"The grammies aren’t a measure of much that is calculable or quantifiable
by our own contexts for music. Why you create is most important... This is why i hate the grammies. Because it allows you to question what you've done. Don't question what you’ve done."
- 2X Grammy winner Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver (via twitter)
And this year's nominees for album of the year are:
Fun. Some Nights
Mumford & Sons Babel
The Black Keys El Camino
Jack White Blunderbuss
Frank Ocean Channel Orange
And this year's list of albums that are actually accumulated by 131 different top 10 lists made by professional music critics are:
#5- Japandroids Celebration Rock
#4- Fiona Apple The Idler Wheel...
#3- Tame Impala Lonerism
#2- Kendrick Lamar good kid, m.A.A.d city
#1- Frank Ocean Channel Orange
Anybody else see something wrong here? According to metacritic, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is the near obvious album of the year. 83 different publications ranked it in their top 10 albums of the 2012, with 19 of them ranking it at #2 and 28 of them ranking it #1. No other 2012 album got any more than 8 different #1 spots. Channel Orange sounds like a pretty darn good competitor for album of the year.
There's also some sweet stats for Blunderbuss. I only showed the top 5 list for metacritic's best albums of 2012, however Blunderbuss was ranked at a very reasonable #9. It was in 22 different top 10 lists, including 2 different #1 spots. Critics can agree on this one.
El Camino is kind of a stretch. I gotta say, come on, who doesn't love the Black Keys? But is it just me, or was 2010's Brothers totally better? On top of that, El Camino wasn't even released in 2012, but I guess it was just released barely a year ago. Part of me feels like the Grammys picked Camino as a "best album" contender because they feel bad for not giving Brothers enough credit (metacritic's 8th best album of 2010). El Camino made the metacritic list for 2011 at #28. Definitely not a bad album, but when it comes to universal acclaim, there were probably better options out there.
Some Nights and Babel are critically out of the question. The average critic gave Babel a score of 63% and the average critic gave Some Nights a 60%. Do the Grammys truly believe these are 2 of the 5 best albums of the year?
The Grammys are not absolutely terrible at picking actually good albums as their "best" albums. In both 2010 and 2011, the album of the year was given to metacritic's #2 album of each year (Adele, Arcade Fire). But the nominations are still pretty stupid. Frank Ocean is nominated for 6 different Grammys this year, Fiona Apple gets a nod for "best alternative music album," but Japandroids, Tame Impala & even the gold-selling Kendrick Lamar are left in the cold. Oh yeah, and both Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" and Fun.'s "We Are Young" get nominated for both "song of the year" and "record of the year." I rest my case.
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