And so we come to the end of yet another considered look, where I have now passed judgment on an entire class of things, in this case the Best New Artist winners at the Grammys. It started out a mission to prove whether or not there was any such thing as a curse, and ended as a sort of scattershot overview of an institution that has no idea what it’s doing and, in fact, probably never did.
Of course, that’s probably because the entire thing is absurd.
As I’ve stated previously, the thing that makes awards shows1 the thing that I focus most of my coverage here on is that they are, even when they’re boring, a truly fascinating tug of war. The Grammys are an important part of the end of the record-selling industry that’s trying to capitalize on taste2, and in order to do so, people have to believe that what they are saying is worth listening to. To that end, they have to be two things: first, to be perceived to be correct enough to matter, and second, to make sure that the people that are inclined to take it seriously feel that they are also in on the important stuff3.
1 or really any of the awards-granting occasions that I write about here.
2 most of the rest of the record-selling industry is more opportunistic, is all I’m actually saying here
3 this also assumes a sort of “ideal Grammy viewer” that probably doesn’t exist.
The Best New Artist category, then is the place where that dependency – on the people that are watching to believe the grammys, and also that their faith is correctly placed and the grammys will reward their correctness – reaches its most absurd point: this is seen as a largely-speculative thing.
It is true that the official Grammy documentation doesn’t include anything about this being given because of a future prediction of greatness, but the only way to really look at it is to look at who has gotten the award, and see how they’ve succeeded or failed. Whether it’s necessarily the case, it’s certainly the tack I’ve taken here4, so it seems reasonable to say that this one is weird at least in part because it depends on the future success of the person in question. This requires the Grammys to add a balancing act to the already-crowded tug of war metaphor.
4 and, indeed, the tack taken by everyone else whose writing on the subject I could find
It’s probably this future-prediction aspect that makes it so genuinely weird: the Grammys fall back on a handful of things5 pretty reliably for this category, which is probably the only move they could have made, institutionally6, which gives this all a sense of repetitive sameness that I didn’t actually expect going into this. There’s also a bizarre mix of people who never should have really even been considered7, people who would have been obvious choices anyway but are unedifying8, and, like, the occasional out-there interesting pop star9.
5 e.g. more jazz musicians than you’d think have won this thing, and fully half of the best new artists are solo women. There are lots of things one can speculate about this meaning, but I have precious little insight into how much of the operations/ mechanisms that make these things actually get awarded is impacted by any sort of heavy-handed control, and how much of it is just the pieces falling where they fall.
6 it remains unclear how intentional any of this is, so it’s probably just the blind opportunism of a group acting like a group
7 Shelby Lynne for her sixth album in thirteen years, but also this year’s own Victoria Monét.
8 The Beatles, say. Or Mariah Carey. That sort of thing.
9 rare as hen’s teeth, but this does cover, like Bon Iver and Tracy Chapman
Of course, the scattershot set of winners, plus the absolutely-bonkers criteria relying on the artist themselves not being new as such, plus the shadowy nomination cabal that no one knows about, plus the insistence that this is, somehow, as important as the other categories, means that what we’re really looking at here is a decades-long, several-dozen-installments experiment in absurdity. Like, even more so than the usual Grammys.
That, ultimately, is why there just isn’t as much to mine here as I want there to be. This whole endeavor10 is, fundamentally, about the absurdity that results when someone who wants to sell something disguises it as a decision made for taste, and at a certain point that absurdity doesn’t really contain any wisdom.
10 a noun phrase you can apply as narrowly as “talking about this one specific Grammy” or as widely as “this whole website and, perhaps, the internet itself”
Or, rather, it contains all of the wisdom that a basically-anonymous panel acting in secret that is also terrified that audiences will stop paying attention can give us. Which is not an amount of wisdom that registers on any of my wisdom-measuring equipment.
But we have come to the end of the thing, and as per tradition, there must be a list. Unfortunately for our purposes here, it’s an ordinal list. I mean, I could try listing them in order of curs-edness11, but instead just went with ranking them based on how much I like them.
11 and, hand to god, there was briefly, in the earliest vision of this thing, a chance this was going to be a list of them in order of “how new they were when they won the award” which is, I think we can all agree, just flat-out fucked.
Unfortunately, that means this list is musical quality only, so Mariah Carey’s late-era emergence as a delightful kook doesn’t enter into, say, the caterwauling godawfulness of her music.
For example.
Anyway, to wrap this up, here’s the list of every best new artist winner, from best to worst. Enjoy.
Bob Newhart (look, it was a close one, but the bit where he’s a guy in the office building that King Kong is climbing? Seriously, it makes “Blackbird” look like “Chumpbird”.)
The Beatles
Sade
Tracy Chapman
Megan Thee Stallion
Lauryn Hill
Olivia Rodrigo
Arrested Development
Alicia Keys
Chance the Rapper
Amy Winehouse
Bon Iver
Victoria Monét
Bette Midler
Bobbie Gentry
Adele
fun.
Men at Work
Sheryl Crow
Zac Brown Band
Marvin Hamlisch
José Feliciano
Dua Lipa
Sheena Easton
The Carpenters
Tom Jones
Bobby Darin
Alessia Cara
Norah Jones
John Legend
Esperanza Spalding
Rickie Lee Jones
Bruce Hornsby & The Range
Shelby Lynne
Samara Joy
Natalie Cole
Cyndi Lauper
Robert Goulet
No Award (as given out in 1967)
Sam Smith
Maroon 5
Christopher Cross
Culture Club
Christina Aguilera
Hootie & The Blowfish
Evanescence
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Marc Cohn
Billie Eilish
Paula Cole
Starland Vocal Band
[technically no one] (although if you wanted to refer to Milli Vanilli as the “Starland Not-Actual-Vocals Band,” I wouldn’t stop you)
America
A Taste of Honey
Peter Nero
Carly Simon
The Swingle Singers
Jody Watley
Toni Braxton
Debby Boone
Mariah Carey
Meghan Trainor
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
LeAnn Rimes
Ohio Needs a Train 