The Album of the Year Grammy Almost Always Goes to the Wrong Act

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Scientists is supposed to be the governing, all-knowing, all-approving, boldly predictive body of American popular music. Granted, every year it nominates two or three of what are the consensus, according to non-NARAS member music writers and bloggers, the best albums of the year for the Album of the Year category. Those albums almost never win. To whit.

• In 1970, Blood Sweat and Tears’ now painfully dated rock-soul fusion self-titled debut beat The Beatles’ Abbey Road and also Johnny Cash’s At San Quentin, arguably the best live album ever made.

• Not winning album of the year in 1985 were such pop milestone hit machines as Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, Prince’s Purple Rain, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, and the heavy favorite, Bruce Springsteen’s incomparable Born in the U.S.A. The good stuff cancelled each other out, allowing bland sweater enthusiast and ceiling dancer Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down to sneak in for the win.

• In 1959, Music from Peter Gunn, the Henry Mancini soundtrack of a TV show memorable only for its Henry Mancini theme song—and no other songs in particular—defeated Frank Sinatra’s classic, travel-themed song cycle Come Fly With Me.

• Eight years later, well into the rock era as well as its first big experimental phase, Sinatra got the Album of the Year win. He didn’t deserve it for the forgettable collection of random songs A Man and His Music. The Grammys were still reluctant to embrace rock, so the Beatles’ Revolver, which is frequently and rightfully ranked #1 on many “best albums of all time” lists lost out. Rounding out the top 3 on those lists are often Bob Dylan’s Highway 66 Revisited and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, both of which were released this same year, and both of which were not even nominated in this category.

• Bob Dylan’s late career masterpiece Time Out of Mind continues to get a lot of praise to this day, but that’s only so people don’t shoot themselves in the head over the fact that something, anything, beat Radiohead’s OK Computer, which even my grandmother knows is one of the definitive masterpieces of human expression, and she died a year before it came out.

• Desperate for some cash and big-time exposure after years of drug addiction and subsequent obscurity, Natalie Cole needed a quick, easy hit, so she added her voice over the top of her father’s old standards with an Apple II and created Unforgettable…With Love. It’s a middle-aged lady singing along to the golden oldies station, and yet this cynical and grave-robbing attempt at hollow sentimentality was irresistible to Grammy voters, Nat “King” Cole’s contemporaries really, and it defeated R.E.M.’s Out of Time and even Luck of the Draw, that year’s collection of Bonnie Raitt-originated Grammy bait.

• It’s easy to hate on Celine Dion, because she’s a psychotic banshee from space, but it’s more than justified when her 1996 album Falling Into You gets an award over Beck’s Odelay, the Fugees’ The Score, and the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. 

• Just past the turn of the century, of-the-moment, visionary artists like Radiohead (Kid A), Beck (Midnite Vultures), and Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP) apparently did not represent the music of the young generation and where music might be going. No, according to the Grammys, the soundtrack of tomorrow is Steely Dan, a soft rock jam band beloved by stereo component aficionados and who were briefly and mildly popular three decades hence, who recorded a bland comeback album that nobody asked for.