Earlier this month, we examined LA Times blogger Todd Martens' attempt to predict the nominees for the Best New Artist Grammy ahead of the Sept. 30 cutoff point for next year's awards. Martens decided to take on the Album of the Year category this week, giving me (and you!) even more to post about and puzzle over.
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Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times is taking a midseason look at the contenders for the Grammy Awards' fourth or fifth most prestigious award: Best New Artist, which has been given in the past to such luminaries as Paula Cole, Arrested Development, and A Taste Of Honey. Looking at all the exciting music produced by those who qualify for the award, it's really anyone's guess who will take home the prize next February. No wait, the winner's definitely going to be Duffy, isn't it?
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Mathew Knowles has responded to Aretha Franklin's miffedness over his daughter calling Tina Turner "the Queen" during Sunday night's Grammy ceremony. Quoth the dad of Beyonce: "As a manager I am not taking something this ridiculous to Beyonce. Beyonce referred to Tina Turner as a 'queen,' ... not queen of gospel, queen of soul, queen of blues, Queen of England. I consider my wife a queen and sometimes call her that. Does Aretha have a problem with that?" Well, now that you mention it... [CelebTV.com]
Three people have been arrested on suspicion of using pilfered passes to sneak into the Grammy Awards on Sunday night. And just in case you were worried about the threat to national security posed by this bit of theft: "Police believe the motive for the theft was a desire to see celebrities, not terrorism." Well, all right then! [Billboard.biz]
Vince Gill on his "na na, I got a Grammy from a Beatle and you didn't" dig at Kanye West during Sunday night's Grammys: "He had said something about how he was gonna win Album of the Year later, and if not him, then Amy Winehouse was most deserving and not me or the Foo Fighters. So I decided to have a little fun. ... I just saw him out of the corner of my eye when I was up there, and I decided I had to do it. He took a shot at Gretchen Wilson when he lost Best New Artist to her a few years ago, and so us rednecks stick together." [MTV / Photo: AP]
Those of you watching the Grammy telecast on Sunday night may remember the middle-school-caliber speech Beyonce gave as an introduction to Tina Turner, where she ran down all the icons of the past who she wanted to be like before instructing the audience to get on their feet* for Turner, who she referred to as "the Queen." Well, Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin—lumped in as one of the "historical women" who didn't quite measure up to Turner for whatever reason—was not happy with the slight, going so far as to issue a statement: "I am not sure of whose toes I may have stepped on or whose ego I may have bruised between the Grammy writers and Beyoncé, however I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy. In addition to that, I thank the Grammys and the voting academy for my 20th Grammy and love to Beyoncé anyway." I seriously doubt that anyone else saw Beyonce's coronation of Turner as a "cheap shot" (I saw of it as yet another indication that the show's writers were clearly scrambling for last minute material), but judge for yourself with the YouTube of the performance—and the cringeworthy text of Beyonce's intro—after the jump.
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Perhaps chastened by the low ratings for Sunday's telecast, the Grammy powers that be have allowed YouTube bootlegs of segments from the show to run wild, and right now the entire first page of the video-sharing site's most popular music videos is made up of Grammy clips. (Click the image for a larger version of the top-12 screenshot; unsurprisingly, Universal Music Group artists Amy Winehouse and Kanye West are in there multiple times. But where's Herbie Hancock?) In the grand scheme of YouTube, though, none of the Grammy clips are as popular right now as that one where the hockey player gets sliced in the neck, a fact that is no doubt causing the awards show's producers to rethink next year's centerpiece entertainment. [YouTube]
Hey, did you know that the Eagles won a Grammy last night? Yes, their wooing of the Grand Ol' Opry crowd led to them taking home the Country Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals award for their song "How Long." And the win made Don Henley get a little misty-eyed: "This Grammy win is particularly sweet because of the length of time that has passed since we (the Eagles) won our first Grammy in early 1976. I was 28 years old then. I'm 60 now." And he's ready to make 61 an even more awards-laden year! 
The promise of seeing Tina Turner perform with Beyonce—and other generational boundaries get kicked in, or at least gently hip-checked—wasn't as much of a turn-on for Joe Television Viewer as executives at CBS thought it would be: Numbers for this year's Grammy telecast were off 12% from last year, and down an astonishing 18.82% among adults 18-49. (Well, OK, those numbers aren't that astonishing given the corresponding drop in album sales this year. But still, not good!) So what happened? Was it the booking? Were the bus ads with just photos of Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl too subtle for potential viewers—and kind of embarrassing for the producers, since Macca wasn't even at the telecast? Or is it just another example of music falling somewhere below ice hockey in terms of pastimes in which Americans are interested—and the music industry doing its damndest to keep its profile plummeting? After the jump, I count down the top five issues faced by last night's telecast, from poor advertising to ill-advised demographic-chasing.
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Judging by the reactions from my living room, my instant-messenger conversations, and the comments section on our Grammy liveblog, people were more than a little surprised when the Album Of The Year winner was announced... and said winner wasn't Kanye West or Amy Winehouse, but Herbie Hancock, whose Joni Mitchell homage River: The Joni Letters took home the night's final prize. I actually wasn't too surprised by Hancock's victory—to quote myself, "if you didn't at least think that Herbie Hancock paying tribute to Joni Mitchell would sway at least half the people who voted for Steely Dan over Eminem a few years back you haven't been paying attention"—but apparently a lot of people were! (Perhaps they forgot that Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae and Tina Turner and Leonard Cohen were also on the album.) So let's put it to all of you: If you had a vote in the Grammy balloting, what would you have chosen as this Grammy year's Album Of The Year? Poll after the jump.
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AP has the complete list of Grammy winners. Tia Carrere was robbed! [AP]
Welcome to Idolator's liveblog of the 2008 Grammys, a night that will have many generation-spanning performances and a few that might even span the divide between living and dead. We're on the last 30 minutes of the dueling preshows between E! and the TV Guide Channel, where we basically get to see people get asked the same questions about who they're wearing and why they're on our TVs. Also: Debbie Matenopolous! I guess when you get banished from The View you get to comment on Rihanna's nail polish for money. Which could be considered as "failing up," maybe. Our coverage begins after the jump.
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MTV is keeping a running tally of tonight's not-presented-on-the-telecast Grammy winners. Among them: Johnny Cash's postmortem celebrityfest "God's Gonna Cut You Down" for best short-form music video, two Bruce Springsteen victories, and Amy Winehouse's Back To Black for Best Pop Album. [MTV]
In an attempt to figure out who won the awards that weren't important enough to make the Grammy Awards broadcast, I visited the awards show's official site, where I was greeted with the above cascade of undefined values. (Then again, why should the Grammy site be any different than the rest of the music industry in 2008?) While I try and suss out what's going on—especially the mystery over whether or not Tia Carerre won anything—I'll have the red carpet shows on in the background. (Could the TV Guide channel's reception be any more public-access quality? Part of me is inspired to try and fashion some rabbit ears out of a wire hanger, just to see if it'll maybe help things.)
Now the word is that Amy Winehouse has been granted a visa by the U.S. Government—but she won't be making the trip to Los Angeles for Sunday's Grammy Awards, probably because having to fly halfway around the world 48 hours prior to a big performance won't exactly make her already-rock-solid stage presence all that much better. Her rep does note, however, that she "will still be performing via satellite broadcast from London as previously announced this morning," so those trainwreck-expectant execs will still have something to pin their ratings hopes on. [TMZ / Photo: AP]
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