5 Awesome Current Artists Who Need Grammy Awards
Posted by Louis Virtel on February 6, 2013
The Grammys are this Sunday, which is exciting for award show fans and depressing for people who think those awards should go to the right people. Sigh. Here are five current artists still in need of official Grammy love.
5. Scissor Sisters
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Since the Scissor Sisters emerged a decade ago, their style has remained as quirky and danceable as anything Lady Gaga's ever produced, yet the Grammys haven't been as keen to reward the ragtag group with their due props. They've only been nominated once in the Best Dance Recording category, where the group's take on "Comfortably Numb" lost to Britney Spears' sole moment of brilliance, "Toxic." Where's the love for "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'"? Or this year's wickedly saucy "Let's Have a Kiki"?
4. Adam Lambert
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Get this: Zero male American Idol contestants have a Grammy to their name. Nope, not even Kevin Covais. Adam Lambert earned a nomination for "Whataya Want From Me?" last year (and lost to Bruno Mars in the Best Male Pop Vocal Performance category), but if anyone deserves multiple Grammys from the past five seasons of Idol, it's Lambert. Surely his latest album Trespassing is his best work to date, and if you can't even earn a Grammy nomination for notching a #1 album as a self-defined gay artist with a distinct pop sound and an otherworldly voice, maybe it's time for Grammy voters to revise their rubric.
3. Tori Amos
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Tori Amos is not only an accomplished songwriter who has released an unreal amount of material; she's also one of the most confessional and ambitious singer/songwriters of the past 20 years. Who else combines the eerie vulnerability of Laura Nyro with the beguiling angelic feminity of Kate Bush? This is a woman who had the nerve to organize a greatest hits package using the Dewey Decimal System (please see Tales of a Librarian for proof), and if the woman who's given us everything from "Silent All These Years" to "A Sorta Fairytale" doesn't have a Grammy, then what are we doing not protesting the fact that Sheryl Crow has nine?
2. PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey has won an unprecedented two Mercury Prizes, rejiggered her stark musical stylings time and again, and successfully reinvented her image so many times over her two-decade career that it's hard to believe she's not often described as Madonna's gritty, art-school cousin. If she's not wailing about a botched abortion in her classic '95 jam "Down By The Water," she's toasting New York on her brilliant Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea album or exploring Victorian stoicism on 2006's chilling White Chalk. How is it possible that this fabulous original has zero Grammy awards? Did I mention who she beat out last year for that Mercury Prize? None other than the Grammys' reigning queen Adele. Yeah. Woah.
1. Bjork
There are geniuses, and then there is Bjork, the undisputed champ of unpredictable style transformations, technological breakthroughs in music, and a completely enigmatic image. When has this woman been anything less than a staggering, life-giving anomaly in music? From Debut through Post, Homogenic, Vespertine, Medulla, and her latest Grammy-nominated work Biophilia, Bjork has remained consummately committed to exploring her one-of-a-kind vision through some of the most fascinating recordings of our time. Listen to that percussion in "Joga." That tribal creepiness in "Human Behaviour." The lovely sentiment of "I've Seen It All." The cinematic grandeur of "Oceania." To make her Grammy-less situation even worse, her unforgettable music videos have garnered four separate nominations without a win. Ugh! There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to Grammy behaviour.
Our colleagues over at MTV.com have you covered on Sunday with a live Grammy red carpet stream...
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