album called "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King".

One trend I noticed was putting in the "shoulda nominees" lists a lot of earlier albums by future winners. Hard to know how much that's a legit assessment of relative album quality (both w/in the artists' oeuvres and w/in a given year) and how much it's classic critical snobbery ("You think Speakerboxx was deserving, but the real best album by them was Stankonia"). Of course he kind of owns it with the '02 and '03 captions, which are funny.

Also, the 2006 caption is excellent.