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2012 Grammy Awards Live Blog

Whitney Houston
It’s the 54th edition of the Grammy Awards. And with the sad passing yesterday of Whitney Houston, I imagine it’s a much more somber celebration than usual. Our own Paul Lorentz wrote a nice piece on Houston earlier this morning. I participated in Popblerd’s appreciation piece earlier today as well.

They always say the show must go on. And it will, though I’m not sure I’m ready to remember Houston yet.

LL Cool J is the host for the show. Yes, a guy who was one of the first hip hop stars is hosting the music industry’s most celebratory day. I don’t imagine many would’ve predicted that when DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won the first ever Rap Grammy in 1989, that 23 years later, a hip hop star would be hosting this show.

(While this show has already happened since it started 3 hours ago and I get the West Coast tape-delayed version, I’m going to pretend this thing is live.)

7:59 – How many times will LL lick his lips tonight? I think the over/under is 100. I’m going over.

8:00 – The Boss opens up this show. I count three earrings. I once had an earring too … when I was 18. Come on Bruce, the gray hair, receding hairline, and earrings together aren’t a good look. Plus, you don’t need them bruh.

8:04 – In a matter of seconds after the Boss finished his song, the cameras cut to Katy Perry with blue FU Russell Brand colored hair, Lady Gaga wearing a veil, and before I could anticipate it, Fergie’s face popped up out of nowhere. I could take Perry and Gaga, but I haven’t been that scared after seeing Fergie’s butter-face since watching The Poltergeist.

8:08 – LL just gave a classy speech about “his sister” Whitney. Who says hip hop can’t be classy?

(I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through this show with all these Whitney clips.)

8:15 – Holy ****! Bruno Mars just sold a whole lotta albums tonight with his performance.

8:16 – And can we just be clear about one thing? Mars’ pompadour is nothing more than the Brandon Walsh/Dylan McKay hairdo from 1992. I may have to bust that out too. It’s coming back.

8:23 – The first Grammy Award is for Best Pop Solo Performance and it goes to Adele. I think Miss Adele is going to have a big night tonight.

8:25 – I go away to check on my dinner and I miss Chris Brown’s performance. Oh the horror. Chris Brown has a very special talent. His talent is to do some pretty impressive and athletic dance numbers and make them seem so unimportant. I don’t remember any MJ performance ever being so insignificant.

8:36 – Kanye West and Jay-Z win for Best Rap Performance and you’re telling me Kanye isn’t there? Well, he did get screwed by not being nominated for Album Of The Year. I guess I’d skip too.

8:58 – I could say that Rihanna’s wig is very Tina Turner-esque, but I’m going with Farrah Fawcett’s dry perm. I think I just dated myself twice. By the way, if you didn’t know based on the hook that was repeated about 75 times, “We found love in a hopeless place.”

9:14 – The Foo Fighters win for Best Rock Performance. New York Giants wide receivers Victor Cruz and Mario Manningham presented them with the award. I wish they had numbers on their suits so I could tell who was who.

9:19 – From my friend @freemaneric:

The Grammys, where Maroon 5 does “Surfer Girl” and everyone dies a little inside.

9:37 – From Paul McCartney to Common shouting out Gil-Scott Herron? This must be 2012.

9:37 – Chris Brown wins R&B Album Of The Year and shouts out Team Breezy. Yawn. El DeBarge was robbed.

9:45 – Give out more awards, give us less Taylor Swift performances.

9:51 – Adele and producer Paul Epworth win Song Of The Year. Epworth says that he couldn’t have done it without Adele. Really Paul? You mean you couldn’t have won this without Adele’s star power and voice?

9:59 – Lady A won for Country Album Of The Year and I’m happy just so that we don’t have to see Hillbilly Taylor come up with her banjo again.

10:10 – So Adele performed and she put boots to asses on everyone. It’s her night. She better win the whole damn thing.

10:24 – Talk about catchy. “Like a rhinestone cowboy…” From @IAMJericho:

Watching McCartney clapping along to Glenn Campbell is true class. #rocknrollisfamily

10:31 – Carrie Underwood is on stage singing “It Had To Be You” with Tony Bennett. Another Tony, Tony Romo just pointed at the TV and said, “Me?”

10:33 – That’s how you pronounce Bon Iver? And I’m so confused how they are a new artist, but oh well.

10:45 – I really wanted to like Jennifer Hudson’s performance and I’m sure it came straight from the heart. But I don’t think it was very good and it was the wrong song to sing. Also, Melanie Amaro channels Whitney better than Jennifer does.

11:04 – Common presented earlier and now it’s Drake’s turn. Sweet. I mean, um, yeah.

11:08 – I think Nicki Minaj thinks this is her Lady Gaga moment. Sadly, it’s not.

11:11 – This is Adele’s year. You can’t stop Adele. You can only hope to contain her. She also wins Record Of The Year.

11:21 – And she wins Album Of The Year. She gives a raw reaction and not something preconceived or prepared, unlike a lot of what’s wrong with music in 2012.

11:25 – Sir Paul McCartney goes HAM to end the show. See you next year.

Whitney Houston photo is in the public domain.

February 12, 2012
Whitney Houston 1963-2012

My First Whitney Houston CD
A few years ago, I was having a conversation with a woman at work about Whitney Houston. I had just heard news that she was in the studio working on the album that would eventually be released as I Look To You in 2009. It had been more than half a decade since she’d released a new album, and a full decade since she’d had a bona fide hit. I was excited. I wanted this new album to be great. I was rooting for Whitney. But my friend told me, “I don’t even want to hear it. She’s ruined. She’s not going to come back from it. Bobby ruined her.”

As unfair and, frankly, unnecessary as it is to pin Whitney’s ruination on her ex-husband, the fact that Houston’s voice was a cracked shell of its former glory became apparent in live performances following the release of what turned out to be her final album. The album itself wasn’t bad, but it’s hard to hear a song like “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” right now.

“I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” (2009)

I came late to loving Whitney Houston. I was in junior high when she released her first two albums. By that time, I was becoming less interested in what was playing on the Top 40 radio and more so in what Kevin Seal was playing on 120 Minutes. Besides, Whitney was a “VH-1 artist”, which, in the 80s, meant approximately that her music was for grown-ups. My mom bought her CDs. I avoided them. Or tried to. But how could one have possibly avoided “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” in 1987? Or “How Will I Know”? Or “So Emotional”? Or any of the other 11 songs she sent to #1 in the first ten years of her career?

It wasn’t until I saw Whitney Houston performing the title track of her 1998 album My Love Is Your Love on the American Music Awards with Wyclef Jean (who wrote and produced the track) that I was finally able to open myself up to loving Whitney’s music. What I remember more than the song itself in that performance was the uncontainable joy Whitney brought to it. (It reminded me of an old In Living Color sketch called Whitney Houston’s Rhythmless Nation – a hilarious re-imagining of the Janet Jackson “Rhythm Nation” video with Houston replacing Janet, Houston’s wild movements knocking over the lockstep military back-up dancers around her.) I was a Whitney-hater no longer. I bought the album the next day.

Whitney Houston at the American Music Awards

I eventually went back and bought all of Whitney’s albums – the ones my mom loved when I was a kid, the 90s movie soundtracks, and later, I bought the 2002 flop Just Whitney on the day of its release. (I still think “Love That Man” should have been a bigger hit!) I eventually saw The Bodyguard. And The Preacher’s Wife. I retroactively picked up 12″ singles of “Love Will Save the Day” and “How Will I Know”. I finally learned to stop worrying about “alt-cred” and learned to love those big ballads – not just “One Moment In Time” and “Saving All My Love for You”, but album cuts like the gorgeous “Just the Lonely Talking Again” from her 1987 album Whitney.

“Just the Lonely Talking Again” (1987)

The thing about Whitney is that in an age where pop stars reinvent themselves for every new album, every new single, every new video; in stark contrast to the other pop icons of her time, and maybe in stark contrast to what was going on her personal life, Whitney’s pop persona remained fairly constant and steady. Her voice was strong. Her phrasing was extravagant. One of my friends derisively noted that she didn’t sing words – she sang notes with words attached to them. I think there’s some truth to that, but so what? She scarcely needed words. She had a voice. She could tell stories and she could preach sermons with her vocal dynamics alone.

Listen to the way her rendition of “I Will Always Love You” builds from a whispery a capella contemplation to its iconic final declaration of love, and tell me you need to speak English to understand what’s going on in that song. It’s easy to get trapped into choosing between loving Dolly Parton’s original (which is deeply heartbreaking in its own right) and loving Whitney’s performance. I don’t think this is a mutually exclusive choice, but it seems to me that, while they’re both great performances (and props to Parton for the words and music), Whitney’s version is, for better and/or worse, more universal.

“Love That Man” (2002)

Whitney was not a costume-changer. She sang songs as herself. When you hear a Whitney Houston song, it feels like she’s letting you into her life a little bit. As RuPaul might have said, she always brought the Whitney realness. Even in her movies, you got a sense she was playing a version of herself, however idealized. She could be unabashedly dorky (see her video for “How Will I Know”). She could be deeply corny (see her cover of “The Greatest Love of All”). She could be your sweetest pal (see “Exhale”), and she could play the tough, wronged woman like no one’s business (see “I Learned from the Best”). But she was always “Just Whitney”.

She wasn’t a lip-syncer either. So when it came down to promoting her last album, she let her broken-ness show in ways that she probably didn’t intend to. At a time when the industry and the audience might have accepted an Autotuned diva doing live performances backed by vocal-doubling tapes, Whitney had the courage to, y’know, sing. In doing so, she demonstrated her frailty and her ruin, and was rewarded for it with punchlines.

“I Learned from the Best” (1999)

In 1998, Whitney sang “If tomorrow is Judgment Day, and I’m standing on the front line, and the Lord asks me what I did with my life, I will say that I spent it with you.” Even then, it seemed a love song to her audience. Thanks, Whitney, for sharing your life and your talents with us.

February 12, 2012
Saturday Oldies Station: Christine’s Radio

The other night, American Movie Classics ran John Carpenter’s 1983 movie adaption of Stephen King’s book Christine, the sweet, all-American story of a teenage boy and his car. Okay, so in classic Stephen King fashion, the story is a grimly hilarious subversion of the cars and girls and rock ‘n’ roll ideal romanticized not just in the songs of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean in the 60s, but revived in the late 70s (a few years before Christine was written) in movies like Grease and the TV show Happy Days.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets 1957 Debut Album

Christine is a “classic” car – 1958 Plymouth Fury in the book, though the car in the movie was played by a cast of cars not always the same model. The boy is a “classic” suburban kid named Arnie. Played by Keith Gordon (in a type he would take to college in Back to School), he’s a much-bullied nerd who can’t get a break with the girls, and who’s desperate to break out of the stifling stability of his home life and his controlling parents. When boy meets car, they’re both a little down and out, Arnie having just experienced a fresh humiliation at the hands of arch-bully Buddy, and Christine all junked out and selling for cheap (real, realcheap) following the death of her previous owner.

Against his best friend’s advice Arnie buys the car for $250, and from there, a love affair begins between the two of them – Christine granting Arnie hitherto un-dreamt-of mojo, and Arnie playing the devoted provider and protector of the over-sensitive, easily jealous, and mercilessly vengeful car.

One of the great devices of the movie is the way Christine’s radio communicates the car’s feelings and passions entirely in 50s rock ‘n’ roll songs (most of which actually date to the year of her manufacture), turning sweet doo-wop love songs into cues for murderous revenge.

We first meet Christine as she’s coming off the assembly line, before Arnie’s even born. She’s eager to be loved, but her nasty temper shows itself twice before she’s even made it to the showroom floor. As she parades past an audience of rapt factory workers, this song comes on the radio – alluding to her powers of self-restoration.

Buddy Holly: “Not Fade Away” (1957)

Though this song with its big Bo Diddley beat and “bop bop bop-bop” hook has become one of Holly’s best loved songs, his version was never released as a single – it first appeared on his 1957 album The Chirping Crickets. The fact that Holly died so young gives the song a poignant irony. True to its title, the song has never left us. The Rolling Stones would score one of their earliest hits with a cover of it in 1964, and three more covers have charted on Billboard‘s Hot 100 since.

The Bronx-based Italian doo-wop group Dion & the Belmonts scored their first hit, just missing the Billboard Top 20 with “I Wonder Why” in the summer of ’58. Though Dion DiMucci completely proves he’s the star of this group the moment he steps out to sing the lead, you have to give props to Carlo Mastrangelo for one of the most memorable doo-wop basslines ever. When I sing along to this song, it’s his part – not the lead – I have the most fun with.

Dion & the Belmonts: “I Wonder Why” (1958)

Dion’s Latest

Since Dion went solo in 1960, he’s had a long and varied career, releasing more than 30 studio albums, and scoring early Top 10 hits with an R&B sound not far removed from his doo-wop days on songs like “The Wanderer”, “Donna the Prima Donna”, and his only #1 hit “Runaround Sue.” By the late 60s, he’d turned to folk music, notching one last top 10 single with the elegiac “Abraham, Martin & John” in 1968. In the 70s, he reinvented himself as a contemporary Christian singer-songwriter, but by the late 80s when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he was starting to come around full circle, revisiting the rock ‘n’ roll and R&B of his youth. Just last month, the 72-year-old released his latest album Tank Full of Blues.

Originally written and recorded by Bobby Day, this pre-emptive cover of “Little Bitty Pretty One” became a top 10 hit for Thurston Harris, leader of a doo-wop group called The Sharps, before Day’s record company even released the original version as a single.

Ultimately it would prove Harris’s only big hit. Meanwhile, Bobby Day would establish himself as a one hit wonder in his own right when he scored an even bigger hit with “Rockin’ Robin” in the fall of 1958. The two men died within months of each other in 1990. A testament to the enduring loveability of this “Little Bitty Pretty One”: My son, born more than 40 years after Harris’s hit single, asked me to put it on his mp3 player after hearing it in the movie.

It hardly seems coincidental that some of the artists whose songs appear in the movie have tragic back stories of their own, adding some dark resonance to Arnie and Christine’s love story. Johnny Ace was an established R&B star in the early 50s. While on tour with Big Mama Thornton, at a party on Christmas Eve 1954, Ace was drunk and showing off a gun. Just playing around, he turned it on himself and pulled the trigger – the gun was loaded and the 25-year-old Johnny Ace died the next day. This single, released just weeks after his death, became his biggest hit.

Johnny Ace: “Pledging My Love” (1955)

So, okay, yes, the car’s name is Christine, and she gets awfully upset when Arnie lands himself a girlfriend. But you’ll notice she expresses herself entirely in the voices of virile young men. Do with that what you will.

The one exception comes in one of the sexiest – in a manner of speaking – scenes in the movie. A gang of teenage bullies led by the evil (you can tell by his wicked sideburns) Buddy breaks into the body shop where Arnie parks Christine (because his disapproving parents don’t want the car in their driveway), and vandalize the shit out of her. When Arnie sees the damage, he vows to defend the increasingly psychologically anthropomorphized vehicle’s honor. Hearing this, Christine offers a hint that, y’know, she’s tough and can take care of herself. Arnie, standing square in front of the car’s smashed-in windshield and mangled grille like a paying customer at a strip club, issues a dare: “Show me.” And she does. Oh yeah, she does. And this is the song she does it to:

The Viscounts: “Harlem Nocturne” (1959)

February 11, 2012