On Beck's Grammy win

It's hard to figure out the Grammys sometimes. More times than not, they're very predictable. Each year, though, seems to have some oddball and non-conventional picks, like Arcade Fire's win a couple of years ago. This year had a few, with Beck's win for Album of the Year being the big one. There's also Tenacious D winning Best Metal Album (metal bloggers are covering this one with some derision). And there's Kanye West's usual attention mongering.

Beck's already handled Kanye with some aplomb. Personally, I don't think much of Kanye West. His work is oddly atonal. His singing is sub-par and he relies on auto-tune way too much. His singles are rambling and largely unlistenable. His comments come off as self-serving and ignorant. His comments about “respecting artistry” proves he knows little about Beck's work, and likely doesn't know anything about Beck at all. His comments about artists getting tired of the Grammys pulling stunts like this again suggests he has no knowledge of Beck's long career as a musician, and that artists need the respect of awards shows to be successful. Funny, I always thought artists made art for the sake of expressing themselves. This says tons about Kanye's opinion of music: that he does it for attention, not for artistry. Who's the real artist now?

After re-listening to Morning Phase, I'm struggling to hear what the Grammy judges heard here. This album was barely on the radar of most critics. I saw it show up on a few year end lists, even topping one I saw, but this album was a dark horse from the get go.

This award does seem to come out of left field. More and more, this seems like a “Sorry, we screwed up” kind of Grammy that come around every once in a while. I'm a big fan of Beck's work, having most of his catalogue in my collection. He's made some amazing albums (94's Mellow Gold, '96's Odelay, '02's Sea Change), some pretty good albums ('98's Mutations, '05's Guero) and no really horrible albums. Like Ray Charles (awarded album of the year after his death for a poor album, and the Grammys ignoring most of his work over the years), Santana (awarded album of the year for an average album, after years of great work with little accolades) or Herbie Hancock (awarded album of the year recently for a jazz album of Joni Mitchell songs in a field awash with pop stars), Beck's win is less of an award for a great album than an award that celebrates the career of a great musician.

Morning Phase isn't a great album. It's a pretty average album. It's a spiritual successor of sorts to Sea Change, which I consider his best album ever. Whereas Sea Change is a bleak album, full of loneliness and abandonment, Morning Phase takes that formula, adds strings and pianos, and comes up with something that's a touch more upbeat, and a lot more safe. It's about ten steps behind Sea Change. Even Mutations' odd mix of country, blues and Beck's usual noodling about is superior to Morning Phase. Sea Change was a desert of an album, a bold statement on the art of songwriting from someone who was usually dismissed as a novelty act. Morning Phase isn't nearly as dangerous an album as Sea Change. It's not anywhere near the experimentation seen in Beck's other work, the weird funk-rock of Odelay, the middle-finger raising slacker-rock of Mellow Gold or the loopy electro-rock of Guero.

Make no mistake, Beck deserved the award. It's a shame it couldn't have been given to him earlier though. Obviously, handing it out in 1994 for Mellow Gold or 1996 for Odelay would have been risky. His career was young and his genius was apparent, but he could easily slid into obscurity or musical novelty. Sea Change was well after his awkward growing phase as an artist, and the album deserved to be recognized for the masterpiece it is. It's a bittersweet win for Beck, but a deserving win nonetheless.