Ten years ago the first Grammy Nominees album contained the likes of Sheryl Crow, Seal, and Michael Bolton. Bonnie Raitt lent her guitar-slinging and vocal talents to two tracks while Boyz II Men and Barbra Streisand played their parts as bookends. Mary Chapin Carpenter was the country songstress while Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Luther Vandross, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion rounded out the talent.
The 2005 Grammy Nominees album does much of the same. Sheryl Crow and Seal are back. Norah Jones lends her piano skills and vocal talents to two tracks. Gretchen Wilson wears the spurs. John Mayer takes Bruce Springsteen’s seat. Where Luther Vandross was the male crooner, we now have Josh Groban and Usher. Various other artists, familiar to anyone paying attention, round out the edges of what amounts to a nice, eclectic, radio-friendly collective.
Looking past the superficial qualities of the disc, you can find an ensemble of artists that are as important to the airwaves as those ten years before them. They represent the best-selling and routinely rotated artists of 2004. It goes without saying that songwriting and performing ability are often pushed aside to make way for a track that’s overexposed. The Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started,” while certainly a fun pop tune, is not the best representation of rap music for the year. Gretchen Wilson is hardly a strong creative contender, but her album sales alone sparked necessity of inclusion. This is where the album becomes interesting.
While the NOW discs will always be smattered with difficult-to-remember songs of the moment, the Grammy Nominees albums maintain respectability by including a variety of artists that should be a viable force in music for the long term. Some, like Ms. Wilson, are really a gamble (It’s a good thing 1990 didn’t have an anthology disc, as a recall for Milli Vanilli inclusion could have happened). If they can grow past their pop sensibility, they can say “I told you so.” But if they fade in a year or two, they’re an anomaly stacked alongside longer legged artists like U2 and Ray Charles.
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