There were a couple of serious upsets at the Grammy Awards Sunday night. Fans are reeling, REELING I tell you, over surprise winners, indie stand-up bass player Esperanza Spalding for Best New Artist, and Canadians Arcade Fire for Album of the Year.
And the internet is going a little nuts with the vitriolic attacks on the winners.
See discussion of the latter here, while here we'll deal with Miss Esperanza. Justin Bieber was, of course, also nominated for the Best New Artist prize and after her win, enraged Beliebers started vandalizing Esperanza's Wiki page. Seriously.
Her name was changed to Esperanza "Quesadilla" Spalding, and some of the added details included:
"She now has the 2011 Grammy for being the Best new Artist! Even though no one has ever heard of her! Yay!"
And
"SHE IS A F***ING REATARD"
And
"JUSTIN BIEBER DESERVED IT GO DIE IN A HOLE. WHO THE HECK ARE YOU ANYWAY?"
The page has since been locked down.
Crazy and possibly psychotic teenage girls aren't the only people who are scratching their heads over Esperanza, which is weird, because the music media has been all over this woman for months. She was an inMusic artist to watch last fall and was on everybody's Hot Up and Coming Artists for the New Year lists. If you don't know who she is, that's your own fault. Take a minute to find out.
26-year-old Esperanza Spalding is extraordinary. She's a female stand-up jazz bassist with one of the best fros you will see today (and good hair is very important in this topsy turvy world). The Portland Oregonian enrolled in college at 16 and became the youngest-ever instructor at Berklee College of Music at age 20.
She released her first album, Esperanza, in 2008.
Her bio says, "Soon after release, Esperanza went straight to the top of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart where it remained for over 70 weeks." And you know how FIERCE the competition is on THAT chart. NO, but seriously, she's awesome.
This woman is getting a lot of attention lately with an acoustic guitar and country, folk, Americana pop rock.
According to her bio she's "a straight-talking Midwestern girl, all flaxen hair and big blue eyes, and this girl is smart and gutsy and tough, with a big old voice to match it: Laurel Canyon prettiness stewed in campfire and bourbon."
At nine she scored the lead in an 80-date production of Annie for the local dinner theatre. But she was also "the family rebel," with a knack for getting into trouble. After getting kicked out of high school, "She taught herself a handful of guitar chords, wrote about the girls who snubbed her and the boys who broke her and all the scrapes she got herself into. Playing them out loud at the local coffee shop where she worked, she dreamed of the world beyond her hometown." Huh. Who writes this stuff?
Anyway….it's a really long bio…"recorded a five-track EP, Why You Runnin’, with her friend Bill Reynolds (of Band of Horses) and in London with Ed Harcourt…caught the attention of new fans and the U.S. press…toured with Ray LaMontagne…won over tough critics like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and even Perez Hilton."
I had no artist to watch this month and found these guys via WXPN. This is Jukebox the Ghost, a Philly-based trio that WXPN described as a "whimsical, quirky, energetic indie band featuring melodic pop tunes driven by a sizzling rock momentum." Sort of like They Might be Giant and The Flaming Lips.
That's pretty accurate. I fear that, after a while, this song COULD get pretty annoying in a One Week kind of way. But TODAY, I'm digging it.
There is absolutely nothing ordinary about this woman.
25-year-old Esperanza Spalding is a female stand-up bassist (rare) who performs jazz music (rare for a 25-year-old) and has one of the best fros I've seen in a long time (rare). She also apparently plays other instruments like violin. The Portland Oregonian enrolled in college at 16 and became the youngest-ever instructor at Berklee College of Music at 20 (rare!).
She released her first album, Esperanza, in 2008.
Her bio says, "Soon after release, Esperanza went straight to the top of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart where it remained for over 70 weeks." And you know how FIERCE the competition is on THAT chart. NO, but seriously, she's awesome. And GORGEOUS.
She released another album in August 2010, Chamber Music Society. Inspired by her classical training, Spalding "created a modern chamber music group that combines the spontaneity and intrigue of improvisation with sweet and angular string trio arrangements. The result is a sound that weaves the innovative elements of jazz, folk and world music into the enduring foundations of classical chamber music traditions."
OK, yeah, we're a little...alright, a lot late to this party. But it took some time fo Nicki to grow on us. At first we were kind of meh about her and her seemingly endless and inexplicably irritating supply of wigs. But then she kept showing up everywhere and winning awards and stuff so, we thought, FINE. Let's give her a chance. And she grew on us, and by us, I mean me. I have NO idea why I wrote this whole paragraph as though I'm more than one person. It's something I do sometimes.
Anyway, 25-year-old Nicki Minaj is with Lil Wayne's Young Money records. Like any rapper worth her salt she started out with mix tapes, and in 2008 won the Female Artist of the Year award at the Underground Music Awards.
She released her first single Massive Attack on April 13, 2010. Then came Your Love, the first official single off her upcoming album, Pink Friday, scheduled to come out November 23rd.
According to their website, they say, "We only write about two feelings: one is the first day of summer when you and all of your friends are standing on the edge of a cliff watching the sun set and being overcome with all of your hopes and dreams at once. The other is when you're walking alone in the rain and realize you will be alone forever."
I get the jangle of The Cure and some of the chord structure from the Psychedelic Furs, a whole lot of other eighties stuff mixed with a contemporary kick, of course.
These L.A. rappers are so hip it hurts and so now they're practically post modern. They've been around since 2003 but only landed on my radar this year when they opened for Lady Gaga in Japan.
In February 2010, Far East Movement signed a major record deal with Cherrytree Records, a subsidiary of Interscope. Their latest single, just released this month, is Like a G6 – it's about jets, not states of the EU. A full length album, Free Wired, is scheduled for release on October 12, 2010.
Guests on the record include popular artists such as Bruno Mars, Keri Hilson, Pitbull, Sean Kingston, Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg, Colette Carr, Natalia Kills, and Ryan Tedder.
Apparently these guys are the biggest rock band in their homeland but I'd never even heard of them until they got on the Lollapalooza bill.
X Japan are a metal band, founded in 1982 -- then known only as X, later adding the "Japan" to avoid confusion with the X featuring Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka – and broke up 12 years ago. Now, according to this Phoenix New Times article, they're back, reformed a few years ago, with a new album in the works, and trying to break into the American market, something that has been difficult for Japanese bands. Despite the Western fascination with all things Japanese, from manga and horror movies to sushi to artwork and literature, to Geisha and Samurai, musicians from the nation just can't catch a big break over here.
