At tonight's Grammy awards, Bon Iver won Best New Artist. Given, it is bullshit that he was nominated for best new artist, seeing as For Emma, Forever Ago came out forever ago* in Grammy terms.
So Bon Iver gets up to give his acceptance speech, and ends up saying something like, "It's weird to be up here, I don't really do this for the awards. It's all about the music for me. But, um, thanks, I guess."
Here's the thing, asshole, "It's all about the music for me" is what people say when they're not winning awards. "It's all about the music for me" or "this show's all about t&a" or "what a popularity contest" are all sayings and phrases that people console themselves with when they're not winning. Actually winning something like a Grammy is kind of a big deal, especially if you genuinely believe that you are the musical shit doing something precious and unique. Because to be doing something precious and unique and to get recognized as the best new(kind of) artist should validate what you're doing. It should signal to you that the Grammys are, for once, recognizing legit musical talent and innovation. And you should be gracious or at least respectful instead of a douchebag.**
In college, Janelle and I had a term for this kind of ridiculous behavior: ICADs, or "I'm cool and disaffected." It tends to permeate indie bands that then get up on stage in aviators and American apparel t-shirts with too-deep Vs and look bored with their own music.
So yeah, cool that you're too cool, Bon Iver. You're probably not cooler than Colin Firth, who, although he had stellar performances in little-known movies, had the decency to say something humble like, "I think my career has peaked" when he won the Oscar for best picture. You're also probably not cooler than Adele, whose songs, while I never want to hear them again, will probably be sung by our children as they weep over their first real, intense acquaintance with heartbreak.
But, you know, whatever. Is it a coincidence that Bon Iver sold enough records to be considered for a Grammy after he was featured on a Kanye*** track? Correlation doesn't always equal causality, but sometimes it is suspicious.
Maybe "music" is an art form that's too overwrought and industrialized for this rant to have any meaning. I'm sure Pitchfork is going to have an orgasm about how great it is that Bon Iver won while being About The Music. But imagine this:
Jennifer Weiner, chick-lit novelist that coined the term Franzenfreude, wins a Pulitzer. Weiner's genre is not typical Pulitzer material, but she wins over Pulitzer favorites, like Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. When she accepts her award, she says, "This is weird for me. I just write for the story, not because I might win an award."
Saying that implies that writing books is something that people do mostly for awards and not to write books. It applies that there's somehow something special about writing books for books' sake and not for the Pulitzer's sake, and that Franzen and Egan don't take their art seriously and are gnashing their teeth and plotting out the plots of their next books to be as Pulitzer friendly as possible.
It'd be presumptuous and pretentious and awful. And it was all three of those things at the Grammys tonight.
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*Four years.
**If you are going to be a douchebag though, at least take some cues from Kanye and have some swag about it.
***Speaking of Kanye, why wasn't My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy nominated for Album of the Year? [EDIT: Because it was on last years' Grammy cycle, which is maybe why you shouldn't do your research at 11:30 pm) Or Watch the Thone? Is that why Kanye and Jay-Z didn't even bother showing up?
