Sound And Vision: Why I'm Seriously Considering Boycotting Music Award Shows

posted in: Features • Pop

On November 9, Nashville celebrated itself (again!) with the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards. For the fourth consecutive year, the event was hosted by Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley, but the masters of ceremonies weren’t the only thing that gave me that old deja vu feeling. Hadn’t these accolades already been handed out just a few months ago?

Wait, those were the Country Music Television (CMT) Music Awards in June. And before that, there were the Academy of Country Music Awards. And, just in case that’s not enough Music City honors for you, there are the 2nd annual American Country Awards coming up on December 5.

Pop and R&B are just as self-congratulatory, offering the MTV Video Music Awards, the MTV Europe Music Awards, the Billboard Awards, the American Music Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, the BET Awards, the BET Hip Hop Awards, the NAACP Image Awards and the Soul Train Music Awards.

Then, of course, there are the GRAMMYs, which following so many other back-slapping fests, have been losing their lustre for years now”though that’s hardly the only reason. Winning one used to be the musical equivalent of snagging an Oscar, but now its just more clutter for the awards shelf.

In a few weeks (November 30, to be exact), the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will announce the nominees for the 2012 GRAMMY Awards (to be held on February 12). Doesn’t it already feel like we’ve been there and done that over and over and over already this year? Am I the only one who doesn’t doubt that we’re in for another repeat of The Adele Show, with a very special appearance by Lady Gaga. Good as it is, like Christmas, I only need to sit through it once a year.

I suppose it beats Keeping Up with the Kardashians or watching whatever mindless drivel the US networks are now airing on Sunday nights. Who knows? You might get Kanye West making an ass of himself and interrupting one of Adele’s acceptance speeches to declare Monster the best album of all time, Adam Lambert kissing another guy and/or simulating sex with a drum kit, Katy Perry announcing that she and Russell Brand are expecting quintuplets or Janet Jackson exposing her other nipple.

Wait, the was the Super Bowl, which has acquired all the pomp and circumstance of any award show. I mean, what does Madonna featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. even have to do with football? But I’ll take my over-the-hill… I mean, top… Madonna performances wherever I can score them.

If only GRAMMY still had a fraction of Oscar’s respectability. While all of the the Academy Awards’ precursors are like appetizers leading up to an spectacular, and very long, main course, music’s award shows exist in private bubbles, seemingly unaware that the stars they’re honoring have been down this road so many times before, on the red carpet, up the aisle to the podium to accept awards whose significance, thoroughly diminishing, is probably as mysterious to them as to the rest of us.

Sure, it’s an honor just to be nominated, but if you don’t get the prize tonight, you’ll have another shot”next month, next week, tomorrow night. No wonder I’m having trouble telling them apart. Each gala trots out the same old stars and the same old categories under slightly different names. The nominees and winners might change, but after a while, they all begin to blur into one, especially since pop stars and rappers like Cher, Kelly Clarkson and Ludacris are now regularly populating the country shows.

Even the grand prizes are losing value. Taylor Swift has an Album of the Year GRAMMY before Bruce Springsteen or Coldplay or Eminem or the Rolling Stones. And now, Britney Spears has an MTV Video Vanguard Award. But what’s so special about her videos? She’s been around for a little more than ten years. Isn’t an award like that supposed to go to artists who have offered decades of great videos or newer ones who have changed the art of video-making in some invaluable way?

“…Baby One More Time” got her off to a good start in 1999, but has Spears done anything iconic since? “Till the World Ends” (the VMA’s 2011 Best Pop Video) was great TV (or YouTube, depending on where you watched it), and “Criminal,” her latest, is a step in the right grown-up direction for Spears, but her recent videos, for the most part, are just a parade of shameless product placement.

Ah, yes, but Britney Spears guarantees great ratings, and in the end, the award shows are more about filling coffers than honoring musical accomplishments. The ratings might generally slip every year, but they’re still decent enough to ensure that even more will follow next year. For the artists who perform and win big, there’s a guaranteed a spike in sales that will likely last at least one week. And if you can use a red carpet or an awards-show stage to announce your pregnancy (poor desperate Beyoncé), so much better for the ratings and for your movement in Billboard.

It might be fitting, though, because the music industry stopped being about artistry decades ago. Now it’s all about making the biggest possible windfall in declining financial times. As long as televised award shows promise one-week sales spikes, the labels will continue to support them, encouraging their stars to get dolled up and trot themselves down the red carpet, baby, one more time.